Ooooh, I really liked this. It brought me to near tears. The film within a film (within a film?) is a clever way to address what we wish our parents would say to us and what we could say back to them. Rewriting the interactions and the outcomes for an entirely different narrative.

The "filmmaker" character and her mother talk around the real things on their hearts and minds and before you know it, perfectly good soup is being dumped…

A boy from a rural area about to start middle school goes into the city for a new hairdo. Where this story takes place, there are rules governing middle school hairstyles, so he gets a stranger pretending to be his older brother to talk the salon into the fresh cut, perm, and dye job he wants. As he sits in front of the mirror checking out his new 'do, he imagines himself dancing—in a tuxedo, completely deadpan—in a cologne commercial…