I saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash (Short Film Review) | BFI LFF 2025
In homage to the short, this review is written in a similar style to how the film is narrated.
In 2019 I had decided that Music was evading me, and become too heavy a craft considering it had birthed my career as an Audio Engineer, and was now somewhat badly supporting me to just about live comfortably while living with my mother. So, I saved up and started attending Part-time Acting School, returning to my second love from a previous push.
The only motivating factor for joining, aside from self-development and returning to a craft I felt I had abandoned, and maybe to star in a Ryan Coogler film, was to one day be able to create my own films that rivalled those of the Directors I had grown up with – namely, Linklater – by knowing what it was to be an actor, and having that inform how I would approach making films and writing dialogue, one far off day in the future.
In some ways this was a good idea, with one minor miscalculation – when given a camera, not a keyboard, I'm unable to make anything but dialogue-less experimental prose.
In 2022, Lockdown was technically still in effect, and wouldn't lift for another calendar year in our household, for reasons most have decided to ignore. The previous two and upcoming year would be the most healthy people had ever been in their life, or been since. This was also the period where my true education flourished, staying up until LA hours and watching metric tonnes of classic cinema with a former friend – everything from Alien to Bande à Part.
This led to a string of short films, almost all of them 'experimental', filmed entirely alone in the corner of the living room that was my bedroom. Despite the fun of it, I knew films weren't meant to be mostly made by one person.
This was also when the publication was actually born, carving itself out of "Turning Red" TikTok Reviews and Remote Access to the London Film Festival Digital Viewing Library each October. Soon, I would move to London and find myself in the BFI Mediatheque, trying to expand my British Cinematic language beyond Downton Abbey. I found a short film from decades ago about Zandra Rhodes – years later, she'd be interviewed by Bella Freud and I'd be very chuffed at knowing who the hell she was.
By the time I found myself in Toronto in 2025 things were drastically different - lockdown was over, this wasn't my first TIFF, and in pursuit of economic stability, I was having a mid-publication crisis about how to steer the enterprise into something that didn't drain my savings every month. At the crux of this panic was a conversation about commerciality, and covering films and media that people were already talking about – our focus on undiscovered indie gems was virtuous, but ultimately misguided.
'Rose of Nevada' is exactly the type of film I should have ignored in favour of some more Netflix fare – but my internal allegiance to the BFI, the British Isles more generally, a good friend and TikTok Mutual based in Cornwall who nudged it further up my watchlist, and my love of films on film, meant that I had still scheduled the showing into my calendar, with the internal Asterix that I could skip it if needed. Despite being jet-lagged, running on fumes and Tim Hortons, being the final film on my list for the day, and after a morning full of Sony Pictures Fare – I still attended. There wasn't much more damage it could do, and maybe I'd be able to take a nap if it was truly pretentious experimental nonsense.
Even if I'd wanted to sleep, the sound design would have prevented me – it's a loud film – in more ways than one. The past year had been filled with "film on film" that had been tedious even in its color grade – but this was different. I'm still not entirely sure I didn't fall asleep and hallucinate the whole thing.
The credits rolled, and it became clear that this Mark Jenkin guy was a lot like Lockdown!me - he'd done quite a bit of the work on this feature himself. Later that week I would find myself on the Press line for the film, and the whole enterprise would become very normal and real – real people make really good films in a not dissimilar way to me, and they exist in real life, and you can talk to them, if you're lucky.
That October, which is this October I was stubbornly scrolling the Short Film selection at LFF, the embers of discovery not yet stomped out from the publication, looking for something exciting. Most of the films seemed interesting, but it was the kooky names that always stood out to me – "I saw the face of god in the jet wash" was likely some Super8 Student Project set in rural Maine, or Arkansas. A fun 5 minutes, maybe. That goes on the list, and worst comes to worst, I can nap through it.
It was about a week before viewing that I would be informed that this was yet another Mark Jenkin film, that he'd managed to sneak onto the same programme as his Feature which would have a homecoming at LFF later in the programme.
What elapsed was an entire rip in the universe – an avalanche of data and references for a world and experience of Cinema and life that I was blithely unaware of. A flurry of images and sequences accompanied with a Diary in the style of a stream of consciousness, and yet somehow perfectly scripted. This tear in the veil between lives was exhilarating - and as all good films do to me, my hands started itching for a camera.
Sometimes cinema needs a lot of consideration, planning and understanding, lucidness and control. Sometimes we berate the auteur that follows some unknown muse, or breaks the rules. But when an artist can rip the veil between consciousnesses - whether considered or unconsidered - and get someone else to drive in their mind, that's the point.
Despite this euphoria, in a rather blasphemous move, I did watch the film on my laptop, as part of the festival's Digital Viewing Library, defeating some of the purpose of the film on film effect. I would also find out moments before publishing this article that the short had also screened at TIFF.
