Domestic issues involving family and security against the backdrop of what it means to be home are examined in Homeland Security (88 min) with 9 shorts that are as diverse in style as any program so far.
In lush digital animation is The Seamstress (4 min), a breath-taking period piece that considers a woman who is waiting for her husband to arrive home from war. As she stitches and sews, the piece revels in her dutiful sense for playing the fixer, or the healer, and the short contemplates the burden of such a responsibility. Inventive, atmospheric, and alive.
Passing Through the Night (13 min) is an involving experimentation from Thailand that begs to be lifted into a popular music video at some point with hypnotic sequences of thread being woven on industrial machines that appear to create or infuse memories in this love letter to mothers and the homes they help to illuminate with love. Contemplative and sensual.
From Lithuania is another amazingly hypnotic animated short in We May Meet, We May Not (8 min). Hand-drawn and then edited on computer, we follow this arresting animated fable that sees the dynamics between mother and daughter tested in this most-evocative way as characters and landscapes melt and shape-shift throughout, the black drawing lines restless and squiggly throughout creating an experience you want to immediately play over again in order to try to keep up with its breakneck pacing.
Dol (First Birthday) (11 min) is hopefully a primer for a full feature length effort because there is a remarkable family drama here as old and new traditions confront Nick, a Korean-American man who hides from his family the fact that he has a boyfriend. But he’s no longer a teen or even a young adult. He’s pushing 30 and it’s beginning to eat away at him. The story cuts between Nick and his partner and the first birthday celebration of his nephew. Nick is appreciated and loved in his family, but he is not understood for who he truly is, and it has something to do with Nick as much as it has to do with cultural traditions. This is a brave and assured film from Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, a name worth remembering, methinks.
Unwieldy Beast (6 min) follows a San Francisco music man who had the idea to fuse a bike with a piano so he could hear his favorite sound under the Bay Bridge and practically everywhere else, for that matter. “Riding a bike is….riding a bike; but then playing the piano while riding a bike becomes an unwieldy beast”. Somehow he pulls it off and the short shows him riding around San Fran pulling stares of wonder, recognition and admiration from anyone who sets eyes on this free-spirited guy who makes riding the “unwieldy beast” look easy.
From Japan, Walkin’ On Snow Grass (6 min) is exactly that, a serene dead-of-winter landscape painted in beautiful digitally-animated shades of blue and gray as we follow a dormouse’s midnight excursion into the unknown and a potential friend he finds in the great outdoors. This is one to sit back and drink in.
Last of the Snow (12 min) is a straightforward Dogme 95-inspired drama from Newfoundland that follows the painful secrets of a couple that has caused their relationship to atrophy. A precocious neighborhood boy enters the picture and helps to finally thaw something that has been frozen between the adult couple. This is a work that contains no easy answers, just tantalizing questions about what came before while the present and future seem as uncertain as ever.
One of the most devastating films playing this week is Seven Years of Winter (22 min), a bleak and very haunting drama that follows 7 yr-old Andrej as he pilfers through the remains of the dilapidated buildings and other structures that remain from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in order to retrieve documents such as passports and other forms of ID that can be sold to the black market. Like young Middle Eastern children who are sent out to locate landmines, this film shows an adult exploiting a child’s innocence for the same gain. Simply unforgettable, a notable achievement for director Marcus Schwenzel.
Places Other People Have Lived (6 min) is the third visually-arresting digital animation project in this set, this time in a room-by-room exploration of a house using a multitude of pictures that are then put through the rotoscope treatment on computer, bringing rooms and windows and walls to life as living, breathing memories moving before our eyes. This is another dazzling achievement in editing and sound and computer animation that celebrates home and ponders who might have previously lived in some of the homes we did not live in first.
- Moviejay
Check out our coverage of the WorldWide Short Film Festival:
- Xavierpop Takes On The ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ Programme - MovieJay Reviews The “All Tomorrow’s Parties” Programme - Douglas Godhino Reviews The ‘Superfans’ Programme - Xavierpop Takes on The “Creative Control” Programme - MovieJay Reviews the “War, What Is It Good For?” Programme - MovieJay Reviews ‘The Family Compact” Programme - Next Up A Look At the ‘Iron Ladies’ Programme - Xavierpop Covers ‘The Love Hurts’ Official Selection - A Break-Down The ‘Who’s Your Dada?’ Programme - MovieJay Reviews The Opening Night Gala: Winners From Around the World - The @xvrpop Ultimate Worldwide Short Film Fest Preview - The CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival’s Screenplay $50,000 Giveaway is Back!
The notion of voyeurism as well as the idea of one who watches over another, either in a parental sense or an authoritarian sense is the thread that binds the 8 films in Someone To Watch Over Me (93 min), an eclectic set of compelling dramas.
The U.S. military’s Wikileaks “hacktivist” is covered in fine digital documentary form in Bradley Manning Had Secrets (6 min), a highly absorbing experience that uses the voice of an actor to characterize Manning in his own words, culled from transcripts of a real conversation he had on the eve of him being arrested for leaking classified documents online. The audible conversation plays over a series of digital images that dance around in movement and that shape-shift along the way, giving us the feeling as though we too are a part of this digital realm, sharing Manning’s complicated existence.
From Brazil comes The Factory (15 min), a straightforward human drama about a mother who visits her son in prison and their elaborate scheme to get him an item she has smuggled into the place for him. Aren’t moms the best?
Kelly O’Brien is behind the camera while her daughter Emma is in front of it in the dreaminess of Six (3 min). Shot on Super 8, we watch as Emma dances and twirls around at the beach, and on the soundtrack we learn that she loves mangoes and sushi, but most of all, being six years old. Emma wishes to remain 6 forever. Becoming a teen and then growing up to do a job and drive a car seem like a bad trade-off. This is a magical rumination on life and aging.
Joy (10 min) is a sad film detailing Nicola, an Irish teen in the hospital due to her pregnancy. With her best friend at her side, the two talk as teens do, almost in code. But when Nicola’s mother enters the room, the entire tone of the piece changes and a crucial reveal is made to the audience that forces us to consider what just came before and how we might deal with the same situation. Thought-provoking.
From the Netherlands is Elephant Feet (16 min), a short that does for gas stations what Clerks did for video shops as we follow Thomas during his first night shift, dealing with night owls, transients, passers-by and other assorted creatures of the night. Good writing elevates this beyond easy situation comedy.
From a movie theater in Penang, Malaysia comes the sensuous experimentation that is the meaning of style (5 min) as we follow a group of left-wing skinheads as they watch themselves in a music-like video on-screen that informs us of their style and history. Mesmerizing even if it is at times impenetrable.
My Sweetheart (23 min) is an absorbing drama that centers on the romance between two developmentally-challenged young adults in this intelligent and curious French drama. Their names are Romain and Laurie, and all they want is to be together like any other couple, but their love is forbidden at the institution where they do most of their living. When they’re found in a heavy petting session in a public bathroom by an older lady, the couple’s guardian scolds them for an activity they should be practicing in private. “But the bathroom is the only place at the Centre where we can have sex!”, Laurie retorts. This is a brave and empathic film that forces us to consider the complexities in the lives of our developmentally-challenged family members.
Deafblind (15 min) begins as a character study of a depressive woman who lacks the ability to see or hear, but then plays as a fascinating thriller-of-sorts when it becomes apparent that the young man who squats in her home is definitely not an apparition. The careful interplay between this woman, who puts up a brave face to her guardian but who carefully hides her alcoholism well, and the young man who oversees her, is spellbinding to watch.
- Moviejay
Check out our coverage of the WorldWide Short Film Festival:
- MovieJay Reviews The “All Tomorrow’s Parties” Programme - Douglas Godhino Reviews The ‘Superfans’ Programme - Xavierpop Takes on The “Creative Control” Programme - MovieJay Reviews the “War, What Is It Good For?” Programme - MovieJay Reviews ‘The Family Compact” Programme - Next Up A Look At the ‘Iron Ladies’ Programme - Xavierpop Covers ‘The Love Hurts’ Official Selection - A Break-Down The ‘Who’s Your Dada?’ Programme - MovieJay Reviews The Opening Night Gala: Winners From Around the World - The @xvrpop Ultimate Worldwide Short Film Fest Preview - The CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival’s Screenplay $50,000 Giveaway is Back!
All Tomorrow’s Parties (91 min) would have to make the shortlist of strongest programs at the festival this week with 7 shorts dedicated to misfits. From night-owls who observe life through the bottom of a glass to the life-affirming story of a strong-willed and adventurous octogenarian, this is a wonderful set of films that shine a light on individuality and alternative ways of living set mostly against a backdrop of nightlife and all its trappings.
Love (7 min) practically starts out as an after-school special as a young man and woman go through the motions of a one-night stand. But then we take a turn into Kaufman or Gondry territory when it morphs into a surreal cautionary tale about the 600 lb downside of having unprotected sex when the young woman wakes up with an alarming surprise the following morning. Freaky.
Eighty Eight (11 min) just might have the biggest heart of any short playing this week, with its story of Ralph “The Banjo Man” on the streets of Cornwall. He would want you to know it’s not a bloody banjo, it’s a mandola! We see Ralph busking and spend time with him in his comfy home learning about his late wife. Through old newspaper clippings and countless gold medals, he shares the remarkable athletic successes he achieved only a decade or so earlier in swimming, biking, and at “thrashing the competition” with a 1st place prize at the roller disco, no less. Brimming with humor, directness, and joie-de-vivre, Ralph only gets bent out of shape when the word “old” is mentioned. “I’m knockin’ on 90 for chrissake, but I don’t feel I’m 90. I feel like a youngster….and I beat them at roller skating, I did!”. Ralph reminds us that life rolls on indifferent to us, but we don’t have to be indifferent to it. This is a special film.
Four Doves On the Aerial (17 min) is a fascinating film out of France that observes a quartet of young women and their sexually-charged adventures come nightfall. Director Martin Tronquart is a name that will no doubt surface again with his skill for creating intimacy and for somehow making this material feel entirely plausible, real, and urgent. The scenes establishing who these women are could have gone on for an entire feature as they discuss sex, dating and men. A sharp, interesting drama with a lot of flavor.
Hypnotic, trippy black and white animation that gives you a little of that Waking Life feel brings The Pub (8 min) to life in this rich, dazzling, and haunting account of a young female bartender and the characters who patronize her bar, from dizzy party girls to lonely old men and their drunken advances. The result is a deep, dark and satisfying watch with restlessness and movement in every frame.
One of the funnier shorts playing is What If Famous People Weren’t Famous: Prince (3 min), a fine short that gets mileage from working the juxtaposition of taking such an odd bird in the Virtuoso Musician Prince and showing what it might be like had he stayed and lived a quiet life in Minneapolis working in the air-conditioning business. I smell the potential for a series here.
From Spain comes They Stay For Dinner (18 min), a film not so much about its subject matter – a flamboyant photographer/drug dealer – as it is about what its like to be around an addict. Since drugs are the perfect excuse to not have to answer any questions about yourself, we see a total disconnect at work here as the larger-than-life but shorter-than-average guy perpetuates himself on anyone and everyone. The film makes the wise decision of seeing him through the eyes of the people closest to him, some of whom are colleagues while most others are friends or enablers.
Good Night (27 min) marks an excellent piece of hard-hitting and perceptive work for director Muriel D’Ansembourg in this UK production that follows two precocious 14 yr-old girls who get dressed up and hit the town, armed with vodka and tampons. This straightforward drama follows them as they remarkably gain access to a club and then it shows them making a series of potentially life-altering decisions when they hook up with a couple young guys afterwards. Smart and tough.
- Moviejay
Check out our coverage of the WorldWide Short Film Festival:
- Douglas Godhino Reviews The ‘Superfans’ Programme - Xavierpop Takes on The “Creative Control” Programme - MovieJay Reviews the “War, What Is It Good For?” Programme - MovieJay Reviews ‘The Family Compact” Programme - Next Up A Look At the ‘Iron Ladies’ Programme - Xavierpop Covers ‘The Love Hurts’ Official Selection - A Break-Down The ‘Who’s Your Dada?’ Programme - MovieJay Reviews The Opening Night Gala: Winners From Around the World - The @xvrpop Ultimate Worldwide Short Film Fest Preview - The CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival’s Screenplay $50,000 Giveaway is Back!
The collection of 6 shorts in Superfans explores fandom and the blurry line between fantasy and reality. Does art imitate life or does life imitate art, and what role does our imagination play?
No Relation (7 min)
Philip K. Dick is best-known for his science fiction novels Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (adapted for the big screen in 1982′s Blade Runner) and A Scanner Darkly, among many others. In his mind-bending stories, the essence of existence and illusion often come into question; this short biographical documentary follows suit by using footage of the author, of people that he knew, and of people that knew about him to illuminate these themes. What’s great about this short is that the elusive quality of the subject is enhanced by the elusive film-making style. The theme from The Third Man for the soundtrack is just one of the brilliant choices by its Canadian director, Kieran Dick.
Gun for George (17 min)
Terry Finch is an author of pulp novels in a time when pulp novels have fallen out of popularity. No one seems to find the stories about retribution in the face of street crime compelling or realistic. But Finch is a lot like the character in his books and he’ll do anything to promote them – mainly by harassing librarians and book publishers. This very funny short bounces between the sad life of this struggling pulp author and a pulp action star known as “The Reprisalizer” – the understated humor coming from the fact that these two contrasting personalities are actually the same person: heroic at times, but usually delusional and kind of pathetic.
Semi-Auto Colours (6 min)
This short is a collage of hip-hop music, homemade recordings, and short clips cut in quick succession with overlapping elements. The film doesn’t seem to have a coherent narrative but is very experimental with many risky choices by its director, Isiah Medina, in a film about a gang of disenfranchised youth in Winnipeg’s West End.
The Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke (12 min)
An interesting adaptation of the 1962 short film La Jetée with a cartoon-ish style, this movie definitely doesn’t take itself seriously. If you’ve ever seen 12 Monkeys, it’s based on the same story but with a few stylistic choices to completely change the tone of this movie. The art direction uses murals with illustrated visuals for sets and shows some inventiveness. This first-person narrated story deals with time travel and fate but does so with such lo-fi special effects and hilarious acting that you can’t help but smirk. It’s a little strange but definitely fun.
Dad, Lenin and Freddy (20 min)
This is the story of a young girl who is particularly impressionable. It’s shot in the style of a documentary and narrated by the main character, however, touches of realism help the audience understand the little girl’s point of view. After her father has left for Russia and she has watched Nightmare on Elm Street a few too many times, the girl’s imagination starts to affect her reality. Impressionable and imaginative, she becomes paranoid and starts spying on her dad – building a narrative in her head. The demons of Lenin and Freddy Krueger have such an impact on the girl’s mind, along with what she suspects her dad is up to, that they all culminate to a climax that only a child’s mind can create. Wholly imaginative and stylish – this short is a great representation of how a child’s imagination works and makes us question our realities, too.
Videoboy (33 min)
This short plays with the idea of how children create narratives about the unknown and the power of suggestion. In this case, two young boys befriend the new kid that happens to have an extensive film collection – particularly horror films. The two friends make up irrational stories about the child that they’ve befriended – fearing and thinking the worst of him. Over time, as the children spend more time with their new friend, they both adopt different attitudes about him. This is a great little parable about imagination and human nature and is told in a very compelling way – the muted color palette and sparse lighting only work to make the film more effective. In the end, the boys choose whether to accept their new friend or to avoid him and although the new friend might be a little strange and may seem scary, it’s clear which child is more righteous in his choice.
- Douglas Godhino
Check out our coverage of the WorldWide Short Film Festival:
- Xavierpop Takes on The “Creative Control” Programme - MovieJay Reviews the “War, What Is It Good For?” Programme - MovieJay Reviews ‘The Family Compact” Programme - Next Up A Look At the ‘Iron Ladies’ Programme - Xavierpop Covers ‘The Love Hurts’ Official Selection - A Break-Down The ‘Who’s Your Dada?’ Programme - MovieJay Reviews The Opening Night Gala: Winners From Around the World - The @xvrpop Ultimate Worldwide Short Film Fest Preview - The CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival’s Screenplay $50,000 Giveaway is Back!
The 7 shorts included in Creative Control (92 min) explore the abstract in both style and thematic elements. Creativity, imagination, self-expression and introspection take the spotlight in this strong lineup.
The Maker (6 min) continues the festival’s streak of presenting one dazzling stop-motion animation piece after another as we follow a rabbit-like creature in the process of his own evolution into creating a new self before he runs out of precious time.
Everything comes together in the powerful Gravity of Center (14 min), a spell-binding Canadian short from director Thibaut Duverneix that follows the RUBBERBANDance troupe in what the program guide calls “an exploration of the push and pull between individual expression and group dynamics”. That is true, yet the film does not play on academic terms; it lives on a more sensual and abstract plane, a place where the individual and the group seem to disappear while the dancers become the outdoorsy environments they dance in, filled with a wonderful music score and top notch cinematography. One of the best shots of any film playing this week shows these dancers in an ebb and flow in their movements as they uncannily become one with the turbulent gray skies above. Deeply involving on a purely emotional level.
Heaven (15 min) is surely a contender for best doc at the festival with the empathy and fascination it brings to Robert, a seriously ill painter of religious art who found that the despair of living with a disease somehow gave him renewed focus on his artistic endeavors. Much of the film is without words as the camera studies Robert’s face, looking for a way in but never finding one in this most interesting of doc subjects I can remember seeing in some time, this hardened man with a third eye that can rise above the worst you can throw at him. Life-affirming.
Cheese (5 min) is an obnoxious turd of a movie that wears thin after about a minute and a half. It’s the kind of cheese you’d see in a dumb commercial before a screening at a highly respected film festival in order to remind us that this industry doesn’t take always take itself quite so seriously, which I suppose is not entirely a bad thing. The story follows an eccentric and overbearing man who begins to pretend he’s Stanley Kubrick when all that nice Asian couple wants is a quick photo or two of themselves taken by what they thought was just an innocuous stranger. Little did they know. Too bad it’s missing any real punch.
Lifetripper (14 min) is an interesting but ultimately sad piece of work that follows Stan, a motormouth who works as a mechanic by day and moonlights as a comedian at night. We watch him trying out his stuff every morning on the bus ride to work. He always engages those around him, even if some of them don’t laugh, while one guy shows his displeasure by cracking Stan in the face. What works best in this film is the notion of what Stan thinks of his own eccentric self, which is something that would have the legs to stretch into a fascinating feature about this unforgettable and challenging character.
Gorgeous black and white stop-motion animation once again in How to Raise the Moon (9 min), a wonderfully inventive and totally alive piece that shows a rabbit and a fox dueling it out over the unconscious woman slumped over her piano. The fox wishes to raise her out of the place entirely while the rabbit looks for ways to keep her grounded in this totally weird but absolutely gratifying wonderment of a film that you just can’t get out of your head after you’ve seen it.
The series concludes with Withering Love (29 min) with Emanuelle Beart (Les Destinees, 8 Women) and Denis Lavant (Mister Lonely, A Very Long Engagement) as two wonderful misfits with dispositions and personality traits that would have been at home in a Cassavetes film. She plays Maria, a woman who witnesses the suicide attempt of a stranger named Vincent and then who goes searching for the woman he tried killing himself over in this rich and involving drama that builds to a satisfying payoff.
- MovieJay
Check out our coverage of the WorldWide Short Film Festival:
- MovieJay Reviews the “War, What Is It Good For?” Programme - MovieJay Reviews ‘The Family Compact” Programme - Next Up A Look At the ‘Iron Ladies’ Programme - Xavierpop Covers ‘The Love Hurts’ Official Selection - A Break-Down The ‘Who’s Your Dada?’ Programme - MovieJay Reviews The Opening Night Gala: Winners From Around the World - The @xvrpop Ultimate Worldwide Short Film Fest Preview - The CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival’s Screenplay $50,000 Giveaway is Back!
Issues of war, both in the conventional sense as well as the introspective notion of interior battles within oneself, take center stage in War, What Is It Good For? (89 min). From world peace to foreign wars for oil, from futuristic nightmares of post-apocalyptic earth to the conflicted nature of a woman who thought her relationship was secure, the 8 shorts here dive headlong into meaty cinematic territory.
Goldilocks Nation (5 min) is a fascinating little polemic that shows psychotherapist June Lawton‘s examination of the modern American psyche, in both cultural and political terms, through the prism of the old Goldilocks tale. Most feature length movies aren’t really much about anything while this 5 minute piece gets to the heart of pleasure versus happiness in this most enlightening film.
The Last Bus (15 min) pits man versus beast in a world where hunting season takes on a new meaning in this schlocky looking affair from Slovakia that is teaming with humans dressed up and running around a forest and piling onto buses as wolves and other such beasts.
One of the best shots you’ll see at the festival is a computer-generated image of military choppers entering the frame one by one until they are circling each other in the air before they pounce on each other in We’ll Become Oil (8 min), a devastatingly good and bleak nightmare of wars over oil. Giant plumes of smoke from oil fields on fire fill the screen against desert backdrops. This is 8 captivating minutes.
Michael Pierro and Sophia Chirovsky have made a film that is about as confident at what it is and what it wants to be as any movie I’ve seen so far this week in Waking (13 min). This Canadian duo will no doubt re-appear soon enough armed with a feature length film as astonishingly powerful and as well made as this one, and possibly about the same character hopefully. We follow a young woman named Chloe who starts to feel that something is off. Like she’s not present. Or in a dream state of some kind. Is this really happening or is it all in her mind? The camera looks upon Chloe with urgent fascination as she negotiates what is going on inside her mind. Very absorbing human drama.
Bellum (20 min) is a terrific Danish effort that follows Dennis, a young rebellious man with more colors to him than we expect, as he parties and hangs out and gets into trouble with his girlfriend in his last 24 hours before he’s to be redeployed to Afghanistan. David B. Sorensen proves himself to be a gifted director of gritty, realistic drama.
Nightingales in December (3 min) is a dazzling piece of animation in this painterly collage of a multitude of nightingale images. Just drink this one in.
It’s the end of the world as we know it in Creature (13 min), a haunting post-apocalyptic account of a city that’s just gotten nuked real good as seen through the eyes of a mangy, resourceful black cat named Yin Yin. Gorgeous, dreamy black and white cinematography and what a plucky, involving cat that is.
Last Christmas (12 min) exists just this side of the Twilight Zone with its story that follows Josh and his Grandma on Christmas Eve. It’s a strange reversal of roles in this foreboding story that sees Josh protecting her from her own self, and from other forces, too. A strange delight.
- MovieJay
Check out our coverage of the WorldWide Short Film Festival:
- MovieJay Reviews ‘The Family Compact” Programme - Next Up A Look At the ‘Iron Ladies’ Programme - Xavierpop Covers ‘The Love Hurts’ Official Selection - A Break-Down The ‘Who’s Your Dada?’ Programme - MovieJay Reviews The Opening Night Gala: Winners From Around the World - The @xvrpop Ultimate Worldwide Short Film Fest Preview - The CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival’s Screenplay $50,000 Giveaway is Back!
