Shorts 3: Bittersweets – Handle with Care

A woman and a man go on a date, both for the first time in years. Each faces the dilemma of how open and honest they should be.

Director/Writer: Michael Glover Smith
Producer: Alyssa Thordarson, John Otterbacher
Starring: Alyssa Thordarson | Mickey O’Sullivan
Cinematographer: Pouya Shahbazi

2024 | 8 mins | US | B&W | 🏆 | Comedy, Drama, Romance

About the Filmmaker

Michael Glover Smith wrote and directed the feature films COOL APOCALYPSE (2015), MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (2017), RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO (2018), and RELATIVE (2022), all of which won awards at festivals across the U.S. and were the subject of rave reviews. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper wrote that “Smith has a deft touch for creating characters who look and sound like people we know” and Matt Fagerholm at Indie Outlook has called him “one of the Windy City’s finest filmmakers.” His films have screened at the American Cinematheque and Rooftop Cinema Club in Los Angeles, Spectacle Theater and Regal UA Midway in NYC and the Gene Siskel Film Center and Music Box Theater in Chicago. He was a recipient of the Siskel Center’s Star Filmmaker award in 2017 and made Newcity Chicago’s “Film 50” list in 2018 and 2020 for being one of fifty individuals who “shape Chicago’s film scene.” He teaches Directing at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and DePaul University and is the author of Flickering Empire (Columbia University Press, 2015), an acclaimed nonfiction book about film production in Chicago during the silent era.

Director’s Statement

The “first date,” that awkward social phenomenon where two strangers come together, both feeling the same uneasy mixture of hope and fear, is a source of endless fascination for me. This short romantic dramedy, my most autobiographical film so far, is based on an unusual blind date I went on in 2005, a night that has haunted me ever since. My goal in making the film was to recreate the events of that evening as closely as I could remember them while also working closely with two of the finest actors in Chicago (Alyssa Thordarson and Mickey O’Sullivan) to ensure that we showed as much compassion as possible to both characters.