April 28, 2008 08:00PM EDT
Film Junkie Reports: Short Films
There’s something immediate and visceral about short films that you often don’t get with features—perhaps it’s the budget, perhaps the lack of a commercial market for shorts. By and large, they are created out of a need, an urgency to simply make cinema for cinema’s own sake. So I was pleased, among other screenings, to be able to attend one of the festival’s short film programs on Saturday. I am a great fan of short films and generally feel that they constitute the lifeblood of a well-programmed film festival.
This session was entitled “Eye Opener” and included seven films totaling 109 minutes. They were from Canada, France, Egypt, Slovenia, Mexico, and the United States; members of the Canadian and two American crews (Song of Slomon, Have You Ever Heard About Vukovar, and Kid) were present and took audience questions after the screening.
The festival’s short film curators—who said over 2,500 shorts were entered for consideration—have grouped films together thematically. In this case these pictures could be linked by a number of factors. Perhaps the most obvious, stemming from the large number of international submissions, is the way in which many of the films explored issues of nationality and ethnicity.
Song of Slomon opened in this vein with a lighthearted look at the role of faith and secularism in the life of a young Hassidic rabbi in Toronto. If you’ve ever wondered what Saturday Night Fever would have looked like if it had starred a diminutive bearded Jew, then this is the film for you. But it also sets up a space for Jewish-Catholic interrelations through the simple act of having the rabbi discuss his problems with his friend a priest in a confessional booth.
Have You Ever Heard About Vukovar, set in Los Angeles, also explores liminal spaces by showing the commonality of the Iraq War and the Croatian War of Independence. Similarly, Kid is about a traditional Mexican rite of passage set in the border area of south Texas, and Feathers to the Sky, Made in Slovenia, and At Day’s End each are infused with the details of their respective cultures.
Even more striking than this, however, was how many of the films used children and explored the relationships between them and their parents or grandparents. At Day’s End is about an aging Egyptian man’s attempts to come to grips with his own health and mortality, but the engine that drives this process is his strained interaction with his adult son and young grandson. The Second Life of the Sugar Bowl uses a basic set up-pay off structure to demonstrate the bond between a dedicated grandfather and a blind granddaughter. The uplifting Feathers to the Sky is quite similar, except here the grandfather is stricter and more hardened, though his eventual connection to his granddaughter is just as complete. For me, though, the best (and, ironically, at times most disturbing) film of the entire day was Made in Slovenia, a film in which a struggling middleclass Slovenian family must choose between their financial security and their familial unity.
