As many New York history buffs can tell you, this year marks the 45th anniversary of the start of
demolition on the old Penn Station — an architectural tragedy that helped kick-start the city’s preservationist movement and made many Gothamites realize that, sometimes, it’s not better to replace stately neoclassical buildings with grimy subterranean shitholes.
Stephen Kellam’s
Forever Yours is a short and hauntingly simple tale of love and loss during wartime — but in setting part of it in the old Penn Station (utilizing computer graphics to re-create it) Kellam brings extra resonance to his story. Suddenly, a film about a soldier dreaming of a rendezvous with his love back home becomes, in part, a film about our dreams of a lost world. Yes, there are currently efforts to
bring that lost world back, but in the meantime, we’ll have Kellam’s film to help our imaginations along.
—Bilge Ebiri