5.

Fuck fragments. Admittedly, we are nothing but fragments yet do we have to shun wholeness entirely in the ways we present ourselves? The fragmented experience is one possibility, but why not attempt to unify all the pieces?

[A girl in a white dress sits in a dining room near an enormous table elegantly set for dinner. She is in a tuck position on a wooden barrel with a flower growing through its side. Her hair covers her face until she looks up; the sound of wood bending and cracking. She has not been crying. The barrel collapses under her, and red wine rushes across the floor, the girl laughing as her dress reddens. She rolls onto her stomach and moves as if to swim, her arms cutting thinly through the sea she just made.]

[The door opens, bringing light into what was dark. Numerous feet descend the old staircase, their owners bodies and faces gradually coming into view. The procession is being filmed from behind/above. A man, bald yet in young middle age, describes the different vintages produced by his winery, absentmindedly lifting musty bottles from the shelves lining the walls of the cellar. He explains that his first batch of wine-a 1978 chianti-was so bad he wouldn't even let his wife cook with it. The people assembled around him, some of them lifting and examining bottles, chuckle. The camera's light casts jagged shadows against the ceiling, no one laughs when a bottle breaks.]

[In a field behind her house, the girl is playing football with her father and her friend Michael. The girl is faster than Michael, can throw the ball farther, so when Michael tackles her by pulling her down by the shirttails, spinning her as he does it, she flips him over and punches him three times in the face. Her father lifts her by her shirt collar and orders her to her room. Her father helps Michael off the ground and apologizes for the girl's behavior.

In her room, which has white walls and beige carpet, a white particleboard dresser and plastic bookcase, a white trundle bed, the girl hears her father run up the steps. She has not shut her door, so she watches him charge to where she's standing. He slaps her in the face and picks her up by her upper arms to shake her. He shakes her for 30 seconds then throws her backward against the wall. His mouth is moving but there is no sound-from his mouth, from the shaking, from her collision with the wall.]

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