The Truck (2024) Drama Short Film by Elizabeth (Liz) Rao
Experience “The Truck” (2024) – a compelling narrative and drama short film by Elizabeth (Liz) Rao. Watch now & be moved.
🚚 The Truck (2024) — Drama short film by Elizabeth (Liz) Rao
A breathless road‑side odyssey about urgency, choice, and care, The Truck follows two teens in post‑Roe America as they race time and small‑town suspicion to access the morning‑after pill. Elizabeth Rao (credited as Liz Rao) turns a simple errand into a pressure‑cooker of love, ethics, and survival, all within a tight, lived‑in slice of Americana.
🧠Overview
Genre: Drama · Coming‑of‑age
Director & writer: Elizabeth (Liz) Rao 🎬✍️
Cast: Shirley Chen (Jo), Daniel Zolghadri (Arash), Garrett Richmond (Mason)
Premiere/festivals: Asian American International Film Festival; NYU First Run Film Festival showcase
Logline: A Chinese American teen and her boyfriend try to buy the morning‑after pill in post‑Roe America
Setting: Rural Tennessee, small‑town pharmacies, gas‑station lots, and the cab of a pickup truck 🚚
The film’s official listings emphasize the post‑Roe urgency and a 13–15 minute runtime across programs, starring Shirley Chen and Daniel Zolghadri, with screenings including AAIFF and NYU’s First Run Film Festival.
Watch the short:
đź“– Story in brief
The spark: Jo and Arash head out after a night that suddenly demands adult decisions. They need Plan B — fast.
The road: A maze of closed signs, judgmental glances, price shocks, and “we don’t carry that” shrugs.
The squeeze: The truck becomes a confessional — jokes, fights, and tenderness flicker as the stakes rise.
The gauntlet: Clerks ask questions they shouldn’t. Policies feel like walls. Time feels like a storm siren.
The choice: The film refuses easy answers, honoring the messy, human calculus of care, cost, and courage.
Official synopses frame their search squarely within post‑Roe realities, highlighting rural barriers and the teens’ cultural backgrounds as part of the tension and texture.
🎨 Creative DNA and style
Immediate realism: Handheld frames and car‑window perspectives put you in the passenger seat, where every delay feels personal.
Performance first: Chen and Zolghadri play the push‑pull of young love with humor and rawness — a fight here, a soft apology there.
Heat and hush: Sun‑baked exteriors give way to hushed interiors; flourescent aisles become battlegrounds of subtle power.
Editing as heartbeat: Quick cuts keep urgency high, but the film lingers where it hurts — the pause before a question, the look after a price quote.
Color of place: Rural Tennessee isn’t caricature; it’s specific — parking‑lot gloom, paper‑sign rules, and the intimacy of a small town’s watchful eye.
🌟 Themes and resonance
Access vs. autonomy: When healthcare becomes a scavenger hunt, autonomy turns into endurance.
Love under pressure: “Are we okay?” rides shotgun with “Did we find it?” — intimacy tested by logistics.
Cost of care: Money, miles, and moralizing shape who gets help and when.
Identity and gaze: A Chinese American teen and her Iranian American boyfriend navigate not only policy, but perception.
Post‑Roe present: The film captures the vertigo of a landscape where rights feel conditional and time feels weaponized.
✅ Pros and ❌ cons
Pros:
Urgency: A compact runtime that feels like a sprint you won’t forget.
Chemistry: Leads spark without pandering, balancing bite and warmth.
Specificity: Rural details and cultural textures deepen the stakes.
Cons:
Compressed backstory: The sprint leaves some personal history off‑screen.
Emotional whiplash: The tonal jumps — tender to tense — may hit hard for some.
đź’ˇ Humanized takeaway
The Truck is about the kind of care that looks like directions, debit cards, and hard conversations — the ordinary heroism of showing up. Rao keeps the camera close to breath and bone, reminding us that “choice” is not an abstraction; it’s a drive, a price, a gaze, a moment shared between two people trying to do the right thing when the world keeps asking the wrong questions.
🔍 Credits and festival notes
IMDb: Cast, runtime, post‑Roe premise; multi‑award festival run noted.
AAIFF listing: 13 minutes, USA, narrative; “A Chinese American teen and her boyfriend try to buy the morning‑after pill in post‑Roe America.”
NYU First Run: Rural Tennessee setting; creative team credits, and Rao’s bio contextualizing her voice and influences.