Cargo

Australia after an outbreak. A man wakes beside an overturned car. His wife is dead and has turned; he has been bitten. He has very little time. His baby is in the back seat. He starts walking. He straps the baby to his back and binds his own arm as well, so that he will not harm the child when he turns. Then he sets a direction. There is nobody to tell and nobody to ask for help. He only walks and carries out a plan. Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling direct. Andy Rodoreda and Alison Gallagher are in the cast. It is an Australian production. It is a short film; it runs around seven minutes and was made for a short film competition. After it was published online it reached very high viewing figures. The same team later remade the story as a feature, distributed on a streaming platform. There is almost no dialogue; the event is told entirely through action. The matter it treats is completing a task; the film uses a genre shape but does not try to produce fear. The solution at the end is the whole idea of the short and is not revealed until the final shot. Its limit is scale; it is very brief and the characters' pasts are withheld. Who it is for: viewers who like short films and work that presses on genre. Who it is not for: it is very short, gives no context, and the subject is upsetting.