It’s dark.
Damn.
What?
Just Damn.
I don’t know how to feel about it.

Those are the opening lines from a film I just watched.  Read them again.

Seriously, read them again.  I’ll wait.

What do you think the story is about?  Use your imagination.  What do you think the story is about?  Whose voices are those?  What are they doing?  It could be anything, couldn’t it?  It’s hard to say what’s going on, because you really haven’t been given anything to go on.  Dialog, by itself, tells us nothing.

In 2009, nine directors were given a script that consisted of nothing but dialog and asked to shoot a short film containing that dialog.  Word for word.  No dialog could change, no dialog could be added.  The director was required to supply genre, context, characters; all the other elements required to craft the dialog into a cohesive narrative.  Nine short films that were completely different from each other, sharing nothing other than the word Wonder in the title, and the exact same dialog.  One director, Peggy Howard Chane, tells a story (Wonder/Love) about a dorky young man wooing a sophisticated business woman.  In The Wonderous Bliss, Jay D. Hayes tells a story of two young women and a large quantity of a drug called Bliss.  And using the same dialog, Ian Fischer illustrates the ups and downs of romance (Wonder of See-Saws).

Wonder could easily be described as a short film anthology, and while that might be an accurate description, it doesn’t do the project justice.  Wonder is a completely different beast.  Wonder was a challenge to the director – find your story in these words, make these words tell your story.  Wonder is also a challenge to the viewer – see the story behind the words.

To see Wonder as an anthology of 9 short films is to miss the point.  Few, if any, of the shorts would work as stand alone pieces.  Taken out of the context of the project, the dialog is far too clumsy not to have been tweaked for the scene.  But when viewed as a complete film, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Wonder is jazz for directors.  Each short is a solo, riffing on a theme… the director’s art.

A story is only a story.  The wonder is in the telling.