Film List - Manhattan Shorts

Last Tuesday I went to the Beijing screening of this year's Manhattan Short Film Festival at the Yugong Yishan music bar, not too far from where I live. Apparently it was planned to screen the 10 films 532 times in 173 different cities all around the world during this past week. All audience members were invited to vote for their favourite, and the winner of the poll is due to be announced on the website above this coming Tuesday, 29th September. So, what did I think? [Yes, there will be SPOILERS in my thumbnail reviews below; but you've now missed the Festival, and you'll have forgotten by the time they show up on TV or on a DVD.] (Well, first of all, I hope they randomised the order of screening a bit; otherwise, I would think, there'd be some weighting in favour of the first few films, since a certain ennui inevitably sets in after an hour or so; it's also possible that the later films, especially the very last one in the running order that I saw [which also seems to be the order that they are listed and discussed on the website, so probably is an unvarying sequence], might get a boost from the sense of relief an audience feels at finally finding something that hits the spot after a string of near-misses; being shown in a middle slot is almost certainly going to be a big disadvantage.) The Boundary (Dir. Julius Onah, USA) The most pointedly topical of the films, this harrowing micro-drama encapsulates the erosion of civil liberties by the Homeland Security regime in America since 9/11. It's inspired by a true story of an Arab family detained for interrogation at a border crossing when they tried to re-enter America after a brief trip to Canada, and perhaps benefits from having a recognised actor (Alexander Siddig - remembered as Dr Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) in the central role. However, at my screening, the film suffered from a poor quality soundtrack - the dialogue recorded at such a low level (much, much lower than any of the other films in competition) as to be almost completely inaudible. Hence, the crucial final twist - Siddig is abruptly released, just when it looks as though his wife has inadvertently said something to compromise him - was rather baffling; presumably it had been a case of mistaken identity (why do so many Arabs choose the name Ali?!). At the time, I felt there was something lacking in the execution of this one. It was a powerful story, but we never descended quite deep enough into the nightmare - it was all resolved a bit too briskly and easily. However, in retrospect, I find this is one of the ones that lingers strongest in the memory, and perhaps the sense of dissatisfaction at the time resulted from my inability to become fully involved in the story because of the soundtrack problems. I suspect this will be one of the strongest performers in the vote, especially with American - and Arab? - viewers. Love Child (Dir. Daniel Wirtberg, Sweden) I think there was a common response from the people around me that this was about the least impactful of all the films on show, but that may have been mainly because it was also the slightest - barely half the length of most of the other entries. A 4-year old girl has enjoyed being the centre of her parents' world, and feels jealous and alienated when they start neglecting her to shower attention on a cat. Originally, this had been just a three-minute film, and it might perhaps have worked better at that length. Here it was padded out to nearly twice as long with some prettily composed but essentially pointless shots of the girl - having run away - framed against scenes of urban desolation. There's an element of magic realism in the presentation - the cat starts wearing clothes and walking on its hind legs; the little girl returns home dressed in a cat costume to try to win back her parents' love - and perhaps this was the problem for me; a more straightforward approach might have established more sympathy, but this somehow just didn't engage me. Mozambique (Dir. Alcides Soares, Mozambique) This documentary autobiography has quite ravishing photography, and a touching subject - the lives of children taken in by other families after being orphaned by AIDS. The teenaged director is impressively talented, and has a tremendous eye for light and composition. However, I found the music added to the soundtrack cloyingly overdone, and there wasn't really very much substance to this: a vivid snapshot of lives we might otherwise never see, but no story. Skhizein (Dir. Jérémy Clapin, France) This 2-D/3-D animation is, I think, the likely winner because it has such a striking premise and is so elegantly realised (in simple grey/sepia drawings). It made a strong impression on, and won the votes of most the people around me at the screening. (And I am rather charmed by the fact that Clapin uses the Greek word for 'to split' as his title.) However, I have some misgivings that, as the only animated film in the field, it probably has an unfair advantage. A young office worker who lives alone finds his life mysteriously transformed after a close encounter with a meteorite. He discovers that he is literally "beside himself", his sensory perceptions and visible self displaced 91cm to the right of his now invisible physical presence. In order to continue to function in daily life, he has to draw chalk pictures of every object in his apartment 91cm to the left of where they are, so that he can co-ordinate the movements of his visible body with those of the invisible self which actually interacts with the physical world. It's a wonderful metaphor of urban alienation, and a disturbing study of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. I have quibbles about the development, though: I feel Clapin didn't really know where he wanted to take the story, and it degenerates in the last third; the ending is rather muddled and disappointing, at least in comparison with the brilliance of the set-up. However, it's certainly a unique and thought-provoking film, and would, I think, be a worthy winner. Parking (Dir. Jorge Molina, Spain) A young businessman, running late for an important meeting, finds himself suffering an escalating series of misadventures in an underground parking lot. This is a darkly comic fable that reminded me at times of the wonderful 70s short feature La Cabina (also Spanish - there must be something about the national sensibility that favours the macabre), although I'm afraid it is nowhere near as good as that classic. I would say that this is also a possible winner, in that it has a strong theme and is perhaps the most perfectly realised of all the films. However, I did feel that it was just missing something: perhaps we needed a little more background about the protagonist and his predicament in order to feel some sympathy for him, or if not sympathy (he's not a very sympathetic character) at least empathy. Also, the final twist is pretty obvious, and has probably been anticipated by most of the audience much earlier - which leaves the ending seeming a little weak. A'Mare (Dir. Martina Amati, Italy) The weakest film in the competition, by general consensus. It looks absolutely gorgeous, but it's a frustratingly opaque story, and it really goes nowhere. Two young boys from a Sicilian fishing village take a boat out to sea on their own. They find a lifeless man floating in the water with a big leather briefcase (this proves to be a complete red herring: we speculate on how he got there, whether he might be a drug runner or a people smuggler, whether the case might be full of money - but we never find out). They're not able to lift the man into their boat, so they tie a rope around him and drag him along behind (thus probably ensuring that he will soon drown, if he hasn't already): some kind of symbolism going on here, no doubt, but it's quite impenetrable to the audience, and we don't even begin to care. The boys lose one of their oars (which inexplicably drifts away from the boat and disappears, in the middle of a flat calm), and so are marooned. They spend an anxious night adrift, but are rescued by a coastguard launch first thing the next morning - so that's all right. Oh, and the dead man comes to life again, and swims powerfully away into the emptiness of the ocean. Er, what? 'Magical realism' again, I suppose. I don't always hate it; I just think it's seldom done well, or to any good purpose. Plastic (Dir. Sandy Widyanata, Australia) A slightly frumpy young woman preparing to go out on a date discovers that, when she looks in her bathroom mirror, she can mould her features and her body like plasticine - and, of course, she gets tempted to try to remake herself into some sort of perverse Cosmo ideal of impossibly 'perfect' femininity. It's all right as far as it goes, but it's not a terribly original idea, and it's mostly about the CGI rather than the acting or the story. Indeed, they had such a good budget to work with that they even introduced an utterly irrelevant CG moth fluttering around the woman's apartment. The superfluousness of that moth pissed me off more than anything else in the whole festival: it completely turned me off this film. Miente (Dir. Isabel de Campo, Spain) This is another topical piece - on human trafficking - that seems as though it might have been lifted from a newspaper report, but is said to be an original work of fiction. The protagonist is an attractive young woman from Eastern Europe living in a large Spanish city. She wants to send a flute to her teenage sister back home as a birthday present, but she doesn't have any money, so she has to steal one. It becomes apparent that she is being forced to work as a prostitute, and her brutal pimp is reluctant to let her have any communication with her family. Eventually he agrees to have someone deliver the flute to the little sister, because he has designs of luring her to Spain as well. This is a well-constructed and moving melodrama; but it's trying just a bit too hard, it's almost cloyingly worthy; and the 'happy ending' seems too contrived, unconvincing. Lashabiya (Dir. Yehezkel Lazarov, Israel) This was the most frustrating of the films on show. It might have been, perhaps should have been a clear winner, but the ending completely let it down. At least it provided proof that a really short film could compete with longer, more complete dramas - I think this was the shortest offering of all, only about 5 or 6 minutes. It also showed that I'm not utterly impervious to magical realism - here was some magical realism that worked. A young Arab is standing against a tree in a small courtyard. A row of ten soldiers are facing him, their rifles raised. It looks like a firing squad, but.... it's not that straightforward. The Arab turns to face the tree, and a game of Grandma's Footsteps begins - the soldiers scurrying forward while the Arab's back is turned, being eliminated from 'the game' if he spins around and sees them moving. The Arab invokes various other childhood rhymes and games to disqualify more soldiers, and one has to withdraw after stumbling and accidentally shooting himself in the leg. Finally, there is only one soldier left, and the Arab is looking down the barrel of his weapon. Then a school bell goes. The camera slowly - slowly, slowly (honestly, this shot must have taken at least 30 seconds, maybe more like a minute) - pans away from this confrontation, up, up into the leaves of the tree. You are waiting, waiting, waiting for some resolution, some finality - and there is none. I didn't speak to anyone that night who didn't hate this non-ending. It seemed obvious, inevitable from the set-up that there could really be only three satisfactory endings here: a) real schoolchildren come out of class and fill up the schoolyard, preventing (or perhaps witnessing) the execution; b) the soldiers and the prisoner go into a classroom for a lesson, continuing the primary schoolkids analogy, but defusing the imminent violence of the scenario (perhaps the teacher begins to tell them about the history of the partition of Palestine); or c) the prisoner just gets shot (it's difficult to avoid the fact that this is the logical conclusion to 'the game'; you don't have to show the execution, but you do have to hear it). I see from the interview on the Festival website that the director sees the Arab's almost-success in 'the game' as an acknowledgement of the resourcefulness of the resistance to Israeli occupation and an illustration of the limitations of trying to rely on military force. He sees the ending as indicating that the only option for the last remaining soldier and the Arab is to open up a dialogue - but I'm sorry, that just doesn't work. The scene is obviously set up as an execution, and the final soldier has 'won': audience expectation cannot be anything other than that the soldier will shoot, and panning away from that climax does not displace the expectation, it merely leaves the audience confused as to why the director has been so coy. If you want to make the virtue of dialogue into the moral of the film, then you have to show some dialogue (otherwise, the idea of dialogue is completely absent from the film; and it's hard, if not impossible to infer it just from the absence of a gunshot at the end). I think a lot of people wanted to vote for this film anyway, because it's such an arresting premise. With an effective ending, I think it would have won by a landslide. Hammerhead (Dir. Sam Donovan, UK) This was the most completely satisfying of all the films on show, impressive in its script, acting, and photography. It also has a very effective and memorable central metaphor (a hammerhead shark mask which gives its 10-year-old protagonist a split-image view of the world). I would pick this as the likely winner, since some viewers may prove resistant to the eccentric charms of the French cartoon Skhizein. Boris is a precocious brat who's crazy about sharks. His mum, who works in an aquarium, gives him the hammerhead mask as a birthday present. There have been reports of a large shark sighted off the coast nearby, so they decide to go to the seaside on a spotting trip as his birthday treat. Boris sees the outing as a last chance to try to get his estranged parents back together, but his plans are frustrated by the presence of Lilah, a co-worker at the aquarium with whom his mother has begun a lesbian relationship. It's not terribly substantial and perhaps a bit trite, but it's beautifully done, with great warmth and humour. With this film coming on last, it seemed in retrospect as though all its competitors had had more unusual story ideas which they struggled to tell effectively; whereas this was a fairly banal story that was executed near perfectly. Yep, it got my vote. But oh how I wish I could have voted for Lashabiya instead. The Manhattan Short Film Festival is an admirable venture, but I have just a few misgivings about its operation. As I've already mentioned, I think having an unvarying running order creates a danger that the voting will be skewed in favour of the first or last films on the programme. I'm also wary of allowing animations into the competition, since they are a very different kind of animal from live action films: the amount of time and energy required by the production process almost inevitably raises the impression of overall quality and attention to detail in a good animated film; and the very nature of the medium makes it more immediately arresting to an audience. (I think Skhizein, for example, would probably not take the top prize in most animated film festivals, but would regularly win out against live action competitors.) Similarly, I think it's very difficult to judge documentary films against dramas, and I'd prefer to see separate festivals for these three very different genres. I also wonder if it might be worth introducing some parameters on running time - you can compare a 3-minute film to a 20-minute film, but you tend to appreciate them in very different ways. Finally, I am somewhat dubious about the selection criteria. The 10 films in competition were culled from over 400 submissions. And I would say that 2 of them were downright weak, and 4 or 5 of them were seriously flawed. I can't quite believe that these were the best short films made around the world last year, given the huge number of such films being made by talented amateurs or as film school projects. The conspicuous thing about these 10 films was that they had all been made by professional film-makers and had very high production values (well, all except the documentary about AIDS orphans in Mozambique; and even that seemed to have had a lot of money spent on it in post-production). I would imagine that they'd all been sponsored or commissioned by national TV stations. I suspect you'd find more zest and originality amongst lower-budget productions. Setting such grouching (inevitable with me, I'm afraid!) aside, though, it was a fascinating two hours; and I'm already looking forward to next year's Festival. I'm also very curious to see the results of the voting on Tuesday.