Friday 2 August 2013

EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS @ MIFF 2013

How the hell am I going to do this? Reviewing 10 short films in 15 minutes?

SECOND SUN (Joel Stern/ Pia Borg; Australia/ UK)

Angry screaming mega-pixels. Like a stroppy, industrial Jordan Belson in an arcade parlour. Not bad, actually.

WANTEE (Laure Provost; UK)

Nope. Nope. Nope.

THE STREAM 3 (Hiroyuki Sakurai: Japan)

Simple, short, shot on an iPhone, drizzly, stuck in a pipe, meh.

BY PAIN AND RHYME AND ARABESQUES OF FORAGING (David Gatten; USA)

Oh, yes, now THIS was the whole reason for being here. Soft, diaphanous, scrawling and trawling through text, grasping some but never all, the whole a blissful mystery but so beguiling.

IYEZA (Kudzanai Chiurai; South Africa)

It'd make a great music video. But ultra slo-mo as the be-all-and-end-all of the piece doesn't really cut the mustard for me.

RECONNAISANCE (Johann Lurf; Austria)

Wonderfully simple, yet by the end of this 5 minute piece, there's an odd sense of not being entirely certain of what you've seen. Ostensibly this appears to be various shots of a decommissioned torpoedo-site, but unless I was going nuts it seems that there was more to this than expected. Still haunting my head.

DOUBLE GRAFFITI (Paul Winkler; Australia)

A genuine revelation here. Shot on 16mm, this film is a flicker-fest of constantly-rotating segments of graffiti-laden wall. The familiarity of tags is channeled into a intense new landscape of constant motion. Rather mesmeric.

DAD'S STICK (John Smith;UK)

A paean to his dead father, through the objects his father obsessively re-used. Smith's humour surprisingly rarely grates, and this becomes a moving piece on familial bonds through the quotidian objects.

CRYSTAL WORLD (Pia Borg; Australia/ UK)

Trying to do too many things. If the film focussed purely on the crystallisation process of underwater figures and objects, the film may have been stronger. Including segments from Night Of The Hunter seemed to throw it off balance.

...BECAUSE SUPERGLUE IS FOREVER! (Johan Grimonprez; Belgium)

I'm not sure that this worked. I think I expected something tighter from Grimonprez. The collation of news items, re-used footage, and news stories, etc read/ played by two young girl felt a little like a haphazard collision of ideas - an archival version of throwing everything at the wall and hoping it will stick.

No comments:

Post a Comment