Genre Drama

Zori (2013)

Item: Zori
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Zori (2013)

Cinema from the Marshall Islands is, to put it mildly, a rare thing. The archipelago, sitting in the central Pacific with a population of fewer than 45,000 people, has virtually no established film industry to speak of, which makes Zori something of a minor curiosity in global film circles. Produced by Microwave Films and released in 2013, the short runs to just nine minutes and was co-directed by Suzanne Chutaro and Jack Niedenthal, two figures with genuine ties to the islands. It sits in that modest but worthwhile corner of world cinema occupied by micro-budget short films that are less concerned with spectacle than with capturing something small and honest about a particular place and the people who live there. For anyone making their way through the full breadth of international cinema, this kind of film represents exactly the sort of thing you would never stumble across otherwise.

The premise is as simple as premises get: young Labro, played by Maxter Tarkwon alongside Netha Gideon and Jamore Melson, wants ice cream, his grandmother wants the rubbish cleared up, and somewhere along the way one of his flip flops, or "zoris" as they are known locally, has gone missing. The result is a breezy, low-key wander through a Marshallese community that doubles as a gentle portrait of island life, the kind of film that wears its family-friendly credentials lightly without feeling like it is pitching itself at anyone in particular. It shares that relaxed, unforced quality with other international shorts and family dramas reviewed here, such as Cigarette and Sugar Cane Alley, films that find their warmth not through sentiment poured on thick but through straightforward, observational storytelling. The production is modest by any measure, a short film from a tiny island nation made on what one can only assume were very limited resources, and it carries itself accordingly: unpretentious, unhurried, polished but unremarkable in technical terms.

What makes Zori worth the attention of anyone tracking world cinema is less what it does cinematically and more what it simply is: a document of Marshallese daily life, shot on location, featuring local people, with the landscape and culture visible in every frame. There are not many films you can say that about. Whether it succeeds as pure entertainment is another question entirely, one best left to the review below. If you are curious how it compares to other short international productions from the same era, it is worth having a look at what I made of Luigi, another short from 2013, or the animated The OceanMaker, which came out the following year.

A-Z World Movie Tour Marshall Islands https://youtu.be/9QESPfd3pWw?si=4kKCQG4cjRZyewEP Best part about this short is the soundtrack. It basically tells the story of a young Marshallese lad who wakes up and is told "if you want ice cream, go pick up garbage". 9 minutes of some little kid walking around picking up garbage. He lost a flip flop (they call them zoris) and yep, you betcha, he found another one.

And there you have it, really. Nine minutes of a kid, some litter, a missing flip flop, and a happy ending involving footwear rather than ice cream. For me, the honest answer is that this one sits firmly in the "ticked the box" category, the kind of watch that matters more as a passport stamp than as a piece of storytelling. The soundtrack doing the heavy lifting while the visuals amble along is a fairly telling sign of where a short film's strengths actually lie. I do not regret watching it, and I would probably not watch it again. That is about as fair as I can be.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2025-07-16

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Zori (2013) on YouTube

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