GoCritic! Review: Fest Anča’s International Competition of Shorts 2
- The second shorts block of the Slovak festival’s competition programme offered a kaleidoscopic range of films that probe the tension between communal connection and isolation
The second block of Fest Anča’s International Competition features nine shorts with a throughline that probes the tension between communal connection and isolation. Its curation is admirable, with each short pushing and pulling like a pendulum swinging between states of euphoria and morbidity, constantly taking you by surprise.
Perhaps the strongest standout in this section is director Lea Vidaković’s The Family Portrait (Croatia/France/Serbia). Its opening frames reference Vermeer, both in motif and technique, showing the interior of an old, bourgeois house in all its resplendent clutter. Shadows and light fill these extremely detailed and period-accurate models. Over the running time of 15 minutes, a huge number of relatives intrude upon the tenants of this home - a daughter and her parents - immediately disturbing the piece they once had. What is the family preparing for? Is this a reunion? Or the death of a matriarch? A newspaper on the table reveals the historical period: Europe at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A sense of dread and forlornness begins to fill the atmosphere. Through intricate sound design, the house starts creaking and cracking before it finally rots and crumbles, ending with a piercing final image: a social order in collapse, through the lens of a family home, and we are its witnesses. Vidaković demonstrates a mastery of puppetry through the use of perspective, spatial coherence and varying effects of light that bring out different textures, making the setting feel lived-in and crammed with history.
Another compelling entry in the section is Bergamot by Chinese filmmaker Yanqi Liang, which uses mixed media such as acrylic and fabric threads to tell a story of creation. No characters are present. Instead, the film focuses on parts of human anatomy, specifically our hands, in all their ability to contort, build, care and pray. The soundscape is equally bare, with no dialogue or narration, and only the sounds of breathing to accompany the visuals. The clever use of physical materials does not feel like a gimmick but rather informs what we see: a womb invocating life, hands in anamorphosis and flowers in bloom. There is a recurring motif of the bergamot citrus fruit, common in Asia and colloquially known as Buddha’s hand, playfully fusing and mingling together in opposition to the human hand, conveying the strands that bind us or that we let go of in our lives. While the film stays with you, its fundamental weakness is that it leaves too much of its narrative context off-screen, so that you’re uncertain what to make of it. The only clues are found in the dedication in the end credits (for the filmmaker’s mother and grandmother) and the accompanying programme notes.
In A Kind of Testament by Stephen Vuillemin (France), a young woman narrates her experience stumbling across a website that shows her name alongside a directory of short animated videos. As if falling into a hazy oneiric wormhole, the film takes a bizarre turn when the protagonist reveals that these short clips were her private selfies. We learn that a stranger on the internet went to great lengths to animate them, imagining and fantasising the various occasions in which they might appear. Taken in our current context of AI tools that are able to turn still images into generative videos, this nightmare might not be so far-fetched after all. Vuillemin deftly explores the protagonist’s personal invasion within the ongoing ethical dilemmas of AI and digital privacy. A Kind of Testament’s meta-narrative reveals the filmmaker’s other preoccupations about the time-consuming endeavour and labour that goes into animation, the pressures of the art form to adhere to “truth” (is the story any less real if it is animated?) and building on the works of an existing visual archive. The Art Nouveau-inspired images, laced with electronic techno beats, make this short a fully realised effort.
Similar anxieties are reflected in the Austrian short Kinderfilm by Michael Stumpf, Adrian Jonas Haim and Robin Klengel of media collective Total Refusal, which uses scenes from the popular video game Grand Theft Auto and the fictional city of Los Santos to explore the isolation of the digital world. Meanwhile, the vibrant, strikingly colourful and almost hallucinogenic Carcinization by Brazilian director Denis Souza follows the relationship of three friends in pivotal moments of their teenage lives, as they struggle with the daunting expectations of adulthood. In The Rubbings of Trajectories, Cheng-Hsu Chung (China) offers an intimate documentation of space and memory, inspired by travelling to different cities around the globe, inviting you to slip into a person's consciousness and experience the relationship between one's inner and outer worlds. Finally, Via Dolorosa by Rachel Gutgarts (France) is a quasi-autobiography of the filmmaker's lost youth in Jerusalem, navigating addictions, discoveries of sexuality and living through a state in conflict.
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