Stealing Kindness (Roy Hathon 2012): USA

Reviewed by Angel Martinez. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Stealing Kindness is the first short by director Roy Hathon, and premiered in the shorts program at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. This short film tells the story of a man who is mugged at knife point and loses his wallet. While a typical reaction, might be to fight back, or call the police, this man offers the youth who robbed him his jacket, and even offers to take him out to dinner. Ultimately, this man takes a chance on this thief, and in the process making him reconsider his whole ways and outlook of life.

The opening sequence with credits rolling in, and synched music worked fairly well, but the acting throughout the whole movie weakened the story and the film as a whole. The first thing once noticed when they started talking was that their voices were dubbed. The director revealed after the film that the audio they had recorded would not be at all usable so they had to resort to this method. He also mentioned that he was inspired to make this film after hearing this true story on NPR of a man who reacted this same way, but I did not feel the film went into the psychology of why this man would react this way at all, and did not personally feel like I gained any insight over this random act of generosity. The aesthetics and cinematography are the greatest things this film has to offer, but it seems a little bit too much focused on style over substance.