hot air
by Douglas Messerli
Isaiah Henderson (screenwriter and
director) Balloons / 2025 [9 minutes]
The director of this short student film
lets loose with nearly every cliché in Gay Film 101 stock book to tell the tale
of two boys, played Keller Kennedy and Braeden Stelle, in a story about a “fleeting
romance.” Like boys in love in a thousand short films, they run across the
golden-steaked beach, pick up and twirl each other about, and generally grab
hold of each other’s body every chance they get. How strange, but I’ve never
really seen any man do that in real life.
But we know something’s up (no pun intended)
when writer/directed Henderson suddenly introduces the metaphor of balloons
used to symbolically celebrate so many occasions: birthdays, weddings, baby
showers, etc. Balloons, so we are told, can are so delicate they can pop at any
moment, and rise up only to be trapped in a wire or a tree.
So
too is these boy’s relationship, particularly since we notice one of them constantly
looking over his shoulder at nearly every moment to be sure no one’s watching
their gay lovemaking. And eventually, we just know it, he will have to say
something terribly profound such as “I just can’t do this anymore.”
He goes out and quickly finds a girlfriend who together make it
difficult for the now lonely queer boy just to survive, writing “Faggot” across
his dorm door and basically mocking him as he passes by, even if there are
moments with his former partner tends to stare after him a little bit longer
that disdain permits. We just know that someday he will have to come home to
his unhappy wife to declare: “I just can’t go on.”
Our remaining blond-haired queer has fortunately saved two balloons, one
red, one blue so show us at the very last moment, that sometimes balloons do
actually “reach the sky.”
Someone should have clued Henderson in that he was sentimentalizing a
trivial affair by using the most tired of cliches. But several commentators on
Letterboxd thought this movie was actually quite profound. AcomsDave
Community Journalist even gushed: “Isaiah Henderson’s Balloons isn’t
just a short film; it’s a gut punch wrapped in eight minutes of raw emotion. If
you’ve ever navigated the treacherous waters of a love that’s vibrant behind
closed doors but shrouded in fear in public, this one will resonate deeply.”
So many gay filmmakers and their audiences
these days seen to have forgotten that gay boys don’t just hug, run, and kiss
on a beach before pouting and slouching off to bed in tears; many of us still
think, question, and challenge the world around us in far more complex ways. And
a relationship is not always the first thing on our minds.
Los Angeles, February 23, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February
2026).
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