Returning for the annual proceedings, the London Short Film Festival 2023 yet again succeeded in its aim to champion art in the short form.
In its 20th year, the UK Short Film Competition at the London Short Film Festival 2023 proved to be just as promising for the future of the industry as ever. That is not to say that all the filmmakers in competition are emergent talents; many of the films are from new, younger voices, but the LSFF exists purely as a reminder that short filmmaking is an art, that many come to even after a career in features.
It can be argued that, particularly in the case of film, short form equates to a more intimate, intensified experience of themes and ideas. It is no surprise, then, that many of the films in competition were still holding on tightly to themes of isolation and identity that we can thank the pandemic for (not least also because many were conceived during this time). All the films shown differed drastically—some directly addressing the long-term effects of the pandemic while others approaching it more subtly. However, all of them deal with both the fear of isolation and loneliness that we all feel post-Covid and the self-referentiality that has been entrained into all of us by such a period of introspection.
Such self-referentiality was initially presented with wit in films like Michael Demetriou’s Hellspawn (2021) and Roxy Rezvany’s Honesty (2022), two movies-about-movies that presented the stupidity of trying to recreate genuine emotion on screen. Both films play with the distinction between filmmaking as an art of documentation and what Laura Mulvey would call a ‘painterly’ (2006) art, whereby genuine, unadulterated emotions are being built onto an actor’s face. Demetriou spends a painful amount of time with stuck up producers trying to explain their craft to the actor than allow the actor to embody it, or telling a writer some airy, poorly delivered spiel about why they don’t like their work. Demetriou is reminding us that the final product of a seemingly natural display of emotion is in fact, and quite absurdly, a complete construction. Rezvany does so with equal fervour, though alludes in the climax of Honesty that this “building” can oftentimes be a referent for real emotion to come out, even if that emotion is towards an insufferable director.
Taking the opposite approach was Richard Squires’ The Perpetrators (2022), which used animation to both tell homophobic myths of homosexuality that have appeared throughout history, and to tell the story of a young boy ostracised from his family for being gay. Animation here is important not only because it is arguably the perfect medium for extricating emotions that live-action couldn’t (as previously discussed), it also has the dimension of texture and a morphing ability that adds a whole new level of meaning to a film. In the case of Squires’ work, we see two different types of animation: a clean-cut, Scooby-Doo–like style to tell the myths of homosexuality, and another more violent and abstract for the tragedy of the boy narrator. These opposing styles are symbolic of the stories they tell; it is easy to make a fully formed story to explain something like homosexuality, particularly if you are crudely against it, whereas getting a fully formed idea of somebody’s mental health is a lot more difficult, and thus pertains to a more abstract translation onto screen. The former might be more accessible and appealing, but the abstraction of the latter is what leads to ostracism and loneliness.
This idea of a more abstract and experimental approach to convey emotional states in short-form filmmaking is also demonstrated in the more radical entries (radical only because of the bravado of delivery, not radical purely because they are experimental, as is often mistakenly assumed). Films like Stones In Hand (2021) by Mo’min Swaitat, a film imagining the struggles in Palestine as happening in East London, collates a series of signs and signifiers that coalesce to create a profile of Swaitat’s emotions towards the crisis. What we get out of the film is not an open-close narrative, an emotional state that ends after the film, but something that always exists, and is just intensified into this short-form presentation. In Tom Chetwode Barton’s Nânt (2022), we do get a classical narrative, but the expressionistic approach, disregarding any preconceived ideas of filmmaking practices is what put’s Barton’s film, with its deeply personal presentation of homophobic bullying, on the side of radically experimental.
But what to say about the themes of isolation? Of course, the question is directly addressed in docu-shorts like Laura Rindlisbacher’s Cargo (2022), which documents the lives of ship crews stuck on-board during the pandemic. Comprising entirely of footage taken by the crew interviewed, Cargo offers an unmatched earnest look into extreme pandemic-era isolation. Most of what we see throughout the film is just wide-open sea—the camera operators are of course not professionals, which becomes quickly apparent. But the reason we see nothing else is because there was nothing else. The use of camcorder footage was also a poignant choice because there’s a distinct separation, we feel from what we are being shown; this is a world we don’t know that is being presented to us by one of its inhabitants. However, this “other world” was a reality for ship crews for months and months, a level of isolation that not many others could ever feel.
Post-Covid isolation, however, does go deeper than this. In John Fitzpatrick’s Outdoors (2022), the two lovers are certainly very close to each other physically but are apart in social status: one is a clean-cut fitness guru with a steady job and a funky apartment, while the other is a bleach-haired delinquent who we later find out is homeless. The struggle to connect is anything but physical in Fitzpatrick’s film—indeed, the physicality of their relationship goes to show this—it’s only when Nathan (Nathan Ives-Moiba) catches Bim (Sam Goodchild) sleeping on a bus that the heaviness of social status gets in the way. Perhaps the film’s title refers to this bareness we feel after coming out of lockdown, that everything we didn’t think twice about receiving poor judgement is now something we should hide.
I would love to talk about all the films in competition if there weren’t so many. But this is what makes LSFF such a brilliant hub for short-form filmmaking talent. With venues across London, the city became one big exhibition for the art form, with a complex network of entries and retrospectives and other marvellous events tying together to form one of the best celebrations of filmmaking in a long time. With the endlessly diverse array of voices and styles, LSFF will be sticking around for another 20 years, which makes me all the more excited to see what and who they will champion next.
Words by Oisín McGilloway
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