Bottleneck (2014)

Grenada is not a country with a substantial film industry to speak of, which makes any production that can genuinely claim it as its home territory something of a curiosity in its own right. The island nation in the southeastern Caribbean has a population of around 120,000 people, and feature-length or even short-form cinema from there is rare enough that it barely registers on most world film databases. Lost Boy in Juba (2017) and Luigi (2013) represent the kind of small-nation filmmaking that also came through the A-Z World Movie Tour, and both at least give you something to hold onto. Bottleneck, from 2014, sits in a different category altogether.

The film, if it can be comfortably called that, runs to two minutes and was directed by Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe. It is an experimental video work built around a single domestic image: a jar of sprouting mung beans. The piece uses that image as a starting point for reflection on borders, movement, and access, asking questions about who and what can pass freely through controlled spaces, and what physical or political boundaries actually contain. It is the kind of conceptual framework that sits comfortably in gallery installation work or academic film programmes, where the visual idea is the argument and the runtime is almost beside the point. Brooks-Smith-Lowe is working in a tradition of short experimental video art that owes as much to visual studies and political theory as it does to conventional filmmaking, and the piece appears to have emerged from that world rather than from any commercial or narrative production context. Details on the studio or production background are not available, which is fairly typical for work of this kind, where the line between a short film and an art piece is genuinely blurry.

Experimental shorts occupy a strange corner of any world cinema survey. At their best, they can reframe a familiar subject through an unexpected visual language, making two minutes feel surprisingly loaded. At their more austere end, they ask a lot of goodwill from a viewer who came in expecting something closer to traditional cinema. Bottleneck, with its political concerns around regional and international movement, is pitched at themes that are genuinely worth exploring, particularly from the perspective of a small Caribbean nation whose relationship to borders and free movement is shaped by geography, history, and economics in ways that a European or North American viewer might not immediately consider. Whether the mung bean metaphor carries that weight is, of course, another question entirely.

A-Z World Movie Tour Grenada Supposed to be a commentary on borders. It's a 2 minute long "video" that was basically just a sideshow of stills on the growth of a jar of mungbeans over an unspecific time period. All the while with a gross experimental soundtrack. New candidate for worst film I've ever seen

I'll be honest, this one tested my patience with the experimental end of the world cinema tour more than most. There is something to be said for short-form work that strips everything back and asks you to sit with a single image, but that only really works when the image is doing enough on its own, and here I am not sure it was. The soundtrack in particular felt like it was working against any goodwill the concept might have built up. Some films on this tour have been obscure and rough around the edges but still left me with something to think about on the walk home. This left me with very little except a mild fondness for mung beans, which I had not expected to lose. Onwards to the next one.

Rating: ½  | Year: 2014  | Watched: 2025-06-23

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