Showing at This Modern World block October 4th, 2025, at 7:00 PM link below to get tickets:
By Valerie Milano
Hollywood, CA (The Hollywood Times is proud to be a media partner of the Hollywood Queer Short Film Festival) 8/18/25 – Some films nourish the eye, others nourish the mind, but May Kindred Booth’s The Eating of an Orange nourishes both—and dares its audience to taste queerness, desire, and liberation in their rawest form.
When I spoke with Booth via Zoom from her home in Bristol, UK, her delight at the reception of her hand-drawn animated short was palpable. “It’s amazing,” she said with a smile. “It’s why we make things, isn’t it? To share them and have people respond well.”
The short film begins in a world of hyper-conformity. Its protagonist, a woman who has known nothing beyond the walls of her rigid environment, encounters something extraordinary—an orange. This simple piece of fruit becomes the key to a realm she’s never imagined: lush forests, queer ecologies, and even what Booth described as a “cosmic queer orgasm.”
“The orange is juicy, vaginal, and innocent,” Booth explained. “That was important for me, because queerness is often framed as unnatural. But queer ecology challenges that idea by showing us how queerness thrives in the natural world.”
Booth not only directed and wrote the film—she animated it, sound-designed it, and even collaborated with her sister on the score. The process, though rewarding, was grueling.
“It was 14-hour days, non-stop drawing,” she told me. “It did drive me slightly mad, but I think it was worth it.”
The result is a visual world that is both strange and sensuous, with surreal imagery that leans into emotion rather than logic. “I really wanted to follow intuition—feeling what was right—rather than over-planning,” she said. That approach gives the film its dreamlike cadence, a flow that feels as natural as it is radical.
At its heart, The Eating of an Orange is about more than queerness—it is about self-acceptance and defiance. “I hope audiences take away encouragement to accept themselves and their desires,” Booth shared. “And also, to challenge the conventions that rule our lives. We rarely question those conventions, but sometimes we should ask ourselves if we actually want them.”
Audience reactions have already proven moving. “There have been tears, there have been thank-yous,” Booth noted. “It’s all I could ever hope for.”
Booth is far from finished. She hinted at new projects bubbling: another short film, a feature, even a series. And when asked about programming The Eating of an Orange alongside other works, she named Flora Anabuda’s 27, a piece she feels captures a similar essence.
Her excitement was infectious as she signed off our conversation: “This is just the beginning.”
As a proud media partner of HQSFF, The Hollywood Times celebrates Booth’s The Eating of an Orange as one of the festival’s most daring entries. It is a film that asks us to taste, to feel, and to reconsider the so-called boundaries of nature, sexuality, and self. Innocent and juicy as fruit, but defiant as queer art has always been, Booth’s short leaves a lingering sweetness—and a challenge—to every viewer who dares to take a bite.
We talk more about her film here:
