Genre Drama

Zori (2013)

Item: Zori
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Zori (2013)

Nine minutes. A kid. Some rubbish on the ground. A missing flip flop. That's your lot.

I've been working my way through my A-Z World Movie Tour, trying to track down films from every corner of the globe, and when it came to the Marshall Islands, Zori was what I found. I'll be honest with you: the pickings are slim when you're hunting for Marshallese cinema, so I wasn't exactly expecting Lawrence of Arabia. But I was hoping for something a little more than what amounts to a very short, very slow film about a boy doing a chore.

The premise is simple to the point of being almost abstract. A young lad is told, in so many words, that if he wants ice cream, he'd better go out and pick up litter first. So off he toddles. And for the next nine minutes, that is precisely what happens. He walks around. He picks up rubbish. At some point he loses one of his zoris (that's what they call flip flops out there, which is where the title comes from). And then, in what passes for a plot twist, he finds a replacement one.

Now look, I don't want to be completely uncharitable. There's something quietly charming about the fact that this film exists at all. It's a glimpse into a world most of us will never visit, shot with an obvious affection for the place and the people in it. The Marshall Islands don't exactly flood international film festivals with submissions, so just getting something made and out there deserves a nod of acknowledgement.

And the soundtrack is genuinely the best thing about it. The music has a warmth and a local flavour that the visuals never quite match. If someone put together a compilation album of Pacific island short film soundtracks, I'd give this one a solid listen. As a piece of cinema though, the music is doing a lot of heavy lifting for everything else going on.

The problem is that the film doesn't really do anything with its simple premise. A story about a child learning that small acts of responsibility lead to reward could be lovely. Plenty of short films have wrung real emotion out of far less. But Zori never finds a rhythm or a perspective that pulls you in. It's a filmed anecdote rather than a story. The camera follows the kid, the kid picks up rubbish, and then it ends. There's no tension, no real sense of character, no moment that makes you feel anything beyond a mild, vague goodwill toward the whole enterprise.

I've come across other shorts on this tour that managed to say something meaningful in a brief running time. Luigi, for instance, showed how a compact short can still carry real weight and leave you with something to chew on. Zori doesn't quite get there. It's nine minutes that feel longer than they are, which is a real trick for a film this short.

One and a half stars. Worth a watch only if, like me, you're committed to the completionist madness of a world movie tour and the Marshall Islands slot needs filling. The zori he finds at the end is in better shape than the film itself.

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

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