Hold

Hold (2021) is a fifty-minute film conceived by visual artist Joshua Kaufman and a creative team, including frequent collaborator Matthew Kyle Levine (photography), with performances by Jack Meriwether, Fernando Moya Delgado, and Megan Stratton.

The film opens with Jack, a young genderqueer artist warming up for a solo performance. As they prepare, we are given an intimate look into the mental space they inhabit, before it is barraged by external contact, and the performance begins.

Prompting us to consider the difference in how we manufacture ourselves and our true inner desires, the film then transitions to its second scene: a meandering car ride with three friends catching up on each other’s lives. In choosing what parts of themselves they share with each other, the audience acts as voyeurs to the intimate dance of social interaction, removed from the personal ties that otherwise cloud human interaction.

Hold is a film that interrogates emotional discourse and its true purpose, asserting that the real truth is something more fleeting, more ephemeral, and revealed indirectly. And that even in the midst of people who purport to care about us, other people are ultimately entirely blind to our inner torment.