neighbours- Manish

“Neighbours”-Manish Padhi

“Neighbours” is a Canadian short film which is roughly ten minutes long with a strong message at the end informing its audience saying “always love your neighbours”. The message is very clear, but it’s very dramatic the way it has been portrayed by the two protagonists of the movie with solid humour and also intelligent and delicate acting which will leave the audience laughing and also on a serious note at the end of the short movie. The most important and at the same time challenging part about the film was that it was a silent film. They were no dialog’s in the film, there was emotion which they needed to show in a very dramatic manner and they portrayed it exceptionally well with variation in their acting and also actions play a huge part in this short film. The cinematography of the film is very good as it shows both the character’s always willing to act and is not afraid of the camera in any way. The most unique thing about this short film is in just nine and a half minutes “neighbours” will bring a smile on your face at the end of it.

The film is about two men on a bright sunny early morning Sunday sitting outside their respective houses reading the newspaper, smoking. All of a sudden, they get attracted towards a flower which starts growing behind them, soon as they close to inspect what it was, they realise that it was a sunflower and get really excited as there are no flowers that are growing in their respective houses and this is the first time. But now the biggest problem arises for both of them is that who gets to keep the flower, because it has grown right in the middle of both the houses and without any fencing, they wouldn’t know who gets the right to have the flower, so now hilarious events occur to show us who should get the flower, as they believe that only one of them should get the flower, it end up burning their own houses, both of them killing each other’s wife and children. This gives us a clear indication that how badly they wanted that flower to be in their own house, after all this at the end, the message of the story is that “always love your neighbour”. This shows us that if neighbours share the same love and happiness, they can live extremely happily with each other without any fights or showing of negative emotion between two neighbours. At the end, all of us should have learnt our lesson and proudly say that we love our neighbour and not have any argument or disagreement with them.

My experience of the short film has taught me to be more careful to situations and not react to inhuman ways because of the situation. Never get too excited and always react in a normal way and be happy with your neighbour, never have a reason to hate or dislike your neighbour, because it can be very complicated and a situation may arise when something like that may happen. But at the end of it, lets remember one thing “Love your neighbour”