Debut: ‘Still Waters’ and When Making Art for Yourself Is Worth the Risk
In the short documentary Still Waters, filmmaker Aurora Brachman turns the camera inward—not in pursuit of spectacle or resolution, but as a quiet tool for proximity, across a series of restrained, intimate conversations with her mother, Brachman zooms in on the long aftershocks of childhood trauma and the complicated inheritance of silence. The film, which has screened at DOC NYC, BlackStar Film Festival, and as part of POV’s Season 6, operates less like a traditional documentary and more like a shared vigil: patient, unresolved, and deliberately small.
From its opening moments, Still Waters establishes intimacy through a quiet undercurrent. The film’s visual language is sparse, with camcorder textures, natural light, long shots that keep bodies at a distance, and close-ups that linger just long enough to feel exposed. Fire becomes an anchoring image. As the conversation starts, we see flames sputter and nearly go out. By the film’s end, the fire burns steadily, offering warmth rather than illumination. The metaphor is subtle but effective: this conversation, like the flame, requires shared labor, oxygen, and time.
What distinguishes Still Waters is not its narrative arc-there is no dramatic confession or cathartic breakthrough- but its commitment to process. The dialogue is spaced out, often halting. Trauma is never named directly, yet it is unmistakably present, hovering in pauses and half-sentences. Mother and daughter circle the same emotional terrain without fully crossing into it. This refusal to articulate becomes the film’s central tension: both women know what they are speaking around, even if language fails them.
Cinematographically, the film leans into restraint. Shots are either uncomfortably close or strikingly far away, reinforcing a push-and-pull between intimacy and distance. Smash cuts juxtapose lush natural textures-fire, water, earth- against moments of emotional withdrawal. At one point, as Brachman’s mother shuts down the conversation, the fire visibly lowers, a visual beat that mirrors the emotional temperature drop. These choices reflect a filmmaker working within modest means, yet using limitation as a strength. The simplicity of the cinematography and sound design-soft, delicate, almost precious- aligns with the vulnerability of the subject matter.
That said, Still Waters may leave some viewers wanting more. For a short film, it lacks the visceral “gut punch” often expected of trauma-centered documentaries. Its specificity and ethereality create the feeling of an enclosed universe, an exchange we are allowed to witness and not welcomed into. This can read as intentional, principled even. Art, after all, does not need to accommodate an audience to be valid as long as it understands that its own elusiveness may sacrifice the limits of its reach and commercial viability. It is a piece that feels urgent and deeply cathartic for Brachman to have created, but not necessarily memorable for us to experience.
This tension raises a crucial question about short-form documentary: what responsibility does the filmmaker have to the viewer when the work is deeply personal? Still Waters seems less concerned with clarity or accessibility than with honesty. It documents a moment of attempted connection rather than offering insight or instruction. In that sense, the film functions as an artifact of abreaction, valuable, sincere, and emotionally delicate—rather than as a manual.
Performance here is not “acting” in any conventional sense, but presence. Both women appear acutely aware of the camera, yet unwilling to perform for it. Their restraint is what gives the film its emotional weight. The absence of dramatic release underscores how trauma often lives not in explosive epiphanies, but in quiet endurance.
Still Waters' minimalistic and coherent aesthetic embodies this reality while proving that minimal resources don’t have to interfere with a piece’s sophistication. The camcorder footage, natural settings, and pared-down soundscape suggest a production focused more on access than polish. There are no elaborate recreations or archival interventions-only time, trust, and patience. This aligns with Brachman’s broader body of work, which often explores memory, inheritance, and intergenerational storytelling through intimate frameworks.
Ultimately, Still Waters is a film that asks for gentleness from its subjects and its audience. It may not “move the needle” in a conventional marketplace sense, but its value lies elsewhere. It captures the fragile act of trying: trying to speak, to listen, to sit with what cannot yet be resolved. If nothing else, one hopes the film offered Brachman the catharsis it gestures toward-and that she continues to explore how personal urgency can coexist with audience engagement in future work. Still Waters is not an easy watch, nor is it designed to be. But in its quiet refusal to dramatize pain, it offers something rarer: a proof of care and healing in progress.
