About the International Film Program

Incident By a Bank, dir. Ruben Östlund

At its best, a short film can be a succinct and provoking contribution to social discourse, a piece of art-film of the kind that burns its image on our retina or exists for x minutes as pure entertainment. The purpose of this year’s International Competition Programme is to show the short film in all of its many facets, with the further aim of presenting the widest possible international variation.

A presentation of a selection of this year’s highlights should nevertheless start with our neighbours: Swedish films again occupy a central position in the programme. Nobody makes better short films at present, and no one produces a wider variety. The range demonstrated from Ruben Östlund’s Golden Bear winner Incident By a Bank to Fredrik Anderssons Watch Alice Bleed proves this point. The former is a meticulously-staged re-enactment of a bank robbery. We get to watch from a safe distance, and observe in a single take the thieves’ stupidity, the witnesses’ apathy, and Östlunds now recognisable sense of satire. It feels like a theatrical production, in which you are seated in the gods, with a view from on high of all the absurdities. We are not granted the same distance in Watch Alice Bleed, in which Andersen abuses and mistreats dolls with a macabre level of detail. It starts with a decapitation, but gets many times worse as the director uses subtle stop-motion techniques to create a disturbing yet beautiful short film, one of the best I have ever seen.
 

I Love Lucy, dir. Colin Kennedy

Things remain pretty gruesome in Grimstad-regular Christoph Rainer’s Catafalque, but again with a striking outer beauty. This is a story of two brothers who dream themselves away from their father’s reign of terror. The uncomfortable portrayal of the human psyche seen in Rainer’s earlier film Walrus and Fawn is thus further developed here. By the Grace of God, from the UK, is also apparently about a form of mental disorder (but we never know for certain), this time presented more comically. The story is about Jürgen and his journey to London to fight for his rightful place as an heir to the throne, and the film is both hysterically funny and achingly sad. Raliza Petrova’s film, selected from this year’s festival at Clermont-Ferrand, is undoubtedly one of the highlights in Grimstad. Her compatriot Colin Kennedy also delivers a laughter bomb, with the witty and surprisingly poetic I Love Luci that includes priceless acting performances. The film charmingly reveals our prejudices, while simultaneously kicking those who deserve to be kicked. Satire seems to be a favourite genre in international short film anno 2010, quite possibly because the very nature of limited time demands a crispness to the message. The bittersweet Bill Collector also belongs to this category, an ironic Croatian production about fear of foreigners and getting old.

 

 

Daughter, dir Chioé Shaos

The geographical spread of this year’s International Competition Programme is wider than it has been for a long time. Portrayals of the everyday characterise much of the programme, and an insight into a different sort of daily life is often given a priority over technically-advanced filming. Four good examples of this kind are: Bassam Ali Jarbawi’s Chicken Heads, Le Ran-hee’s A Perm, Chloé Shao’s Daughters and Chris Niemeyer’s Las Pelotas. The subjects they address are as different as the countries they come from, but all concern the ideal of family, and the position of an individual within it. From the playful irony in Swiss-Argentinean Las Peoltas that considers a father’s role and the value of securing a worthy heir, to Chinese Daughters’ look at what results if you have too many of them.

 

The family theme is taken further in Gabriel Gauchet’s Cuban film Efecto Domino and Polish Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s Hanoi - Warsawa, both films address current issues in their respective countries. It is in these restricted and precise stories that the short film format truly demonstrates its potential as a narrative form, and shows the strength that can lie within just a few minutes of film. Both productions resort to drastic methods to communicate their points, and the fact that we have chosen to give place to two such long novella films reflects our view that every minute is used to the utmost. While novella films are often a reduced feature film, these are articulate, complete stories with much to tell.

Eirk Smidesang Slåen

International film list here

 

 

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