Weird is the way I would sum up Blueberry. This 13-minute short will appeal to those who enjoy seeing a film where they have to guess the meaning of it all afterward.

Where they have to try and figure out what is going on in each and every scene and how it connects with the whole. Many call these types of pieces artsy.

Blueberry is the story of an emotionally troubled young woman with dark black hair. She stares at the photo of a young boy with glasses as she drinks shots at bar. Then she leaves the bar driving to a desolate blueberry bush by a highway. She picks some of the fruit. Then the camera goes to a diner or small restaurant where after a little while, this woman with black hair walks in and asks the owner to take her to the kitchen because she wants to cook.

She makes a blueberry pie. Then she takes it to a man who looks as if he might be the grown -up version of the boy in the picture. She tells him she's baked him a pie for his birthday. A blueberry pie. He says he doesn't like blueberry pies and so she leaves.

Next she's gotten out of her car and is standing by the highway clearly upset she is jolted for a moment when she spots a family of three whose car seems to have broken down. They have a young boy. He looks much like the boy in her photograph. She approaches him. Next we see her aiming a gun at the top of his head. She fires a single bullet and it appears that blueberry filling has run down his face. She drops the gun and walks off.

He picks up the gun and shoots it at an oh so far away plane in the sky. Then he throws the gun on the ground and walks off. Huge pieces of debris fall from the sky including what appears to be the black box of the plane. It lands in front of the woman as she is driving along the highway. She stops and picks it up listens to a bit of it and then records her own voice saying "testing, testing".

And so the film moves on and on. You watch it figuring that in the end it will all come together. You anticipate that at the end of the wait it will all make sense and you will think how clever it was to have told the story in that way.

It was here that I was let down as no such revelation occurred.

Not surprisingly the film's director Brett Ball, was also the writer. It's not a script I would imagine anyone but the writer himself would understand without a lot of explanation. And by the time the writer would have explained this piece to a director, he/she would have in fact directed it.

So I was not enamoured with the story, but the filming I found very interesting. Everything is blue. Varying shades of blue. Shot in black and white the 35mm film was then processed with the blue. This worked in that it set a clear mood - cold and sad. It also worked in that it made the piece perhaps of this world and perhaps not. Fitting because in this other world or other time of this world perhaps people communicate differently.

The appropriateness of the devices used to tell this story are what indicate that Mr. Brett is in fact a talented director.

Blueberry won Best Short Film in the Sacremento Festival of cinema.

Cathy Stovell