Lantern Path
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Lantern Path.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Sky lanterns burn across an open field under the Milky Way, set out like a path from a wooden stile into the dark. The paper of each lantern is thin enough to show the flame's color. A cloaked woman walks between them, one light at a time. Her cloak brushes dry grass and the grass does not catch. Each lantern she passes goes out behind her. The going-out is quiet, a sigh of paper, then black. Those still ahead stay lit. The field she has crossed is black grass and nothing else. The stile behind her is only a darker joint in the dark.
She stops at the next flame. Inside the paper a face she knows is smiling, small and held in the fire, and it is not her own face given back by the heat. The smile does not change when the flame leans. She takes that lantern down from its stick. The stick remains, a bare pole, and does not sprout another light. The face remains in the flame, and the paper is warm in her hands. Ash does not eat the smile. Ahead, the path of lights reaches the field's far edge. There is no door standing there. The grass simply ends, and the sky continues on the level, stars where the ground should go on. One more lantern at that edge burns and does not invite a step past the last blades.
She does not turn back toward the stile. The lanterns behind her stay dark. A moth finds the lantern in her hands, circles the known face, and leaves without burning. She holds the one flame against her cloak. The cloth does not scorch. The known face still smiles inside it, small and unrevised. The lights ahead do not come to her. They wait at their sticks, and she does not walk them down. The Milky Way runs on past the last of the grass.
Wind crosses the black field she has already put out and does not relight a single paper. The bare stick where she took the lantern stays bare. She remains at the edge with one flame and one smiling face that is not hers, and the sky keeps the ground's missing half without opening a door for her to enter.
The flame in her hands burns at one height and does not reach for the cloak's edge. The known smile inside the paper does not blink and does not turn into her own mouth. Ahead, the remaining lanterns sway on their sticks and stay lit, a path she has stopped walking. Behind, every extinguished paper is a pale shape in the grass, cooling. The stile is still there and still behind her. She does not set the taken lantern on the ground, where the face might scorch the dry stems, and she does not hang it back on the bare stick. Stars occupy the level where the field should continue. No threshold appears in that starlight. She holds the one warm paper, and the Milky Way keeps its river over a ground that has already ended.