Spank's LFF Diary, Friday 18/10/2024

Reviewed today: 2073, Official Shorts Competition (Mo-Z).

12.00pm: Official Shorts Competition (Mo-Z) [watch all shorts here]

Following on from part one on Wednesday, we're looking at the remaining five entries on the list for the Short Film award: all viewable on the link above until at least October 20th, and with the voting form for your choice open until October 23rd. And as you've got to skip through the American Express bumper every time you start watching a new film, let's take a little time out here to laugh at it. Somebody somewhere was paid an insane amount of money by AmEx to dream up the ridiculous phrase POWERFUL BACKING, which is a bit much for a card that's accepted by less than a dozen places in the UK. Still, let's move on.

Continuing to take these films in alphabetical order, we now get three narrative shorts in a row, Emily Burnett’s Mother’s Day [official site] is the nicely understated story of a space-obsessed kid who doesn't notice that his mum's going through a rough patch until the day that she's apparently replaced. Shown entirely from his perspective, it gets across his confusion without making him obnoxiously insensitive to what's going on. Nez Khammal’s See It, Say It [official site] has Amir El-Masry as a struggling actor waiting for the one audition that'll change his luck: shot in crisp black and white, it's easily my favourite of these five because you can never tell where the hell it’s going from one minute to the next. And Matty Crawford’s Stomach Bug [director interview] is the third film in a row to be possibly set largely in someone's head, with its father/daughter clash being visualised by some surprisingly gloopy prosthetic effects.

It's all documentaries from here on in: though Sham-e-Ali Nayeem’s Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) [trailer] is one of those experimental historical documentaries that assumes you know all the history already (in this case, Portugal's history of colonisation in India and Africa) and mixes it up with oblique comment in the form of poetic sequences. Regardless of its technique (including good use of layered images), the simple fact is that when a shorts programme contains a film that's over thirty minutes long, you're simply going to resent it being there. Finally, Rehab Nazzal’s Vibrations From Gaza [official site] takes a unique approach by interviewing deaf children in Gaza about their experiences of living in a war zone. The interviews are conducted in sign language, depicted in subtitles, and accompanied by a brilliantly muffled soundtrack of nature sounds and drones. The children's perspective is fascinating, but it doesn't really need the adult editorialising that pops up in caption form every few minutes.

Overall, I still think that Magic Candies from Wednesday's selection is still my favourite, but you've got a couple of days to have a look for yourself and see what you think.

3.45pm: 2073 [trailer]

Asif Kapadia has had an idea. There are plenty of documentaries out there that can tell us what the current problems are in the world. There are also plenty of dystopian sci-fi films that show us the world in some state of collapse in the future. What if you had a film that combined the two? Would you end up with two great tastes that taste great together, or a bit of a mess?

Kapadia's focussed on four current issues that could bring society to the brink of collapse - the rise of far-right authoritarianism, increased surveillance of the public in general and certain factions in particular, tech bros being tech bros, and climate change. He's extrapolated them to a point where something called The Event happens in 2036. When I hear the words The Event, I immediately want to REMAIN INDOORS, but that's not the case for Samantha Morton. She plays a woman in 2073, living out the aftermath of The Event in the bowels of an abandoned Bloomingdale’s, popping out once a day to retrieve stuff from a nearby dumpster. Nobody ever explains who's putting stuff in these wasteland dumpsters each day, which is just the first of 2073's many problems. Because you know how people say the current situation is like a bad science fiction movie? Well, Kapadia has literally made that bad science fiction movie.

The documentary part of this docufiction hybrid is okay as far as it goes, using fast-paced montages to show us what bad things are currently happening. (We already have a system for doing that: it's called 'the news'. There's nothing Kapadia shows you here that you won't have seen before, because he's pulling it all from the usual broadcast sources.) But you can't just take all that and use it as the backstory for your badly written dystopian fantasy - well, you could, but it would require a much more detailed description of how we got from the present day to 2073. You could even use that as a way of suggesting actions we could take now, to prevent the worst future outcome. But the dystopia in this film is entirely generic - there's no indication of how the four causes discussed led to The Event, we've just got things formulaically going down the toilet like every other dark future you've seen on screen.

Obviously, the fictional elements are just there as a framing device that brings 2073 up to the length of a feature (albeit one that’s only 85 minutes long, including an overlong post credits sting). But when you top and tail your film with what amounts to a call to arms, you need to have a lot more to say than just 'arms'.

(And as has become traditional in recent years, you're only getting two LFF reviews today, because yet again someone has carelessly scheduled an unmissable gig in the middle of the festival. For those of you who’ve been paying attention, this is the one at Alexandra Palace Theatre, and yes, they’ve fixed the sound since Wednesday’s film. It’s Joe Jackson, doing two sets back to back: first on his own at the piano playing a reverse chronological selection of the hits, and then – oh yes! – with a nine piece band recreating the sound of last year's Max Champion album What A Racket!, as previously discussed here. It seems obvious now, but it's taken me this long to realise that when you write an album's worth of music hall songs, they have to be built for live performance. The record is all well and good, and needed to be made as a way to lure punters into a concert hall. But the concert hall is where the songs take off: all the instruments teetering on the edge of chaos, all the songs extended by several bars of vamping to cover various bits of onstage comic business, but held together by the loudest, thumpiest drums you've ever heard. If you weren't there, it's your loss.)