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Cinema Talks > 2017 Winter (Season 11)
Cine Club: Wednesday 22 February 2017 (7:00 to 8:30 pm - All are welcome)
Title: A Festival of Short Films
Duration: 1 hr 44 min (total)
In the 60s, there was a movement based on showing collections of short films in one group. They used to have one theme. For example, Spirits of the Dead consisted of 3 shorts by Roger Vadim, Federico Fellini and Louis Malle each based on a short story by Edgar Alan Poe. Soon after that, the short film became an important genre.
In the past few years, and due to strong commercialization of film production, the short film lost its producers but not its public. The variety of output is massive consisting of animations, cartoons, real life films, short talks, etc. In this session, Karaz w Laimoon is happy to present a large number of such shorts each one taking anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes.
Here are the films to be shown (not in order of projection):
The Judgement - Forrest Rice (2015 USA)
One fine morning, after writing a letter to his friend, a young merchant named Georg Bendemann decides to have a chat with his seemingly benign father. Things take a turn for the worse, however, as Georg quickly comes to learn that, just because something seems so, it doesn't follow that is is so. Based on the Story by Franz Kafka.
12 minutes
Plastic Bag - Ramin Bahrani (2010 USA)
This short film traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.
17 minutes
The Bad Boy - Andrei Wajda (1950 Hungary)
First short film by Wajda, based on the story “A Naughty Boy” by A. Chekhov.
6 minutes
Two Sat Under the Cuckoo’s Nest - Mallik Ram (Pakistan 2011)
The two diseases talk of their contrasting views in life, their opinions, discussing movies, ideas (a short animation where they see person losing everything due to excessive greed), Fellini and finally land up discussing proverbs. They both laugh as they think of how contradicting proverbs can be and as they laugh while coming up with contradicting proverbs, their outlook to life changes into something upbeat. They end up feeling happy at being part of this beautiful life and feeling immense gratitude to life.
11 minutes
SALAS Sal - Antonio Palacios (Spain 2015)
Arranged in mirrored halves, Salas S.A.L is a lesbian Godardian tale of a boss and her secretary. The technique showcases a director with a supreme sense of patience. Rojo captures a galaxy spinning in a coffee cup and the course of a love affair in the turn of a woman’s head. Through well-composed, largely static shots, Rojo eeks the human out of her characters’ sexless business-speak and bland office settings.
8 minutes
10 Minutes - Ahmed Imamovic (Turkey 2002)
This short film, as its title indicates lasts only 10 minutes, but it tells a much longer story which unravels only in our imagination upon seeing the end of the film. While 10 minutes in someone's life mean nothing, they can be fatal in another: a boy and his loving family, tragedy in a war-torn city, death and destruction. All in just ten minutes. The film follows two simultaneous story lines: one set in Rome, and one in Sarajevo, in 1994, the worst time of the war in Bosnia. Although the Rome part was not filmed on the original location, that does not take away anything from the quality of the film, it was just a symbolic element anyway. Cast is great, story is very compact and well written, direction dynamic and precise. There is nothing out of place in the film: well structured, stripped of false pathos, realistic, it is very straight forward. In other words, this is a jewel of a film, and it was not by chance that it won the award for the best European short film in 2002. 10 minutes for me is definitely one of the most moving and powerful films about wartime Sarajevo. Behind the scene: I read that the director Ahmed Imamovic, in search of Japanese for the role of the tourist, had to go to the Japanese Embassy in Sarajevo and ask one of the staff to perform in the film. Luckily for the director, the Embassy allowed one of their employees to star in the film.
10 minutes
Castello Cavalcanti - Wes Andreson (USA 2013)
Italy, September 1955. A Formula One driver crashes his car during a race, leaving him stuck in a small village but good surprises will come his way. This was written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola and while this is presented by Prada, it’s not an advertisement. Castello Cavalcante is just a short film, starring Jason Schwartzman, with all of the visual flourishes you might expect from Anderson.
8 minutes
Downfall - Oliver Hirschbiegel (Germany 2004)
The success of the film about the downfall of Hitler (last 10 days) portrayed by Bruno Ganz invited many people to make parodies of an important scene. This one portrays Hitler’s anger when he finds out . . . . and when he learns that . . . (two clips)
7 minutes
Le Canard a L’orange - Patrick Bokanowski (France 2002)
Bokanowski, the ‘artist-alchemist of celluloid’, employs an extraordinary range of technical invention – combining live-action with optical experiments, drawing, performance, painting, and animation – to conjure magical forays into a parallel universe: moving from dread and terror in the early shorts, via bursts of zany humor, to sublime serenity in the landscape films and joyous kinetic energy in his most recent work.
8 minutes
Dimensions of Dialog - Jan Svenkmajer (1982 Czechoslovakia)
Svenkmajer is a master of animation using objects. He has influenced a large number of directors. The animation is divided into three sections. 1) Eternal Conversation shows Arcimboldo-like heads gradually reducing each other to bland copies. 2) Passionate Discourse shows a clay man and woman who dissolve into one another sexually, then quarrel and reduce themselves to a frenzied, boiling pulp. 3) Exhaustive Discussion consists of two elderly clay heads who extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste; shoe and shoelaces, etc.) and intertwine them in various combinations.
14 minutes
