First Love is a Bitch!: James Hartley’s Short Film About Timmy and a Tim Tam

First Love is a Bitch! is the blunt, festival-friendly title attached online to James Hartley’s short film First Love—a roughly three-to-four-minute Australian comedy-drama built around a single, disarming monologue. An eight-year-old boy named Timmy recounts his earliest collisions with romance: meeting a girl, sharing half a Tim Tam, somehow arriving at marriage in his own logic, then watching the story collapse when she marries someone else. The boy is confused. The audience is supposed to laugh, then wince, then laugh again.

Hartley wrote, directed, and produced the short under Pyramid Schemes Productions, with James Shepherd among the producing and camera credits in contemporary listings. Lucas van Hilten plays Timmy. The film’s own logline stays proudly elementary: boy meets girl; boy gives girl half a Tim Tam; boy and girl marry; girl marries other boy; boy is confused. That nursery-rhyme plot is the whole engine. There is no subplot about parents, no montage of suburban Sydney, no winky adult narrator correcting the child. Timmy’s voice is the frame.

Why a child’s monologue carries the film

Short films about first love often cast teenagers and aim for ache. Hartley aims younger and finds something sharper. An eight-year-old does not have the vocabulary of heartbreak, so he borrows the vocabulary of fairness. Sharing a biscuit becomes covenant. Marriage becomes the obvious next sentence. Betrayal becomes a rules violation. The comedy is not that Timmy is stupid. The comedy is that adult romance still runs on similar leaps—only with better costumes.

The Tim Tam detail matters more than it first appears. It is local, edible, and child-scale. An Australian audience recognizes the snack immediately; international viewers still understand the economy of the gesture. Half a biscuit is both generosity and negotiation. In Timmy’s telling, that split is enough to found a relationship. When the relationship fails, the snack becomes evidence in a private trial. Short films live or die on concrete objects. Hartley picked one you can taste.

Performance-wise, the piece depends on sincerity without preciousness. If the child actor tips into parody, the short becomes a sketch. If he tips into solemn prestige-kid acting, it becomes sentimental. The sweet spot is matter-of-fact bewilderment: Timmy reports events as if filing a complaint with the universe. Hartley’s writing leaves space for that tone—simple clauses, big stakes, no essay about “what love means.”

A small film with a long travel bag

For a micro-runtime comedy, First Love collected an outsized itinerary. Credits and festival notes connected to Hartley’s work list selections and honors including the Boardwalk Film Festival (2012), Court Métrage at the Festival de Cannes (2013), an audience prize at the Festival international des Très Courts (2013), the Sydney Underground Film Festival (2013), Images En Vues (2013), recognition at the B-Movie, Underground & Trash Film Festival (2014), and later audience-choice attention at Simply Shorts (2016). Not every short that circulates online earns that kind of circuit. The ones that do usually have a premise you can pitch in one breath and a tone that survives bad festival speakers.

The online title that pairs the film with “First Love is a Bitch!” captures how the piece was often shared in the early 2010s: as a sharp little gut-punch about romance arriving too early and making no sense. The official short title remains the cleaner First Love. Both labels point at the same bruise. First love is frequently ridiculous. It is also frequently the first time a person learns that other people do not follow your private plot.

What Hartley is practicing here

Looked at beside Hartley’s broader theatre and film credits—other shorts, stage writing, and directing—the film reads like a calling card for control of tone. Comedy and soft drama share the same three minutes without a gear grind. There is no need for elaborate production design when the writing plants a world in snack-food and childhood logic. That thrift is a craft lesson for anyone making shorts on limited means: choose one voice, one object, one misunderstanding, and let runtime do the editing.

It also sits comfortably in a lineage of child-POV comedies that trust kids as narrators of adult institutions. Marriage, in Timmy’s mouth, is not a legal status. It is a story ending. When the ending is rewritten without him, the outrage is moral before it is romantic. Adults watching recognize the pattern from later breakups, which is why the short lands harder than its runtime suggests.

How to watch it without spoiling the spell

If you find the film online, resist the urge to treat it as a “kids say the darndest things” clip. Listen for structure. Notice how quickly Hartley establishes the contract (meeting + Tim Tam), how casually he escalates to marriage, and how little explanation he offers for the rival. The gap is the joke. Timmy does not understand triangulation; he understands injustice.

Also notice what is absent. There is no montage teaching you to pity him. There is no adult punchline that translates the monologue into a TED-ready moral. The title’s rough online cousin does some of that work for sharers—“bitch” as comic exaggeration—but the film itself is gentler and stranger. It lets confusion remain confusion.

Why the short still circulates

Romance stories usually promise that suffering will be dignified by meaning. First Love offers a different bargain: suffering can be undignified, brief, and still true. An eight-year-old with a broken Tim Tam treaty is not a metaphor you need to unpack for hours. He is a reminder that the first curriculum of love is often procedural—who shared what, who promised what, who left—long before anyone has language for attachment styles.

James Hartley’s short succeeds because it respects that curriculum. It does not inflate Timmy into a prophet. It does not shrink him into a meme mascot. It gives him three or four minutes, a biscuit, and a plot that falls apart, then exits before anyone can sand the edges. That is a tough kind of kindness, and it is why a tiny Australian monologue about first love kept traveling from living-room links to festival halls without needing a bigger budget—only a clearer sense of how early the confusion starts.