The Heart is a Cul-de-sac 

During a sweltering Austin summer, a virus that turns romantic love into self-destruction lays bare the disparate feelings between Ana--no longer in love-- and her partner Nat who is calmly trying to kill herself at every opportunity.  

There is a scrap of cardboard in my house with this sentence written on it: “what really matters is what we can only be silent about.”

For some part of my life, I would have interpreted this as giving tacit approval for staying silent, for not airing deep secrets. I know now that the things we want to stay silent about are actually the most deserving of vocalization.

Following this revelation I wrote The Heart is a Cul-de-sac, an intimate pandemic film about the struggle to express ourselves inside our most intimate relationships. A Wittgenstein quote (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) hangs inside a character’s home and runs through the narrative. 

Tonally, the film weaves together the comic, surreal, and tragic. The humor in The Heart is a Cul-de-sac is physical and behavioral: a woman sitting calmly in a chest freezer, an aluminum foil crown, someone tied to a stationary bike. These embodied moments anchor the film in a reality that is heightened but still recognizable as our own.

- Katy McCarthy