Moving at the speed of its title, Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’s It Goes That Quick, which premiered at MoMI’s First Look last spring, is a beautiful love letter to the married filmmakers’ respective families. Though it’s crafted from footage the couple (Connor behind the lens, Stankus responsible for sound and editing) shot with their relatives over eight years, juxtaposed with home movies from their youth, the film isn’t a straightforward work of nonfiction but rather a sort of Seinfeldian doc.
Opening with the Leonard Cohen line, “If you are lucky you will grow old and live a life of errands,” It Goes That Quick is about nothing and everything. By casting their relatives in short scenarios — and often inserting themselves into the proceedings to give direction, roll sound, and call action and cut — based on their everyday lives and mundane activities, a multigenerational portrait emerges that’s equal parts comical and profound. One memorable scene, set to a warm piano waltz, involves Stankus’ mother, Andrea, who’s in need of a ride to work after her car breaks down. Running late for a meeting, she reaches out to her elderly father, Fred, to come pick her up. This in turn leads Fred to ask Andrea’s mom, Joan, if she wants to go with him. She does, but she’ll need a few minutes to get ready and then disappears up the stairs. The minutes grow ever longer as Joan dresses, puts on lipstick and perfume, and fixes her hair. All the while Fred calls out to ask if she’s ready yet (at one point adding, “I think she’s got a time limit”).
Eventually, they manage to get out the door and on the road, where Joan mentions for the second time that she needs to stop by the dollar store. They bicker over how to set up the buffet table for the Passover Seder. The quarreling continues once Andrea joins them and adds her two cents about the living room setup and serving gravy. She also wouldn’t mind swinging by that place where Fred gets a daily free bagel as a perk. Meanwhile, Connor’s uncle Michael, a commercial airline pilot, is in a hurry to get home from the airport, having just gotten in after being delayed for a day in Seattle due to the weather. On the long drive back, he calls his husband Ed to let him know he’s eagerly on his way and will ring him once he nears the Wendy’s.
After checking in when he reaches the fast food joint and asking if he needs anything from the store (“I do not,” Ed replies in sing-song fashion), Michael then pulls in to a plant nursery. On the phone with a friend, he laments being stuck on the job for an extra day. “All I want to do is be home. I want to be a hermit housewife in the Poconos.” As he starts browsing price tags on foliage, he also reveals that Ed is still struggling with a death in the family from the year before and that, “I think I want to plant something. I think it’ll make him feel better.” When Michael eventually arrives at their large house in the woods, the couple greet each other with a hug and a kiss — and then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to determine the perfect spot for an impulsively bought tree. They also have cocktails.
And while all this shtick might seem inconsequential and silly, it likewise reveals relationships between longtime husbands, and husbands and wives, and parents and children in a way that gets at their very essence. Indeed, over the course of filming two mothers, two fathers, two grandparents, and three uncles, the ups and downs of life are truthfully captured even as they’re staged. There’s a wedding, a birth, the progression of an illness, and deaths both expected and not. So by the end of the film’s 70-minute runtime, we’re left in a state of wholly unexpected wonderment, wondering how on earth it all went by so fast.
Published as part of New/Next Film Festival 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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