TOAST SOLDIERS | Omeleto

A woman deals with loss. Alice and Joe are a couple trying to have a baby. But their journey to completing their family has been difficult, marked by an earlier loss, and they are on their last rounds of treatment before money runs out. As they deal with their ups and downs, Alice begins to lose faith, despite Joe's warm support. But just when she is about to succumb to despair, she receives the understanding she needs to keep going. Directed by Paul Stainthorpe and written by Lou Burns, this beautifully compassionate short drama captures both the fragility and resilience of life under the shadow of fertility struggles and baby loss, told through the lens of a woman reaching a critical point in her journey. Alice has lost a baby earlier, and she's trying to have a new one. Through perceptive storytelling, it captures how fraught Alice's emotions are, permeating every corner of her life. The storytelling, built on searching, sensitive dialogue and a gently naturalistic visual style, is intimate and gentle, attuned to the emotional ebbs and flows between both the small but resonant events of the IVF process and how they ripple out from Alice, affecting her state of mind, her relationships and the very way she goes through her life. Alice's early devastating loss of her infant daughter has cast a shadow on Alice, and as she approaches what may be her final rounds of IVF, she finds herself sinking into pessimism, challenging her relationship. As Alice, actor Rhiannon Jones captures Alice's complicated web of emotions: her longing, grief, fear and anxiety. With both restraint and precision, she conveys how easy it would be to sink into despair, and how setbacks and struggles can compound into a loss of faith, an isolated space where no one else understands what you're going through, not even her loving husband, Joe, played by actor Jacob Anderton with stores of support and devotion. But at her lowest point, Alice hears exactly what she needs to keep going and keep her hopes of becoming a parent alive. Baby loss and infertility are not subjects often captured on film, but TOAST SOLDIERS remedies this with beautiful depth of emotion. It excels in representing how it feels to live with these difficult subjects, and how an ongoing, often private journey can pull someone into deep, sometimes quietly overwhelming waters, made all the more alienating because of the silence that shrouds it all. It is an emotionally generous, heartfelt film, one that acknowledges the complexity of fertility struggles and the all-encompassing way it can affect people, and it also offers both Alice and the audience hope during what can be a long, circuitous and arduous process. The ending of Alice's story isn't tidy, neat or simple, but this type of journey rarely is. But we are left with a feeling that no matter what happens, Alice will have the resilience to face it. TOAST SOLDIERS. Courtesy of Paul Stainthorpe at https://hazypine.com.