The International Competition of the 47th Drama International Film Festival offered 27 short films from the following countries: France, Belgium, Colombia/Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, Lebanon, the Netherlands, China, Germany, the UK and UK/Turkey, Italy/Peru, Estonia/Sweden, Greece, Canada, Kosovo, Finland, Spain. The FIPRESCI jury awarded its prize to the French film Clamor by Salomé da Souza.
From tragedy to comedy, social advocacy and experimentation, other shorts stood out.
A Bird Flew by Leinad Pajaro De La Hoz (Colombia, Cuba) that is mostly set in a practice gym, strongly relies on an original modernist music score that creates a somber atmosphere while a volleyball training takes place. The soundtrack interacts with unusual camera angles and shifts of focus that fragment the space and the bodies within it: the orchestration of these elements agonizingly conveys the sense of a somehow inexpressible and yet urgent sense of grief, subtly undermining the most classic male culture of stoicism that wouldn’t make room for the mourning of a dear friend.
With a stark black and white cinematography, its elliptically non-linear narration and visually harrowing aesthetic perspectives, Dreams like Paper Boats (Haiti) by Samuel Suffren tells the story of a loss: of the wife, for the father, of the mother for the daughter, as they, father and daughter, together try to find ways to transcend their beloved’s painful absence.
Numb (Greece) by Despina Kourti also engages with death and the suffering that this traumatic experience causes in its tender portrait of an adolescent’s turmoil at the loss of her pal and sweetheart.
Madwomen in The Attic (Spain) by Tamara Garcia Iglesiasis a poignant testament to women’s instances of emotional fragility and the way they have historically been sanctioned as psychosis by the ‘wisdom’ of platoons of male psychiatrists. Garcia Iglesias avails herself of an impressive range of repertory silent cinema from the 1920s and 1930s which she uses to create a powerful film-(essay) where women have been framed ‘to be’ mad.
The Distance Between Us (France) by Léo Fontaine, as the title suggests, shares with its viewers the seemingly unsurmountable distance that separates a mother, Yalla, from her son. Without a clue about her mounting anxiety to get on a bus at the end of her night shift as a nurse, the audience embarks on a long and complicated journey. The film remarkably builds up the tension by staying constantly close to Yalla, who switches from a bus to another, relentlessly, yet without knowing what this journey will lead her to. When she eventually arrives at a detention centre, the embrace with her incarcerated son becomes a beam of light, for her, for him, for us.
Workers Wings (Kosovo) by Ilir Hasanaj makes use of the testimonies by three workers in Kosovo, Milazim, Fatmir, and Liridon, who have lost a limb as a result of accidents at work. Creatively rendered through a compelling array of stylistic visual sensitivity in 16mm, the film movingly pays homage to their individual stories as well as to those of the millions who continue to suffer from poor working conditions globally.
Loving Her (Canada) by Day traces a trans woman’s recollection of her development into her gender identity at a point when her memory is beginning to fade. In an intensely gentle manner, through warm lighting choices and a haunting mise-en-scene, the film celebrates the path into loving herself.
The Lost Memories of Trees (Italy,Spain) by Antonio La Camera is set in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest where two trees talk to one other at night and unveil their past as brothers. Magic realism and florid visual textures meet and unearth a most visceral encounter with the realm of the metaphysical.
On another note, within a lighthearted framework, Montsouris Park (France) by Guil Sela shows two young filmmakers wishing to document whatever happens before their eyes as they have pointed their cameras looking down from the top of Parc Montsouris, Paris. When a girl asks one guy and his friend to be taught how to ride an electric scooter and as they help her mount and drive the one owned by one of them, she keeps riding until she disappears from their sight. That evening everybody will return home with some sense of disbelief… one way or another!
In Pena’s Special Hauling (Finland) by Annsi Kasitonni, a retired man, with memory issues, wishes to spend his day out riding his old hauler truck. Once stopped by the police a major diatribe begins about his right to drive, until when, slowly, the prank unveils itself as the camera’s pan shows another car pulling the truck…
Silent Panorama (Belgium) by Nicolas Piret is a standalone case in its ingenious approach to animation on a single piece of paper where second after second (for the total of 5 minutes) life appears to draw itself through characters, notably, an energetic wild boar, and the several living beings part of the landscape in the Belgian Ardennes, with their sounds depicting vividly the life that we so often tend to ignore. A little and sweet gem that reminds us of what we are and what we are all part of.
Loreta Gandolfi
© FIPRESCI 2024