Michael Perez-Lindsey’s Will I See You Again? is a raw and emotional look at how hard it is to look inside yourself and finally see the parts of you that you have kept hidden, not from the world, but from your very own eyes. In the short, two estranged friends meet again at the funeral of another close friend, and are forced to confront their still-present feelings for each other when they discover that their late friend always saw them better than perhaps, they saw themselves.
It’s a little heartbreaking, though there’s also a moment of levity at hearing that your late friend went through the trouble of literal matchmaking from the great beyond. What is a polygraph where my two friends have to ask each other five honest questions but matchmaking? And yet, Will I See You Again? is mostly about the raw emotions, about the grief of losing someone, yes, but about the grief of losing yourself – and about how hard it is to be faced with the idea of finding the person you really are again.
Because, more often than not, the person you hid isn’t even that far from the surface. No, they’re right there, trying to break free.
That’s pretty much what happens in Will I See You Again? as Hosea Chanchez (Max) and Nick Wechsler (Paul) navigate a storyline of two people coming back together and trying to find who they were before, and perhaps who they can be again together. The journey of reconciliation looks very different for Max and Paul because the thing that broke them apart wasn’t just circumstances – it was a decision. And that means that the thing that brings them together again must be just that, a decision, once more.
But there is a rawness to the journey of reconciliation, just as there is a rawness to this story that is told through looks and through dialogue that is, perhaps, more powerful because it’s simple and real. Chanchez and Wechsler are both fantastic at a story that is so clearly a romance, even if it isn’t exteriorized at such for much of the short. We don’t need sappy declarations. We understand, just as we understand Chanchez’s poignant moments speaking on the Black experience.
In the end, Will I See You Again? is the simplest kind of short, and perhaps because of it, the most authentic. It is a look at what makes us human, and what it feels like to embrace all parts of that humanity and believe – even if just for a moment – that you are not just allowed, but that it can make you better. No, that it can make you whole.
Will I See You Again? is premiering at the 2024 HollyShorts Film Festival.
