Last September, the Drama International Short Film Festival (DISFF) presented twenty-two international films in competition. Twenty-two variations on reality.
Festival programmers often say the hardest part is not selecting good films—contrary to what one might think, they are not so rare—but putting together a perfectly harmonious lineup for the audience. In other words: combining serious, heavy films with lighter ones; works showcasing national cinema alongside those from other continents; highly “arty” but sometimes less accessible films with others that are more mainstream (ideally featuring well-known actors). Finally, genres must be varied: live action and animation, fiction and documentaries.
Few festivals achieve such a balance as the Drama International Short Film Festival, held in Drama, Greece, from September 8 to 14. In the international section (which also included a few Greek films), twenty-two films were shown across four programs. The eclecticism of the lineup never felt artificial, and it gave some programs the breathing space they needed to avoid seeming too long. The selection was curated by Vasileios Terzopoulos, who has been involved with the festival for over twenty years and has headed the international programming since 2021. Among the highlights was Phoebe Cottam’s excellent and essential documentary When You Were Young Were You Afraid of the Moon? (winner of the FIPRESCI Prize), as well as other outstanding documentaries such as Ülo Pikkov’s highly personal Sewing Machine, which tells the contemporary story of Estonia through the life of the filmmaker’s grandmother. There were also film-essays blending fiction and reality, such as Campolivar, where director Alicia Moncholí stages her childhood memories in a quasi-theatrical, baroque manner. In the fascinating No Mean City, Ross McClean uses actors not to tell a story but to share a feeling and prompt reflection on the place of light in the city and the gradual replacement of old incandescent bulbs with a completely different new technology: LEDs.
Sometimes the boundaries between fiction and documentary blur even further: Magdalena Hausen: Frozen Time by Yannis Karpouzis, a pretend documentary constructed from photographs reminiscent of Chris Marker’s cinema, is in fact pure fiction – the celebrated photographer being a wholly invented character. Conversely, in the ultra-artificial Tragédia, Bernardo Zanotta employs the grand devices of fiction (and the archetypal story of a crime) to pay tribute to his very real father. In Skin on Skin, Simon Schneckenburger sets an impossible love story inside a slaughterhouse, using the same violent surveillance footage we have all seen from abattoirs to tell another, equally secret and equally violent but more intimate story: the love between a migrant worker, toiling at the most grueling jobs, deprived of his passport, and the guard meant to watch and control him.
Of course, the power of a film—fiction or documentary—always lies in questioning reality: it could be the reality of society or the one of our emotions. With very little artifice and writing of rare finesse, the Palestinian film I’m Glad You’re Dead Now by Tawfeek Barhom (who also won the Cannes Short Film Palme d’Or) manages to evoke a powerful, painful but cathartic emotion without ever dictating what we should feel. The story of dark childhood secrets that drive apart and then reunite, two brothers—played by the filmmaker himself and his real brother—once again plays with that blurred frontier said to separate fiction and documentary.
Other films, by contrast, were clearly fiction: Favours by Agnes Skonare (starring Raw’s Garance Marillier) is a tightly written thriller of unrelenting tension. Yet in this story of a mother to whom someone abandons a baby—or perhaps one who wishes to abandon her own—we cannot help but ask a very real question: what would we have done in her place? Finally, Jocelyn Charles’s animated film God is Shy is an invitation to fiction, following characters as they tell each other stories. Still, the natural delivery of the voice actors (including Alba Gaia Bellugi and Anthony Bajon), along with the precision of the dialogue, gives an immediate impression of reality—even though the drawing style is far from realistic.
In Ancient Greek, “Drama” means staged action, theatre—in other words, represented fiction. Whether documentary, fiction, or animation; comedy or tragedy, films are all representations of reality. Distorted reflections of the real. In Drama, more than anywhere.
Pierre Charpilloz
©FIPRESCI 2025