Last week’s 27th International Short Film Festival in Berlin featured a stellar line-up of short films that certainly maintained the city’s world-renowned reputation for high-calibre film festivals showcasing both emerging and established talent. Although often overshadowed by its glamorous feature-length counterpart (the Berlin International Film Festival in February), this short film festival is certainly one not to underestimate. Established back in 1982, the International Short Film Festival is now one of the most significant short film festivals in Europe, which is somewhat of an achievement considering its humble beginnings. The festival’s founder and director, Heinz Hermann, remembers organising avant-garde screenings that would incorporate live music, art, dance, and performances, all in various squats across the city.
Fast-forward thirty years and the Opening Ceremony is a grand international affair, hosted in one of Germany’s most provocative and experimental theatres, the Volksbühne (the People’s Theatre). This year, over 7,000 short films were submitted and the festival folks had the daunting task of whittling them down to a far-from-measly 500. In just five days, several cinemas in Mitte screened these 500 films within the various festival programmes and competitions, to a total audience of 16,000.
From the screenings I attended, there are still a few films that linger in my mind, and for good reason! Jeroen Annokkée’s ‘Sugar’ (Netherlands, 2010) was the winner of the Best Live-Action Film, and rightly so, but perhaps the award should, in this instance, have been called ‘Most Brilliantly Painful Film Ever’. The film opens with a coroner surprisingly retrieving a pair of pink knickers from the mouth of the film’s (now dead) protagonist. A short rewind sees an awkward exchange between the same guy and his deadly attractive female housemate, the usual ‘can I borrow some sugar’. Without giving too much away, as you can watch the film yourself here, what follows is an incredibly accidental and almost slapstick, yet somehow realistic (as though it could’ve happened to anyone), series of events that makes the embarrassing legacy of Jim in ‘American Pie’ seem like a favourable alternative.
The German film, ‘Interview’ directed by Sebastian Marka, is a sleek and compact thriller featuring a journalist’s ill-fated interview with a serial killer. The allusions to David Fincher’s ‘Se7en’ are obvious and apparent (an ominous square box sits sinisterly on the bed), but this is intentional to distract and confuse the audience repeatedly. It’s a taught piece of cinema that constantly tests both the journalist’s and the audience’s expectations and assumptions of the thriller genre.
Another impressively sleek short was the French film, ‘L’Accordeur’ (The Tuner), a modern-day fable depicting a piano tuner (once a talented pianist but, having flunked the biggest performance of his career, now resorts to tuning pianos) pretending to be blind for an array of not-really-justifiable reasons. Better tips, unprohibited customers, and a little local fame as ‘the blind piano tuner’, may all have their appeal, but, of course, it all goes horribly wrong!
In the New British Shorts segment, Jane Gull’s ‘Sunny Boy’ and Michael Pearce’s BAFTA-nominated ‘Rite’ were two films that particularly stood out and, interestingly, both depicted problematic father-son relationships. ‘Sunny Boy’ is a tender portrait of a caring, yet over-protective father and his son, Danny, as they both try to cope with the restrictions of Danny’s painful rare skin allergy to sunlight. Whilst in ‘Rite’, the dysfunctional relationship of a father and his estranged son on his birthday presents a powerful and at times difficult to watch depiction of a desperate and somewhat aggressive father in stark contrast to his football-hating, cultured son. The simmering violence throughout this film, at a football match and in a typically English pub, culminates in a revelation that in the end reconciles their relationship.
And one last film that I just can’t leave out of this round-up, is the winner of the Best Viral Video Award, Yoann Lemoine’s witty animation, ‘Aides Graffiti’. No description would really do this animation justice, so here’s the video itself. Strap-up!
| |  |
