Reeling: Half-Life

Coastal areas across the world are flooding, the US is fighting countless wars, and air quality is worsening. The world of Jennifer Phang's award-winning debut feature may be pre-apocalyptic, but the earth keeps turning just the same: a boy struggles to be seen by his family, a young man attempts to come out to his parents, a teenager struggles to see beauty in a burning world. Deemed by Variety to be "an Asian American Beauty set against a backdrop of global decay and illuminated by splashes of Waking Life-style animation," Half-Life, like other groundbreaking and imaginative films such as Donnie Darko, functions on another plane than most films today.