Kenneth Turan’s film pick of the week: ‘Nous Deux Encore’

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Even for a critic, seeing short films is not an easy thing to do, so I jumped at the chance a few years ago to judge a competition that was part of Portland’s Northwest Film and Video Festival. That’s where I first saw a small film that made a larger than life impression on me.

Heather Harlow’s deeply moving ‘Nous Deux Encore’ is a 16-minute documentary short that will screen Aug.10 as part of the 8 p.m. show at the HollyShorts festival at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 in West Hollywood. I can’t vouch for the rest of the shorts on the program, but if they are as good as this one they will be memorable.

A formidably articulate 80-year-old Frenchwoman tells the voice-over story of the great romantic passion of her life as hundreds of photographs taken by her husband with the aid of an automatic timer fill the screen. Inventively told, powerfully evocative of time and place, this is a love story that is both heartbreaking and exalting.

-- Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times film critic