Ortolan is a psychological thriller about three estranged sisters who come together on the night of their mother's wake to divide a family home haunted by fractured memory and buried trauma… all over a pot of magic mushroom tea. It's an eery, absurd, sometimes funny short, that's also a little bit scary at times.
The short is written/starring/produced by Kate Winter after her own jarring experience with buried memory with the script edited and directed by Tracy Mathewson.
Ortolan is a story about the tenuousness of memory, buried trauma, and a love of food and psychedelics. It is a 24-minute proof of concept for a feature of the same name starring Waleed Zuaiter and exec produced by Andrew Koji and Academy Award-winning production company FlipNarrative.
In the short we meet Jean, Ann, and Dorothy: daughters of the late king and queen of London's restaurant world: Tony Beaumont (to be played by Zuaiter in the feature), a charismatic chef, and Claire, an exquisite food critic whose scathing personality is blamed for Tony's suicide years before. What starts as a psychedelic bonding activity between sisters turns into a confrontation of the traumatic past that each sister has been avoiding, forgetting, or disassociating from. The questions their parents leave behind simmer in the short and boil to the surface in Ortolan the feature.
Watch the trailer below:
