Still from Man from Uranus from One Man in the Band (Adam Clitheroe/One Man in the Band). More information on the film here.

London Short Film Festival

9-18 January 2009

Various venues

LSFF website

Now in its sixth year, LSFF returns to the capital with a charming mix of films, music and can-do attitude. Set to be a highlight of this year’s programme, Adam Clitheroe’s work, One Man in the Band, perfectly encompasses the festival’s DIY ethos. Having started out making ‘odd little shorts’ on 16mm film, Clitheroe has always preferred a samizdat style of filmmaking and found a kindred attitude in the ‘stubborn persistence of one-man bands’, as he describes it. Influenced by the atmospheric style of Errol Morris’s Vernon, Florida, Adam’s documentary is a lyrical, poetic portrait of seven lone performers. A strange menagerie of acts, the one-man bands provide an illuminating meditation on man’s creative impulse – that strange desire to define oneself and connect with the world, which so often leads to loneliness and isolation.

In order to keep costs down and retain control, Clitheroe spent six months acting as a one-man crew, undertaking all aspects of filmmaking from camera to editing to sound mixing. As he explains, ‘it was just me on my own, chatting to the performers, getting distracted by scowling cats and trying not to drop my camera as I drank a cup of tea at the same time’. Clitheroe’s unobtrusive approach has resulted in some distinctly surreal scenes: a skeleton puppet playing the theremin; a strange duet between one man and his Hornicator, a homemade instrument made from junk-shop finds; and The Man from Uranus, a Gulf War veteran playing avant-garde space rock to a garden full of Cambridgeshire children. By acting alone, Clitheroe also garnered some very honest, poignant conversations from his subjects. As he wisely says, ‘if you’re filming someone interesting, just listen to what they say’.

Speaking about the initial motivation behind the film, Clitheroe admits to being ‘seduced and overawed by the impossible glamour of music performers’, but in retrospect he’s not so sure he ‘discovered the glamorous face of music making’. Indeed the film does so much more than that; through the weird and wonderful performers, it presents a fascinating exploration of the creative process.

In addition to individual filmmakers, LSFF also invites the participation of film organisations, and last year one of the guests was Darryl’s Hard Liquor and Porn Film Festival – a Canadian festival showcasing comic shorts all about sex. Having started out nine years ago in filmmaker Darryl Gold’s bachelor pad, the ‘festival’ has grown beyond a small network of filmmaking friends to a large-scale annual event but the same irreverent spirit remains. Audience participation is strongly encouraged and it went down especially well in London last year, with an extra screening being scheduled to satisfy demand. As festival co-curator Jill Rosenberg explains: ‘It is always a spirited crowd and often quoted as the best party of the year.’ It’s not just about the festivities, however; the films themselves are often extremely creative. Jill’s brilliant animation, Origasmi, winner of the lo-budget film award at LSFF 2006, is a case in point. Such an experimental do-it-yourself attitude is integral to LSFF and one which makes the festival such a deserving hit with London audiences. Make sure you don’t miss out!

Eleanor McKeown

Format: DVD

Release date: 24 November 2008

Distributor: Cinema16

295 mins

Having showcased the best shorts from Britain, Europe and America, the Cinema16 team are taking on the world in their latest two-disc collection. It’s no easy task to encompass the entirety of world cinema in 16 short films and, as is to be expected, there are significant gaps. Sadly, there are no works from the Middle East or Eastern Europe, and African cinema is represented by just one film, Borom sarret (1963). Considered to be Africa’s first contribution to modern film, Ousmane Sembene’s portrait of a Senegalese cart driver is incongruously older than the other films in the collection (most of which date from the 1980s onwards). As such, despite its beauty and importance, it highlights a need for more modern examples of African filmmaking.

Geographical bias aside, the DVDs present a wonderfully eclectic snapshot of contemporary world cinema. The animations are particularly strong. Sylvain Chomet’s The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998) contains the same winning combination of absurdity and slapstick which made his 2003 feature, Belleville Rendez-Vous, such a pleasure to watch. With a similar nod to silent classics, the stop-motion animation Madame Tutli-Putli (2007) is a magical work of art. Having taken four years to complete, the 17-minute short introduces the extraordinary technique of superimposing live action human eyes onto animated puppets. The added human dimension results in an intensified sense of fear as we follow Madame Tutli-Putli on her increasingly sinister train journey. This emotional depth is surpassed, however, by Adam Elliot’s poignant work, Uncle (1996). Elliot’s endearingly naive models and his tender focus on the little details of life emphasise the vulnerability of human experience.

The ‘little things that happen underground or indoors’ is also the inspiration behind Guillermo del Toro’s Doña Lupe (1983-84). Made when del Toro was just 19 years old, this rarely seen film follows two corrupt, drug-dealing police officers as they try to outwit an elderly widow. The resulting dialogue is far funnier than the disappointing comedy of the collection – cult splatter film Forklift Driver Klaus (2000). Other acclaimed directors who make it into Cinema16’s selection are Guy Maddin and Park Chan-wook, who both provide visually arresting works. Maddin films Isabella Rossellini’s ode to her father Roberto – My Dad is 100 Years Old (2005) – with characteristically dreamlike beauty whilst Chan-wook’s Kafkaesque Simpan (1999) has a powerful, stylised quality also apparent in Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s Sergio Leone-inspired Sikumi (2007) and Naoto Yamakawa’s terrifically witty Attack on a Bakery (1982).

Many of the live-action contributions focus on the idea of coming of age, with two examples from the UK – Simon Ellis’s gritty tale of masculinity, Soft (2006), and Andrea Arnold’s well-acted but slightly contrived Wasp (2003) – and two from New Zealand: the recent film Two Cars, One Night (2003), and Jane Campion’s haunting A Girl’s Own Story (1984). Despite being best known for her award-winning features, Campion has said before that she believes the short film format forces filmmakers to be more creative as plot is less important. In keeping with Campion’s comments, the films in this collection, although slightly patchy both in quality and geographical range, all reveal a willingness to experiment that should inspire and entertain any cinephile.

Eleanor McKeown

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 September 2008

Distributor: Future Shorts

Approx 120 mins

Future Shorts website

The first Future Shorts DVD is a compilation of the most interesting and entertaining 16 short films, animation and music videos screened by Future Shorts Festival over the past five years. Our resident scientist-cum-comic book artist Oli Smith methodically analyses its contents.

What’s a Girl to Do

A dark music video with a catchy tune. The film is just short enough for the symbolism to avoid pretentiousness. Plus the symbolism involves BMXers in animal masks.

City Paradise

Well, I’ve seen THIS a million times before. The animation is lovely but pretty standard for indie CG mixed with live action and the storyline is so insubstantial it might as well just be called a line. But the song over the ending credits is beautiful.

7:35 de la mañana

Very good. A man in a French bar holds the clientele hostage, forcing them to take part in an amateur musical number to serenade a fellow customer whom he fancies. A very original twist on the genre and the rough clumsiness of the participants who don’t quite know what they are doing is well realised.

La Barbichette

A terrible film to follow up 7:35. Three French brothers slap each other for five minutes? Sound like fun? It isn’t.

La Vie d’un chien

Humanity is set free by a scientist who invents a drug that turns people into dogs. Reminded me of a short story I read in a trashy SF anthology from the 50s once, but progressing into a quiet poignancy toward the end. An elegant parable.

I Want More

I don’t know what a Faithless pop video is doing on a disc of amateur filmmakers, no matter how cool it is. So I will pretend it doesn’t exist.

Meat

Ask a random person on the street to imagine what a black and white Russian short film about a prostitute with a young son would look like and they’d probably say this. It is so clichéd it’s untrue and about eight minutes too long. I was half expecting the words ‘reassuringly expensive’ to appear at any moment.

Procrastination

Cute is the word really, and that’s about it. In 10 minutes’ time I’ll probably forget I ever saw this.

Revolution of the Crabs

I laughed out loud at this near perfect animated short about a species of crab that can only walk in a straight line. Although the ending is a little muddled, the black and white line work sets the story off perfectly without detracting from the physical comedy.

Neighbor

‘Based on and old joke’. And a good one it is. But if the joke isn’t his then the artist has added very little of himself.

Park Football

Or Pongball as I like to call it. This is a stunning piece of visual comedy, which is even more remarkable considering all the characters are rectangles. The birds molesting the kid will have you rolling in the aisles.

I Just Want to Kiss You

A young Martin Freeman seems to be auditioning for Trainspotting. I just find it depressing that in 1989 he was already pulling the same funny faces he’s been doing in lieu of actual acting his entire career. I still love him in The Office though.

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

A lovely plot device about a man looking back on his past relationship a petal a scene. Unfortunately, the writer was so busy high-fiving after that he seemed to have forgotten that the idea is no good if the relationship isn’t remotely convincing.

On s’embrasse

And there was me thinking that the reason I hadn’t enjoyed the serious shorts so far was because five minutes wasn’t time enough to develop a sufficient emotional attachment. Turns out it’s not the time that’s been lacking, it’s the talent. This is heartbreaking stuff with a twist that will kill you.

Never like the first time

I have always been a proponent of the idea that the secret to autobiography is to get personal and you can’t get more intimate or universal than talking about losing your virginity. Beautifully animated and in turn heart-warming and frightening, this is creature comforts with soul.

Jojo in the Stars

Rayman Raving Rabbits meets Tim Burton in this predictable fairy tale that is saved by its visuals, which seems to be the excuse for most animated tales on this disc. A shame.

Oli Smith

Format: DVD

Distributor: Scanbox

Release date: 20 October 2008

Director: David Lynch

Writer: David Lynch

Cast: David Lynch, Richard White, Dorothy McGinnis, Virginia Maitland, Robert Chadwick, Catherine E Coulson, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance

USA 1969-95

90 mins

To mark the DVD release of The Short Films of David Lynch, which coincides with a new print of Eraserhead, Alex Fitch sat down with the artist Tom Humberstone to discuss Lynch’s short films within the context of his career as a whole as well as their relation to late 20th-century filmmaking on both sides of the Atlantic.

Tom Humberstone: I’m not sure if I was in the best frame of mind when I watched his shorts, having just had an agonising trip to the dentist…

Alex Fitch: They do look like visions of a disturbed mind, so perhaps you were in exactly the right mental condition to appreciate them!

TH:Perhaps! I can’t remember who said that the true sign of an artistic masterpiece is when the art transcends the artist’s original intent, and it can be interpreted in a thousand different ways by a thousand different people. I’m not sure I agree with that, but it seems very apt for describing Lynch’s work, because he creates films that aren’t necessarily meant to be understood…

AF: Well, some of them are wilfully obscure – he does it on purpose…

TH: He’s said as much – that when he starts a film he doesn’t necessarily know where it’s going to end. So it frustrated me that everybody was trying to figure out Mullholland Drive when it came out. You had these ‘cheat sheets’ on the internet where you could see all the signs listed that you were supposed to pick up on. But it completely defeats the object of his films. You could obviously dissect the movies and try and work out what Lynch’s intentions were, but ultimately they mean what you want them to mean. There are exceptions to the rule, The Straight Story is exactly what the title implies…

AF: You mentioned Lynch when we were talking about Dark City last month – you said both his shorts and features, like Mullholland Drive, have a very elliptical dreamlike quality where things are presented as if in a traditional narrative, but that the images don’t actually add up to anything.

TH: Absolutely, they wash over you like a dream. There comes a point after the first act of most of his films where you give up trying to figure it all out and you give in to the dreamlike narrative and take from them what you can! Approaching the shorts on the DVD, I was reminded of my problem with experimental shorts and art-house films in general: if you’ve got the possibility of moving imagery and audio to accompany it, and you’re dealing with what is predominantly a narrative medium, I feel you have a responsibility to your audience to create something that does flow from a beginning to an end point.

AF: In terms of an emotional arc, if not one that makes actual narrative sense?

TH: Yes.

AF: In the introduction to his first short, Six Men Getting Sick, he says that he came to film as a painter who just wanted to animate a painting, but that after manipulating a moving image he wanted to become a filmmaker.

TH: That was an interesting film. Certainly the animation that was used in his early shorts is quite accomplished and reminiscent of early Terry Gilliam. I would be interested to find out if Gilliam was working concurrently and if one of them was influenced by the other?

AF: I think Gilliam started doing animation at art school earlier, but didn’t get his cartoons on to TV until after Lynch had made his first couple of shorts. Gilliam studied in LA and then moved to England to work on British TV while Lynch made his shorts in Philadelphia and then moved to LA to make Eraserhead. I don’t know how long it was before Monty Python appeared on American TV. Maybe there was just a certain school of thought in experimental animation in America at the time!

TH: Absolutely! I found the imagery really interesting – even then it was clear that he had a way with images – and there are stylistic conceits there that are fascinating already, but Six Men Getting Sick is an incredibly difficult short to watch. The police siren was hell! Once I’d seen the sequence and realised it was just going to repeat six times, I questioned why I was still watching it.

AF: Well, you almost expected it to be a trick, that it would start to change, that he was having you on and it was different and you almost start seeing things in a way: ‘I’m sure that was different to the last version!’

TH: Maybe that’s the point, but I don’t care, it infuriated me! It reminded me of that scene in Ghost World, where the teacher shows this black and white film that she’d made, and it’s just her repeating the words: ‘Mirror, Father, Mother’ and so on.

AF: I’ve seen awful experimental videos like that…

TH: If Six Men hadn’t been by David Lynch, would we be watching it and thinking, ‘Oh god, another terrible art student film’?

AF: The point is, if it wasn’t by David Lynch, it wouldn’t be on the DVD. It is interesting watching these films as the ‘archaeology’ of David Lynch, seeing him form his ideas. Maybe we expect too much of them. They were never meant to be shown to fans of a successful art-house filmmaker 30 or 40 years later.

TH: I went to see a retrospective of Tim Burton at the BFI and got to see a lot of his early shorts and it’s the same sort of thing – you can see the genesis of a lot of ideas and a certain style starting to form. A lot of these DVD collections of short films serve two main uses for budding filmmakers or budding artists. People always ask the question: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ So this is one way of seeing the germs and seeds of ideas. The other point is that they’re very inspirational: there’s nothing there to suggest, ‘My god, he’s going to become a great filmmaker’, and it’s encouraging to see that early amateurishness. I found I started to enjoy the shorts more as they went on, as he was getting a bit more funding – I assume – and as he was growing as a filmmaker. I was really encouraged to see The Cowboy and the Frenchman…

AF: …although he made that much later in his career, after he had three or four features under his belt…

TH: …yeah, but it was nice to see David Lynch with a sense of humour by that stage! Basically, watching the shorts made me really glad that he ended up making features. His ideas and his stylistic approaches were given a structure. There were some really lovely visuals and concepts in the shorts, but what he really needed was the framework that you get from having to make a 90-minute film.

AF: Although it’s a shame that like Gilliam, he gave up animation. There are things he learned as an animator – like changing the speed of the camera and filming things backwards – that crop up in his later work, but no actual animation appears in his features, which is a shame because it works really well when it’s juxtaposed with the live action in shorts like The Grandmother and The Alphabet. There’s something profoundly dreamlike in those contrasts that he never quite got back to, no matter what tricks he used in terms of lighting or narrative or script construction in his later films.

Another thing you realise watching his shorts is that they do seem to contain a lot of references. For example, if you compare his work to that of Jan Å vankmajer, who was working on his shorts at exactly the same time and ironically made a short called House of Lynch, there are all these references to people being grown out of seeds and being born out of logs and turning into trees. It’s strange that experimental American animation should be so similar to Eastern European animation. We haven’t talked about The Amputee yet…

TH: The Amputee was horrible!

AF: Although, using Gilliam again as a reference, it’s that kind of British black comedy that certain Americans were attracted to, like Monty Python and early Kenny Everett, where you laugh at people having limbs cut off with arterial spray that no one seems to notice! I guess I found it funny and you found it disturbing…

TH: I’ve seen lots of gore and horror films, but The Amputee felt worryingly real. The one thing that struck me at that stage, watching the shorts, is how cold the actors reading the lines were…

AF: He’s never been an actors’ director…

TH: All his actors are so cold and stiff!

AF: …to the extent that there are scenes in The Grandmother, where he’s just using his actors as human puppets. He shoots a frame of them, moves their limbs a little bit, shoots another frame, moves their limbs a little bit more – he might as well be using mannequins instead of real people!

TH: He’s not a warm director. All these directors we’re talking about – Lynch, Gilliam, Burton – who are recognised as great visionaries…

AF: …all have problems directing humans and started off as animators…

Alex Fitch and Tom Humberstone

16th Raindance Film Festival

1-12 Oct 2008

Programme

The Best of 15th Raindance Film Festival Shorts DVD is out now.

Sebastian Godwin’s The Girls and Tom Harper’s Cherries were two of the most memorable shorts presented at last year’s Raindance Festival and deservedly made the short list for the Best UK Short award. They can both be found on the Best of 15th Raindance Shorts DVD. This year’s Raindance Film Festival runs October 1-12 at various venues across London. LISA WILLIAMS caught up with Godwin and Harper to find out what being selected for Raindance last year has meant for them.

SEBASTIAN GODWIN

A graduate of the Lodz Film School in Poland, Sebastian Godwin is drawn to stories that revolve around the family unit. The Girls, completed last year, is about two pre-teens playing a twisted torture game with their father, while his forthcoming short, The Rain Horse, concerns a dad who encounters a wild horse while on a family trip to Wales. Godwin is currently working on a feature film in which he explores the theme further, this time through a story set during a holiday to Spain. ‘I’m interested in families because they can contain a high level of drama and tension’, he says. ‘The family can often be a very political idea as well – the idea that parents protect children, that the family is a “unit”… The family can also be a microcosm of wider society and a good way to explore and challenge certain notions we may have.’

Godwin is particularly interested in the father figure. Notions of patriarchy are placed under scrutiny in his films, often with the fathers being forced to undergo some kind of physical test. In The Girls, the unnamed father is subjected to being blindfolded, smeared in mud, fed with worms and jabbed by a rake. Godwin adapted the script from a short story by Joyce Cary, although the director insists that his version is not as violent as the original: ‘I read the story at school when I was young and it stuck in my mind. It really interested me but I didn’t understand it at the time. In the book, the girls actually strangle the dad but I extended the film so that it is drawn out over 10 minutes and there is more development. It is more playful rather than nasty or violent’.

With an enchanting visual style that moves from steady shots of a fresh autumn garden to a more disorientating, hand-held look as the game escalates, the film is unsettling because of its very domestic setting. Godwin credits the naturalistic feel to the use of different filming styles, which were edited together at the end. This took less planning yet provided a wider choice of shots to choose from for the final version.

As The Girls was one of the highlights of the Raindance Festival shorts last year, it has allowed Godwin to secure better funding for his next project, The Rain Horse, which is part of the Film London and UK Film Council’s Pulse Plus project. The Rain Horse is also an adaptation of a short story, this time by Ted Hughes. While out filming in the rainy Welsh countryside, Godwin reflects that having The Girls shown at Raindance was a big step up for him: ‘Raindance was one of the most helpful things that has happened for my career so far because it was one of the very first showings of the film. We had no idea what the reactions were going to be and everyone at Raindance was incredibly supportive. And the film was nominated for Best Short Film at the festival which meant there were extra screenings and it automatically got more exposure.’

Not resting on his laurels, however, Godwin’s ambition is to make a feature film that would somehow fuse Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. ‘It would be nice to make a film that used the adventure/crazy fun of something like Jurassic Park but make it more indifferent and cold like Haneke’s film, which says something about cinema itself’.

TOM HARPER

Though some people insist they are happy with the short film format, Tom Harper admits that making it through to feature-length territory is no bad thing: ‘I think I will always make shorts when I can but you also need to make money. You can sell feature films and get them distributed, so I would like to make more of them’.

Since his short film Cherries was shown at Raindance last year, he has directed The Last Van Helsing television series and has made a start on his first feature film; known under the working title The Scouting Book for Boys, it is due to be shot later this year. It marks a key change in location and subject matter: Cherries was a paranoid but not wholly unbelievable look at the effect of the Iraq war on an inner London school; his earlier short film Cubs was a stark depiction of urban fox hunting filmed in London. The forthcoming feature, on the other hand, is a coming-of-age film set in a caravan park in Norfolk. Harper insists that his reasons for moving out of London were somewhat practical: ‘This script came up and it was set in a caravan park. As there are no caravan parks in London we had to move out’, he says. ‘I shot my short films in London because it was where I knew and where I grew up but I want to start telling bigger stories about different places’.

His interest in politics remains strong. With a social consciousness due in part to having studied theatre and ideology as part of an academic drama degree, he considers that the filmmaker’s role is not to be taken lightly. ‘If you have the opportunity to make a film I think you have a responsibility to tell a story that needs telling. I don’t want to be overly controversial but if I believe something is right for the story, then I’ll do it’.

Having started out as an editor in post-production, Harper only realised his talent for directing after shooting some of his own footage in order to practise editing. Since then he has taught himself although he acknowledges the role film festivals have played in his career so far: ‘With good festivals, you get a platform for your film as well as an audience. With a festival like Raindance, you also get a great networking arena where you can meet other people’.

Harper is now seeking the help of Shane Meadows’s protégé Thomas Turgoose (who plays the lead role in his new film) to find the right actors for the supporting roles: ‘Thomas is helping us with casting but when we ask him what he thinks of people he always says, “I really like them”. He’s such a talented young man, which is quite unusual to see. He’s going places!’

The same will no doubt be said of Harper himself.

Lisa Williams

Still from Monsters of Miami

Uncut is a film forum that runs monthly at the ICA (London).

For more details visit the ICA website.

The ICA’s monthly Uncut Film Forum is an all too rare opportunity for members of the public to see short films by up-and-coming directors and film school graduates, with the chance to get the inside scoop from the filmmakers themselves. Programmed and presented by Joel Karamath, the Forum was founded fifteen years ago in response to the demise of repertory cinema: ‘A lot of the art-house cinemas were closing down when I was at college, so there were fewer places to see films by new directors. I wanted somewhere to show films and have them discussed, so when the ICA offered me the opportunity to set up a film forum, I ran round the student shows to pick the best films and the monthly event grew from that’.

June’s Uncut featured eleven incredibly eclectic short films covering a broad range of subject matter and styles, from challenging documentaries, to touching dramas, fantasy with live action mixed with animation to more abstract takes on filmmaking. ‘There’s no point programming two hours of avant-garde cinema’, says Karamath, ‘you want the audience to be drawn in. So by showing a variety of films, including a couple of more abstract pieces, you really hold their attention’.

Many of the filmmakers tackled tough subject matter, providing balanced arguments. Hamish Mek Chohan’s Boots and Braces – The Night Southall Burned is the story of the clash between skinheads and Indians in Southall in 1981, with interviews from both sides providing a compelling investigation into a forgotten issue. In Monsters of Miami, Nick Ahlmark talks to paedophiles forced to live under a bridge with no running water or electricity, due to a law that means they can’t be less than 2,500 ft from anywhere children gather. Their story is sympathetically told, and the viewer feels sorry for these men while simultaneously horrified by what they’ve done.

Death was a dominant theme in June’s event, as demonstrated in the poignantly funny drama Roaring Heaven, which is set in an old people’s home and tackles the way British people are able to handle and talk about death. In stark contrast to the film’s sad subject matter, the colours are Technicolor bright, representing the heightening of the senses due to grief.

Death receives a more abstract treatment in Niall Thompson’s Six Million Ways To Die where an actor is filmed straight to camera, reciting stream-of-consciousness monologue in one take, listing every conceivable way to die. The monologue features everything from ‘heart attack’ and ‘stabbing’ to ‘ill-prepared fugu‘ and ‘eaten alive by a whale’.

To put together the programme of the Film Forum, Karamath (a college lecturer) searches for the most outstanding work from an international assortment of student filmmakers. Yet, he also looks beyond the confines of film school: ‘I’m most interested in the first film out of college, where the filmmaker is no longer restricted by college but they haven’t yet been disillusioned by the industry’. If the standard of shorts demonstrated is as high every month then the future is certainly bright for the British Film Industry. Uncut resumes in the autumn after a short summer break.

Lucy Hurst

Still from Spring Love

London premiere of 75 of the best of straight 8 08 at Rushes Soho Shorts Festival

July 28-29 at Curzon Mayfair

July 30 at Renoir Cinema

For tickets and information go to straight 8.

While many big filmmakers started their careers with the silent visuals of Super 8, it is likely the device of their humble beginnings is now left to gather dust in the coffers. However, contributors to straight 8, the annual Super 8 filmmaking competition, have clocked on to the fact that the limitations of Super 8 film also give rise to an ‘olde worlde’ creativity and pleasing simplicity.

The rules of the competition are simple; apply to compete, get sent a registered Super 8 cartridge and get three months to make your film. The soundtrack must be supplied separately (to be added later) and the only editing allowed is what you can do on the camera itself. Apart from this, filmmakers are free to fill the 3,600 frames as they see fit.

‘We don’t limit creativity’, says competition founder Ed Sayers. ‘That’s when you get really nice, artistic work. We don’t set a theme and if people have access to studio lighting for example, they can use it. People are starting to be smart about it by playing to their strengths and avoiding their weaknesses. Teams can sometimes be up to 10 or 20 people, and it doesn’t have to cost more as no one is being paid.’

This does not mean that those with an eager workforce and a wealth of equipment always end up on top. Sayers is proud of the fact that he has created a level playing field for those wanting to take part. ‘We are about to screen the winning films at Cannes Advertising Week. People working in advertising could be watching a film made by absolutely anyone, including a cardiologist (I explain participants’ professions in the programme). Normally, the entrants are filmmakers but The Last Trip is the third film made by cardiologist Malcolm Finlay and it’s brilliant.’ Finlay’s film is a far-fetched story about a Welshman who wants to send the ashes of a departed friend into space. Simply, yet amusingly told, and starring a host of non-professional actors, it is story-telling at its finest.

Similarly inventive is 2007 winner Sticks and Balls made by Jacqueline Wright and Alice Lowe. Using the euphemistic potential of a game of golf, the film depicts a frolicking female player trying to distract her man while out on the green. Set to a witty electro soundtrack, it is easy to see why it has notched up nearly 30,000 hits on YouTube, demonstrating the potential of basic filmmaking.

Often entries are lavishly executed, their simplicity betrayed only by the occasional flickering or underexposure at the edges of the frame. Some have even pushed the camera to its limits by coming up with painstakingly meticulous production methods. Herrjaapmans’s Spring Love, for example, follows a couple through the streets and parks on a spring day. The simple love story is made more complex in two ways: Firstly, it is set to the jagged edges of the soundtrack; secondly (and most impressively) it is filmed entirely in stop-motion so that the actors are suspended in the air for each and every shot. ‘The actors had to leap into the air. It’s amazing that they were all caught mid-air for every single shot, you would expect a couple of them to be on the ground but it is just done so well’, says Sayers. ‘The title is a clever play on words in that it’s spring and they’re literally springing in the air. When someone has a really great technique and works it so well into a theme, that’s when I really want to show the film up on a big screen.’

The suspense of darkroom development, often forgotten in the wake of ever-ready digital imaging, is magnified by the competition, as the winners see their films for the very first time only when they are being screened to an entire cinema audience. This is obviously part of the fun. Some of this year’s films were given a preview screening on Channel 4, but the man behind The Last Trip reportedly avoided watching his film on TV, preferring to wait until the Cannes screening.

It is the unpredictability of Super 8 that Ed Sayers loves above all. ‘You could accidentally push ‘record’ as you’re walking across the road and when you watch the film a random floor shot will appear – which actually happens quite a lot – and you will be worried but no one else will really notice it.’ Maybe precisely because of that unpredictability, Sayers believes that it takes a lot of careful planning to make a good Super 8 film: ‘You have to be a bit ‘zen’ and go with it. You have to plan thoroughly and do more pre-production. It pushes you to be a better filmmaker.’

Super 8 can also help to remind the industry types what filmmaking is all about. ‘Kodak started to show an interest in what we were doing and suggested we did a regular screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Now some people tell us that it’s the part of the festival that they most look forward to. Super 8 appeals to these ‘grown-up’ film people as it is often easy for them to forget what attracted them to the industry in the first place.’

Sayers is particularly proud of the fact that 75 of the 175 films submitted to this year’s straight 8 will be shown in London at the end of July during the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival, both at the Curzon cinema in Mayfair and the Renoir cinema near Russell Square. ‘It’s amazing how a film that began with an old camera can end up in a nice cinema like the Curzon or the Renoir. From having no budget, to having a West End audience! This is why we do it.’

Lisa Williams

Still from I Love Sarah Jane

Edinburgh Film Festival

18-29 June 2008

Festival website

Now in its sixth decade, the Edinburgh International Film Festival is still unrelenting in its dedication to short films. This is, after all, the festival that nurtured the careers of filmmakers Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold by supporting their early shorts. This year’s festival boasts six programmes, which all reflect the festival’s commitment to screening challenging work as well as its rejection of Western-centrism: a programme of solely Scottish shorts sits alongside an international category that has contributions from Turkey and Israel among others.

Other programmes include ‘Love Bites’ – a look at the bitter aftertaste of love – and ‘Child Proof’, which groups together films that use child characters in an unconventional way. Both these categories were chosen in order to explore recurring themes in a way that would not betray the originality of the submitted material, according to the festival’s short film programmer Matt Lloyd. ‘There are so many short films that use children’, says Lloyd. ‘Often everything is seen through the eyes of a child – that is fine but it has become so prevalent. The films in our selection go against the grain. Similarly, films about relationships and love often form a large part of the work we see but we’re showing a film about an attempt at sex in a sick bed (Sick Sex). We’ve also got a film called I Love Sarah Jane, which is a love story set in a post-apocalyptic suburb overrun by zombies’.

The fact that short film allows people to push boundaries is not lost on Lloyd, who compares his role as programmer to that of a DJ. ‘I choose films I like and which I think other people will like but I also have to give consideration to how they work together in the 90 minutes of a programme. We can afford to be experimental. The beauty of it is that when you’re watching a short film programme, if you don’t like one of the films, you know it’s going to be over in a few minutes and you’ll probably like the next’.

Film conventions are also subverted in 2 Birds, a film about the growing pains of two teenagers. ‘Coming-of-age films are always about people at a crossroad in their life’, said its Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson. ‘They have to make a decision and this makes them grow wise or lose their innocence. I was interested in a story about how the main characters end up after this. Some people may interpret what the characters do as taking drugs but there is no close-up of the drugs and it is not supposed to be about them specifically. I have a friend who is very Christian and for him the drugs are the Biblical apple. Apparently, there is some kind of myth about Adam and Jesus which was found written in a manuscript and he recognised this story in the film but I hadn’t heard of this – I guess some people are cleverer than me’.

Screening his film at Edinburgh must mean a lot to Rúnarsson, whose last film to be shown at the festival – The Last Farm – went on to be nominated for an Oscar. But most contributors agree that the charm of the event is the opportunity to see burgeoning themes and practices. ‘It’s great to see which works are evolving. With short films you can be experimental and really push things so it’s the place to see what is emerging – it’s like a mini-subculture’, said British director Piers Thompson.

Thompson hopes that his film K, the story of an encounter between a teenage girl and a vagrant on a bleak island, will go down as well in Edinburgh as it has done elsewhere. ‘It’s about a 15-year-old living in the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary with her father. I worked on a documentary out there and saw the location, which I just loved. It’s really barren and really strange – especially out of season. We showed it in Berlin and it worked well there as they liked the cold and clinical aspect of it’.

The aesthetic quality of a film is something that director Sarah Tripp also takes very seriously. Tripp comes from a graphic design and fine art background, and has ample experience of photography, drama and writing, so her short films are the culmination of a broad artistic outlook. ‘What I love about film is how it uses so many other art forms – the aspect of performance, storytelling, photography – and music, which is so important to narrative and the building of emotion. Film builds different sub-disciplines into one’.

Her film Let me show you some things is about a brother and sister meeting after years of estrangement and constructing a relationship by showing each other mementos from the past. It is based on a short story Tripp wrote as part of her artist-in-residence role at Glasgow’s Centre of Contemporary Arts and was turned into a film using improvisation by drama group Stage 5. ‘The film is highly autobiographical. It is about whether or not the brother and sister will reunite and about the dissipation of the relationship’.

She too has high hopes for this year’s festival. ‘I think under Hannah McGill the festival has huge potential. She is a really interesting woman with a fresh outlook. We should see new practices in the short film categories this year. Short films show that despite living in a digital era, creativity is not being compromised’.

Lisa Williams