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Review

After a brutal breakup with who he thought was the girl of his dreams, Ben, a young sketch artist obsessed with the curves of the female body, sinks into a deep depression. Riddled with a terrible case of insomnia, Ben decides to take on the graveyard shift at the local grocery, where he finds a cast of outrageous characters by his side. In a desperate attempt to navigate their way through the boredom of their overnight shifts, Ben and his coworkers partake in a collection of inane activities that range from kung fu fights to childish pranks to Ben’s own specialty, freezing time for himself and undressing the attractive customers in order to indulge his innocent appreciation of the human form. Through all the mayhem, an adorably shy romance begins to blossom between Ben and the shy yet bluntly direct checkout girl, Sharon. How his introverted world will collide with hers is anybody’s guess as their idle dreams begin to merge. Based on writer/director Sean Ellis’s Academy Award-nominated short, Cashback turns a cute basic twenty-minute comedy into a dazzlingly imaginative romantic feature film populated with quirky characters and a multitude of outstanding visual experiments.

 -- Michael Lerman