Ken Ochiai | Phoenix / 2006

two brothers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ken Ochiai (screenwriter and director) Phoenix / 2006 [6 minutes]

 

In this short, slightly hallucinatory, black-and-white film from 2006, then USC (University of Southern California) student Ken Ochiai, conjures up a story about a father (Kelwin Hagen), so devastated by his wife’s death, that although he has kept the piano upon which she played and taught her young song Ryan (Zachary Allan) to play, he has locked away in a meat freezer and will not allow Ryan to play or his loving older brother Karl (Stanko Zovak) to sit in wonderment, watching him perform.

     The very first time he catches the boys playing, after they have snuck into the freezer to practice the piano, he burns his younger son’s hand with a cigarette butt. He then puts a padlock on the door.

     Yet the boys dare to borrow his keys, and again sneak into the cold locker to let Ryan practice. This time the reaction is even more brutal as he tosses his younger son to the ground, injuring his ear, again insisting that they never again enter to room again.

    So enraged and hurt are the boys that they determine, while he is out to burn down their shop and home, leaving their clothing on the floor to simulate their own bodies, as they steal any cash in the register, pack some meat in a bag and run off. When he returns home, the father sees his home ablaze, presuming the ashes in the boy’s room to be their bodies. He vomits in horror.

      But the investigator assures him that the boys have escaped.

      The rest of this short film portrays an older Ryan (Max Shippee) performing his mother’s favorite piece, “Phoenix” on a grand Baldwin piano in front of an appreciative audience, while his loving brother Karl (Kevin Donelan as the older incarnation) watching from the wings, now evidently his manager and constant associate.

      There is no openly gay content in this short film, but it is clear that both boys have been closely attached to their mother and perhaps have a closer relationship with one another, bordering on an almost incestuous love, than to any women, of which we have no representatives in this short work.

      And this film, which I saw on “Gay Films Matter” seems perfectly at home in that company.

      Since this early film, Ochiai has made some 30 more short and longer films.

 

Los Angeles, August 18, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).