Louise Bagnall's Late Afternoon spends ten minutes inside the mind of a woman named Emily, drifting between the room she is sitting in and the life she has already lived. The 2019 Irish animated short is available on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles.
What is Late Afternoon about?
Emily is an elderly woman who no longer feels fully attached to what is going on around her. The present reaches her only in fragments. Small things in front of her open doors into memory, and she slips through them into earlier chapters of her own life, experiencing those moments again as though they were happening now. The short moves back and forth between then and today, letting the two states blur into each other. Its question is a gentle one: whether revisiting where she has been can help Emily take hold of the moment she is actually in, and of the people in it.
About the cast
The voice cast is led by Fionnula Flanagan, followed by Lucy O'Connell, Louise Bagnall, Niamh Moyles, Michael McGrath, Aislin Konings Ferrari and Caoimhe Ni Bhradaigh. Bagnall appears on both sides of the production, credited as director and also listed among the voices, which suits a piece this small and personal in scale.
Context & significance
Animation is often thought of as a medium for children, but short films like this one show how well it handles interior, adult subjects. Memory is hard to photograph; it is much easier to draw. A drawn image can dissolve, change shape and flow from one moment into another, which is close to how recollection feels from the inside. Late Afternoon uses that freedom to tell a story about ageing, identity and the pull of the past, all within a running time of about ten minutes. It comes from Ireland, and it belongs to a strand of contemporary animated shorts that favour mood and emotion over dialogue-heavy plotting. Because it is so brief, it works well as a quiet watch on its own or as something to share and talk about afterwards with parents and grandparents. In the Farsi catalogue the title appears as «بعد از ظهر گذشته».
Watching Late Afternoon on Ktime
Late Afternoon can be streamed on K-Time, a Persian-focused service for viewers living abroad, with a Farsi interface. A Persian-dubbed version and Persian subtitles are both available for this title. Anyone can read this page; to start playback, log in to your K-Time account.