Amazing 'This is Water' Commencement Speech Gets the Short Film Treatment

[vimeo][/vimeo]

It doesn't matter that I've read and listened to the audio of David Foster Wallace's much-shared 2005 graduation speech enough to recite parts of it by heart—I still got the chills seeing this new short film from director Matthew Freidell, which uses original audio from Wallace's "This is Water" speech. I could gripe about how the abridged version used in the film left out some very good parts of the original speech, but I'll let that go (Wallace did have the tendency to write long). It's enough to see a moving visual depiction of "This is Water" that will surely reach a larger audience—even if it's a bittersweet reminder that we won't hear anything new from the late author. Watch and listen.