When thinking of dawn one’s first thought might be the beginning of the day, but the “Dawn” in Jaime Mariscal short film is a time of transition. As a girl stuck between childhood and becoming a young woman, Dawn (the title character) is deciding in each scene who she is now and who she will become. Dawn isn’t alone in this, in fact she is surrounded by and confronted with young people trying to understand love relationships and most of all sex.

It’s easy to remember that time, right at the beginning of being a teenager when a lot of us figure out what our relationship is toward sex. It can be years before we ever enter into a love or lust relationship, but it is in these first hormone colored years that we start to understand why bugs bunny in drag can make Elmer Fudd do whatever he wants.

“Dawn” takes us back to that time through its wide eyed main character. Everybody wants something from Dawn or for Dawn. There’s her controlling older brother, her older more worldly friend, the boys who have innocent and less innocent crushes on her. What’s unclear is what Dawn will want for herself.

While its more effective in its slice of life moments than in it’s over arching story, “Dawn” takes the audience back to a very specific part of life. Over the course of a day, Dawn submits to and rebuts the advances of lovers and friends in a world that feels lived in, blunt and real. It’s hard to decide who you want to be, and Dawn makes no judgments and comes to no firm conclusions about who that hero should be, that’s for her to decide.