{"id":3817,"date":"2014-11-11T17:44:49","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T16:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturedallroundman.com\/?p=3817"},"modified":"2015-11-04T18:25:21","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T21:25:21","slug":"aesthetica-short-film-festival-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/aesthetica-short-film-festival-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2014 In Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SeeingBlackCows2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Aesthetica Short Film Festival<\/a> is now in its fourth year. In a city with an artistic temperament which hitherto lacked a renowned venue or event, the festival has been a vital addition to York\u2019s cultural life: showcasing a breadth of York\u2019s cultural spaces, with a focus on UK film but drawing filmmakers and film followers from throughout the world, the festival is a resounding success. For the 2014 edition, 300 films were on show across fifteen venues and four days. New groupings showed collections of shorts from the worlds of fashion and advertising; there were special screenings of Lebanese, French, Japanese, Iraqi, and German film; and industry people afforded \u2018masterclasses\u2019, workshops, talks, and networking sessions, alongside opening and after parties \u2013 the latter following ASFF\u2019s ceremony for awards. I attended seven screenings over the course of the weekend, and offer below my thoughts on each of the forty-two films I saw.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Experimental 3<\/strong> (Location: Middleton\u2019s Hotel)<\/p>\n

\u2018L\u00e9th\u00e9\u2019 \u2013 by Harald Hutter, co-produced by the Scotland Screen Academy, and filmed in France and Scotland \u2013 is almost parodically French. Nicely shot and rich in colour as it traverses country roads, fields, and bridges, a man follows \u2013 always present but keeping his distance \u2013 a troubled young woman wearing red. Upon first sight, we may wonder whether she has been assaulted, or is in some other way physically distressed: lost, or witness to some horrible incident. Yet her struggle is mental rather than physical. Through vague and repetitive utterances, she hints to her follower that she has something to show him and that they might know or may once have known one another. Towards the close of the film, she turns to the camera and informs the audience: \u2018Thoughts are the dreams of the unconscious\u2019. The film meanders, and\u00a0never becomes more than a poor impression of Alain Resnais.<\/p>\n

\"hotchicken\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Seeing Black Cows\u2019, by the Finnish director Nuutti Koskinen, was one of the most visually and aurally engaging films on display at ASFF. An animation which digitises the cutout technique, and draws something from the aesthetic of Yuri Norstein, the film throbs and hums between the blacks and greens of misty forests and falling trees and the synthetic reds and golds of highways and road tunnels. \u2018Hot Chicken\u2019, by Iain Bonner, is splutteringly funny. A man \u2013 with a small mouth and deep eyes but a glassy gaze \u2013 sustains himself on warm rotisserie chicken, which he takes home and juicily dismembers by hand. Repeated visits to his front door by a fitness instructor-cum-spiritual healer win this passive adult\u2019s attention, and he embarks on group exercise before becoming the meat in a male-male-female sandwich.<\/p>\n

\u2018Maria\u2019, by the Polish-born, American-based director\u00a0Katarzyna Plazinska, was a tightly composed work of experimental drama. We are offered a sensitively austere portrait of a woman in isolation, whose careful inner life abuts against the blank contexts of a frozen landscape, a shopping mall\u2019s food court and bathroom, and a hockey arena, at which she remains resolutely behind the glass. The film is a series of precise frames. Its climax shows simply the nape of this woman\u2019s neck, and the thin chain necklace she is wearing, which draws \u2013 by surreptitious movements \u2013 ever more tightly against her skin.<\/p>\n

\"maria\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018The Rinsing\u2019 is a short of just three minutes, which shows a middle-aged woman in a workhouse or factory environment pulled and pushed in the competitive effort to become and remain an object of desire for the opposite sex. \u2018Dans Le Bruit\u2019, a Chilean film by Gabriel Olavarr\u00eda, continued the theme of female dislocation which was a constant throughout Experimental 3. Peering\u00a0between the cracking walls of her room, a woman witnesses a younger counterpart \u2013 who seems to function in some sense as the woman\u2019s double \u2013 experience the stresses and sufferings of domestic abuse at the hands of a male. The younger woman, and then in turn the woman herself, both end up wearing eye-patches. However, as the woman clambers across the industrial terrain of her hometown and tears apart the crumbling walls of her room, the narrative of the film suggests \u2013 without condoning the behaviour of its men \u2013 that such domestic violence can also be a product of male suffering, and thereby renders\u00a0the issue in societal and interpersonal perspectives.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Drama 14<\/strong> (Location: Middleton\u2019s Hotel)<\/p>\n

\u2018The Weather Report\u2019 proved a peculiar short. A dramatisation\u00a0of the factual role played by the lighthouse keeper at Blacksod Bay in County Mayo, Ireland, during World War II \u2013 the lighthouse keeper, Ted Sweeney, provided important weather forecasts to the Allies prior to the invasion of Normandy \u2013 the film develops only to retract its story of romantic intrigue. The phone calls which Mr. Sweeney continues to receive from a female operator, asking for his reports on the weather, raise in his wife the suspicion that he is carrying out an affair. Ted encourages this suspicion by virtue of his evasive manner. But then as the film ends we are told how Sweeney\u2019s weather reports were in fact crucial towards the Allied war effort \u2013 and the notion of any intrigue is dropped.<\/p>\n

\u2018In the Still of the Night\u2019, by the Austrian filmmaker Erich Steiner and Sorger Film, is a period piece, beautifully portrayed and acted, which blisteringly evokes the Holocaust. A family \u2013 a mother, grandmother, and three children, the eldest of whom is suffering from an unspecified debilitating condition \u2013 wait for the return of their father, late home from work. While the youngsters squabble and play, the eldest girl seems anxious. The father arrives home and, giving his three children presents, the family settle into a domestic scene. Yet the pace and the atmosphere of the film has created a sense of foreboding, and in the night soldiers ransack the family home and leave the bodies of their victims.<\/p>\n

\"inthestillofthenight1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the German film \u2018Still Got Lives\u2019, a teenage boy named Marco plays an online\u00a0RPG with a girl named Lisa. Fond partners fighting monsters over the internet, beyond their flirting Marco suggests that they meet in real life. Lisa, however, rejects his offer. When Marco continues to press the issue, Lisa declares she is quitting the world of the game, and leaves Marco with only her log-in details so that he can continue the life of her character. Yet when Marco uses this log-in to access a billing address, he makes his way to Lisa\u2019s family home \u2013 only to find that Lisa is terminally ill, and confined to a hospital bed. Marco and Lisa become intimate in the little time Lisa has left. If the film sounds superficially cloying or somewhat trite in its depiction of online romance and circumscribed young love, it surpasses any such concerns in the closeness of its details and in the strength of the two leads\u2019 performances.<\/p>\n

\u2018Demob\u2019 is a bleak but limited portrayal of a soldier just home from Afghanistan. Suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, the former soldier sits in his girlfriend\u2019s apartment in the nude, adorned only by his old combat helmet, which he wears on his head. Whatever black comedy one may struggle to find in this is curtailed when the soldier bludgeons his girlfriend to death.<\/p>\n

\"cercavo1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In contrast, Alessio Rupalti\u2019s \u2018Looking for Something Else\u2019 is a gentle unfolding of a couple coming to terms with a past loss. The film \u2013 set in a luxurious Italian apartment, with its two lead characters impeccably dressed \u2013 languishes in uninspired rhetoric which is florid and excessively sentimental, but it somehow holds together, owing to the unity of its aesthetic sensibility. It has a\u00a0glossy sheen, and plays close to an elaborate television commercial. \u2018Zephra\u2019 is a long short \u2013 thirty minutes in length \u2013 by the director Bob Gallagher, set in a post-apocalyptic Ireland. A man called John\u00a0barely survives in a desolate landscape despite a weight of expertise in hunting, foraging, and medicine; and when a contaminated water supply forces him to take shelter with an expecting couple, he takes the opportunity to rebuild a family for himself \u2013 at the couple\u2019s expense. With a compelling landscape, thoroughly plotted, and convincingly acted and directed, \u2018Zephra\u2019 was an accomplished work in every respect.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Documentary 1<\/strong> (Location: Treasurer\u2019s House)<\/p>\n

Owing to the diversity of its selection, Documentary 1 promised much; yet the group of films rarely excelled and occasionally stuttered. \u2018Herd in Iceland\u2019 is still an eminently worthwhile documentary, affording a sustained view of\u00a0life with horses in rural Iceland, through their breeding and herding, and as a new generation of owners questions whether to remain in the countryside or move to the city. Likewise \u2018Zima\u2019 is an engaging look at life in Russia\u2019s coldest regions.<\/p>\n

\"HerdinIceland\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Next Stop: Reset\u2019 manages little as a retrospective covering three countries in five minutes; and while Treasurer\u2019s House is a supremely attractive location, the acoustics rendered the apparently uninteresting stories told by the three hard-to-understand elderly ladies of\u00a0\u2018The Wolf, The Ship, and The Little Green Bag\u2019 especially difficult to discern. \u2018Here We\u2019m Be Together\u2019 is a slightly ingratiating look at the dying customs of the Norfolk Broads \u2013 until the film\u2019s star amusingly tells the tale of how an aristocrat once generously offered him a meal of warm horse manure. \u2018A Film is a Film is a Film\u2019 is enjoyable \u2013 and fittingly uses music from William Basinski\u2019s The Disintegration Loops<\/em> \u2013 without either the detail or the formal experimentation which would have allowed its meditative subject matter to truly excel.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Artists\u2019 Film 5<\/strong> (Location: According To McGee)<\/p>\n

\u2018Glace Crevasse et D\u00e9rive\u2019, by Albert Girard and Chantal Caron of Fleuve Espace Danse, was a spectacular piece of choreography \u2013 primarily for the boldness of its two dancers, Tomas Casey and Karine Gagne, in daring to perform atop the icebergs and frozen shore edges of the Saint Lawrence River as it runs through Quebec. Gagne was especially remarkable in this regard, supremely poised in a full-length ballgown, off the shoulder and replete with folds. The choreography was delicately balanced through movements of mirroring and counterpoint, and despite intending to serve as a metaphor on \u2018the allure of death\u2019, the dance retained a lightness which highlighted individual gestures and asserted the phenomenal power of the landscape.<\/p>\n

\"crevasse2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Every Man and Woman is a Star\u2019 is a pleasant enough piece, featuring the fluid interactions of a woman and two men on a pebbled beach in Essex. The two men switch between the attires of the businessman and the homeless as they indifferently negotiate their relationships. \u2018SYSTEM\u2019 retains a strong narrative element, built around the obsessive hygiene concerns of one of two sisters as she navigates the impositions of a shopping centre. The film succeeds as a concise commentary on our routines and on the abstract concerns by which we would safeguard our health and general wellbeing; and on how these define and delimit our interactions with people.<\/p>\n

\"revalites\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018R\u00e9valit\u00e9s (Dreamalities)\u2019 occupies a similar realm to \u2018L\u00e9th\u00e9\u2019, as another film set largely in the French countryside and featuring a female protagonist in red who dwells in the folds of memory. But \u2018R\u00e9valit\u00e9s (Dreamalities)\u2019 offers a much richer experience, its cinematography fluent in colour and light; and its exploration of childhood memory more thoughtful and sustained. \u2018Monsters\u2019 is brief at just three minutes, but visually admirable as ornate flowers emerge and encompass gardens and stoneworks. \u2018Return\u2019, directed by Gabrielle Le Brayon and inspired by Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, is a somewhat static rumination on the concept of the journey.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Documentary 2<\/strong> (Location: Middleton\u2019s Hotel)<\/p>\n

For \u2018Cailleach\u2019, Rosie Reed Hillman followed Morag, aged eighty-six, and living in Scotland\u2019s Western Isles in the same remote household in which she was born. Morag \u2013 who expresses the view that you don\u2019t move house for the mere fun of it \u2013 has never married, and she looks back on her life and contemplates her impending death, and discusses her current interest: her sheep, who she names by epithets. Hillman succeeds in providing a sense of place while allowing Morag\u2019s distinct character and sense of humour to emerge.<\/p>\n

\"cailleach\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite its brief span, \u2018Emilie\u2019 provides an interesting perspective on the art of the tattooist as a unique collaboration between artist and medium. \u2018Gli Immacolati\u2019 took an entirely different route to the other documentaries on show. Rather than filming human subjects, Ronny Trocker allows his film\u2019s contentious account \u2013 a story of how a girl\u2019s false accusation of rape wrought the devastation of a Romani camp in northern Italy in 2011 \u2013 to soundtrack a series of images, as his camera slowly pans across his scaled models of the destruction. The models possess a desolate beauty while they raise questions about truth telling and documentary as genre.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Port Nolloth: Between a Rock and a Hard Place\u2019 felt laboured as it studies the demise of a community on the northwestern coast of South Africa, and the challenges faced by those who linger to dive for its\u00a0few remaining diamonds. \u2018Autism in Love\u2019 is a tender and humorous account of a fifty-year-old teacher with autism and his partner. And \u2018An Undertaking\u2019 fittingly completes the cycle of films: like \u2018Cailleach\u2019, a close depiction of a narrow and unheralded way of life, extending in a wry and humane humour.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Thriller 2<\/strong> (Location: City Screen Basement)<\/p>\n

Thriller 2 divided neatly into three exceptional films and three bland mediocrities. \u2018Naive\u2019, by the Belgian director Marie Enthoven, is a fantastic conceit, at once dark and darkly comic. A woman named Emma \u2013 somewhere about her late twenties or early thirties: a time at which society dictates one should have a few close friends and a relationship, and be preparing to settle down \u2013 spends an evening with her best friend, struggling to get a reception on her television. She speaks to her boyfriend over the phone, and ends the call with kisses, but notices that the line does not go dead. Gradually she uncovers a plot against her: her mother seems to be paying her boyfriend, and indeed her best friend, to occupy their roles. This is the twist in the narrative: despite the equivocations and protestations and further deceits which follow, we never recover the sense that everything is alright, and the film proceeds by a continual tilting of the floor.<\/p>\n

\"naive\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Infringe\u2019 is darker still, a harrowing invasion of a young blind woman after an incidental meeting in the street. The film is a Swedish short, directed by Martin \u00c5hlin. A young woman strides down the street in the evening, with dark hair and a long hooded jacket, her headphones on in the dark; and when a man walking in the opposite direction bumps into her, she is sent sprawling into a blind blonde stripling, and sends her tumbling to the ground. The dark haired girl helps the blonde find her apartment building, and asserts that she was in fact headed to the same complex to visit a friend. This is disconcerting, because the dark haired girl appeared to be heading past the building when she bumped into the blonde.<\/p>\n

The pair share an elevator, and the blonde girl reveals she is German, and has moved to Sweden to live with her Swedish boyfriend. He is out for the evening at an after-work party. Before the two women part, the blind woman asks whether she can touch her new companion\u2019s face, to \u2018see\u2019 what she looks like. The dark haired girl assents, and the blonde feels her face, and feels the braid in her hair. The elevator closes and the dark haired girl ostensibly travels on to her intended floor. But when she arrives there \u2013 presumably, there is no friend \u2013 she hesitates before making her way back to the earlier floor. Disrobing \u2013 taking off her jacket, jumper and shoes, but leaving on her gloves \u2013 she silently enters the blind girl\u2019s apartment. There she disturbs the innocent through a series of noises, and when the blind girl trips, she strikes her viciously on the head, rendering her unconscious. As the blonde comes to, a knife is held to her face; slicing off her braid, the dark haired girl hands it to the blind girl as a means of revealing herself; before she is back out onto the street, leaving the girl weeping.<\/p>\n

\"Birthdaygift\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In contrast to the two previous films, \u2018The Birthday Gift\u2019 by Max Myers is in broader strokes and its plot is not as unique: a husband is carrying out an affair, and on the night of his fortieth birthday, the young lady he is cheating with deceives the man\u2019s wife and babysits for the couple\u2019s young son. Realising the situation, the husband feigns sickness and hurries home from the restaurant where he and his wife have been celebrating; their son is shaken, but unharmed, and the babysitter flees into the night, leaving behind a gift which implies that she is carrying the adulterer\u2019s child. So if the concept is not entirely original \u2013 drawing on themes popularised in films like Fatal Attraction<\/em> and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 still it is fully developed. And \u2018The Birthday Gift\u2019 is a polished film, slickly directed, well acted \u2013 by a cast including Tobias Menzies, best known for appearances in the TV series\u2019\u00a0Rome<\/em> and Game of Thrones<\/em> \u2013 and sustaining its tension to the last.<\/p>\n

\u2018Dawn\u2019 is a hackneyed, grimy vampire short, involving an adulterous younger man in a relationship with an older woman. \u2018Status\u2019 is set in a dystopian future: it is 2018, Australia, and social media is now embedded in our wrists and utterly inescapable. Strangers can verbally comment in real time on all our thoughts and actions; but as the social network falters under the weight of its users, the people riot and seek blood. The film does not work on an artistic level \u2013 and in this respect, after also viewing \u2018Zephra\u2019 during the festival, it is curious to consider how\u00a0the post-apocalyptic seems to afford more artistic space than the dystopian. Post-apocalyptic visions demand a process of careful\u00a0observation and re-creation, where dystopias often merely draw tenuous lines from the present day. \u2018The North Side\u2019 shares the supernatural and dystopian aspects of the previous two films, a flat Matrix<\/em>-inspired chase through deserted streets.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Comedy 4<\/strong> (Location: King\u2019s Manor)<\/p>\n

\u2018A Day in the Life of a Bathroom Mirror\u2019 is broad UK comedy at its worst: cloying and repetitive across its eight-minute duration, which issues are only emphasised by the rotundity of Tim McInnerny\u2019s narration. In the film, a bathroom mirror bemoans the tap which drips beneath him and lusts after his attractive female owner, only to steam up before he can catch a glimpse of her in the nude.<\/p>\n

\u2018Scrabble\u2019, a Swiss film in which the words on a Scrabble board wreak havoc between a loveless old couple, is a little better; but it suffers squeezed between two broad works, for \u2018The Boy with a Camera for a Face\u2019 is in much the same vein as \u2018A Day in the Life of a Bathroom Mirror\u2019. A boy is born with a camera in place of a human head. Despite his camera looking like a model from the 1950s, it evidently remains \u2013 throughout the course of this boy\u2019s life \u2013 effortlessly up to date with modern technology, for it is capable of recording video and streaming it live on television.\u00a0As the boy, now an adult, becomes famous nationwide,\u00a0the film drifts towards a lazy political allegory. Worst of all, it does all of this in rhyming couplets.<\/p>\n

\"manwhoknewalot\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018The Man Who Knew a Lot\u2019, a French film by Alice Vial, is an engrossing work, alternately sombre and playful. An elderly man named Monsieur Beranger \u2013 played by Andr\u00e9 Penvern \u2013 works at a large furniture store, where the staff become part of the displays. Each given a showroom, they live and lounge about and thereby advertise the comforts of their surrounds. Mister Beranger is particularly adroit demonstrating the virtues of his chair and footstool; and when he clinches the sale of a chair to a psychoanalyst, sitting up and declaring \u2018I want to have sex with my mother\u2019 at the pertinent\u00a0moment, he seems in line for a promotion. However, when he visits the site of his promotion \u2013 the thirteenth floor of Paradesign \u2013 he realises that it is nothing more than a holding place for the elderly. He forms a relationship with a young girl, who offers a form of escape: she insists that there is a beach just outside the store, if only they can find the right door of egress. They try several solutions, and appear to have succeeded; only to find that beyond the sandy dunes of their would-be beach lies a motorway. So they must keep searching. This is a delicate and absorbing film.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Funeral\u2019, by Nick Green, starring Paul Kaye, is a rich Jewish comedy. A man is stuck between his devout mother, who is ill in hospital, and his son, who is coming to the appropriate age and wants a Bar Mitzvah. He himself maintains the vestiges of his Jewish faith, but he is not a believer, and his blonde wife is a gentile. Yet a case of mistaken identity \u2013 when the hospital reports his mother dead, and the family carry out a proper Jewish funeral in accordance with her wishes \u2013 results in him regaining a crux of faith. In the final scene of the short, he puts on his sunglasses, starts his car\u2019s engine, and declares that his son is going to get his Bar Mitzvah.\u00a0Closing Comedy 4, \u2018Robot Luv\u2019 is a briefly unnecessary depiction of a machine spurning its human creator for computer-based romance.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Assorted Films and Trailers:<\/p>\n