Her Lens: Louisiana Creative Uprising
Manship Theatre
Baton Rouge
Sept. 21, 2025
The thing about short films is that they have to build the world, take you in and leave you somewhere interesting all in less than the time it would take to watch an episode of “The Office.”
The event "Her Lens" features five short-film screenings of women-led projects, events like yoga and card games and more. The shorts were a range of student films to festival award winners, but they succeeded in the above challenge. They’re “by women, for everyone,” according to the event’s website. Most of the shorts were filmed here in Louisiana or made by people who live here.
Her Lens spotlighted women’s voices and local businesses, but I wish that the event was more integrated. The Manship Theatre is a large venue within an even larger arts building. At the beginning of the event, if you didn’t know where to go for happy hour or to see the arts vendors, you ended up in the dark theater space and it’s unclear if you could have left and come back after scanning your ticket.
The films themselves all ran less than half an hour, but they tackled big ideas. “There Are Flowers Outside The Door” explored life after loss by showing contrast between flashbacks and life after a partner’s death. “Aces,” showed a generational grudge gone wrong.
A particular stand-out among the shorts was “Dying Laughing.” Written, produced and starring Tyler Young, it featured the story of a young comedian named Dru who is arrested for tax fraud and picks up a job at her father’s mortuary to try to pay off her debts.
Dru (Young) has a crass sense of humor which she doesn’t really know how to turn off or tone down in social settings but is legitimately funny. The scene when she does stand-up during the film had the audience laughing, but her out-of-pocket remarks off the stage were even funnier.
During a consult with her lawyer-friend after her arrest, Dru is faced with some hard truths. She’s in deep, and she’s gonna have to pay the money back.
“Sorry friend,” her lawyer-friend says.
“Some friend,” she retorts. “Didn’t it take you 4 tries to pass the bar?”
As a worker at her father’s mortuary, she sucks at wheeling around corpses, and like Charles in “Only Murders in the Building,” she’s able to talk to the dead bodies — or at least an imagined version of them. The film follows her character through working her first funeral, but beyond her character arc, it makes a broader point about the role of comedy in our lives and even in death.
“Comedy is comforting,” a character says to Dru in the film. “Everybody needs it to survive — even you.”
The short shines in its comedic timing and leaves people wanting more. I could see a TV show like “Insecure” springing out of the world Young has created through this short. We don’t know if Dru pays the money back because the money was never the point. The point is that she had something she needed to survive hard times and could give it to others and through the film, we see her start to figure that out.
