A Short About What We Lose by Forgetting

Read Time:5 Minute, 13 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
A Bear Remembers
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Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 20m
Director(s): Linden Feng, Hannah Palumbo
Writer(s): Linden Feng, Hannah Palumbo
Cast: Lewis Cornay, Anna Calder-Marshall, Ciarán Hinds, Rhianna Compton
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 HollyShorts Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: There’s a moment in A BEAR REMEMBERS that crystallizes what the film does best: it makes history feel like something you can reach out and touch — or something that might reach back. This 20-minute short transforms a simple idea into something emotional and haunting without ever resorting to spectacle. It’s a story about a mysterious sound troubling a remote village, but it resonates because it’s ultimately about what happens when the bonds that hold a community together begin to unravel, unnoticed.

The film centers on Peter, played with curiosity by Lewis Cornay. He’s young, restless, and drawn to the unknown — something that already places him at odds with a village that has learned to accept silence as survival. A strange noise echoes throughout the hills: intrusive, repetitive, and impossible to ignore. But where the adults hear only irritation, Peter hears something more. His impulse to document the disturbance — a small-town filmmaker chasing a mystery — immediately hints that curiosity itself might be the last reminder of what this village used to be.

Cornay carries that sense of questioning. While the film never turns him into a “chosen one” or a trope of discovery, his presence gives the story its forward pulse. It’s through Peter that we meet Ebba, played by Anna Calder-Marshall. She becomes the emotional core of the film: a woman whose past remains buried just deep enough that it aches. Calder-Marshall’s performance embodies vulnerability without collapsing into sentimentality — a person who has learned to live with absence and only now realizes how heavy that burden is.

As the two characters share time, the noise becomes less of a menace and more of a call. And the thing that answers is the Bear — a performance by Rhianna Compton and given voice by Ciarán Hinds. It would be easy to describe the creature design as odd or playful, but that’s also why it works. It represents memory, which is rarely clear — more of a stitched-together image from youth than some streamlined beast. When viewed through the doubt of adulthood, the Bear looks almost naïve. When viewed through the openness of childhood, it’s sacred.

This duality is where the film lives. Directors Linden Feng and Hannah Palumbo (working as Zhang & Knight) shape the story not as a horror mystery or an anthropomorphic whimsy, but as a fable rooted in loneliness. The hills surrounding the village feel ancient, but the community feels hollowed out. The film suggests that the Bear wasn’t gone — the people simply stopped listening.

However, the film’s emotional peak occurs in a moment when Ebba reconnects with what once brought her joy. Time briefly collapses, and she is not the village elder living in a quiet present — she is someone who once danced and laughed and believed in magic. There’s no elaborate explanation needed. The Bear remembers, and for a moment, she does too. The simplicity makes the scene powerful.

This approach leads to a finale that lingers rather than resolves. The sound eventually stops, and with it goes the last signal that the village was once alive in a different way. The quiet that returns offers no comfort. Feng and Palumbo pose a challenging question without stating it: if the past no longer aligns with the present, is that progress — or a loss?

At its core, A BEAR REMEMBERS explores generational erosion. The older villagers have forgotten, and the younger ones are growing up without ever learning. Peter is caught in the middle: not old enough to remember, not jaded enough to stop caring. That tension carries the film all the way through its final moments. A short running only twenty minutes has no business being this emotionally layered — and yet, here it is. It’s a reminder that scale has never defined storytelling. What matters is intent, and this film has a clear purpose: to mourn the vanishing connections that once made places feel like homes, rather than locations on a map.

A BEAR REMEMBERS earns its accolades because it’s not interested in being loud. It whispers. It asks. And it trusts its audience to stay quiet long enough to hear the answer. It’s a film that proves memory can be a form of bravery — choosing not to let what mattered disappear just because it’s gone. This is a beautifully human short, and even when its oddness risks distraction, its sincerity brings everything back into focus. The Bear isn’t a creature at all. It’s a reminder that the past is always nearby — waiting for someone to acknowledge it.

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[photo courtesy of ACADEMY FILMS]

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