Charlie Kaufman directs a script written by his friend and poet, Eva H.D. How to Shoot a Ghost, a short shot in Athens, Greece, is a film, unsurprisingly for Kaufman, about our mortality and leaving something behind. Narrated by H.D., and without dialog, the film tells the two recently departed young people, played by Jessie Buckley and Joseph Akiki, as they walk around and trying to capture the daily lives of citizens of Athens. Beautifully captured by Michal Dymek (EO, The Girl with the Needle) and melancholic score by Ella van der Woude, the elegiac look at the existence of human lives and what we leave behind are examined, in the background of dense cityscapes, old remnants of ancient civilization as well as tumultuous recent Greek history under dictatorship in newsreel footages.
Buckley, donning a colorful wig, emotes a young woman as she argues with her father (?) and loses herself in a disco club and taking polaroid pictures of Athenians and the like. As two strangers in a foreign country, not fitting in with society's norms- Buckley and Akiki are soulful and magnetic in their presence, trying to leave a trace in the world that no longer belong to them. As H.D.'s narration goes, what you do in life is enough. You don't have to worry about what you leave behind. How to Shoot a Ghost is less agonizing existential trip, but more spiritually in tune with Joachim Trier's August 31st or Hirokazu Kore-eda's Afterlife.
