In Praise of the Short Film
The 9th Annual Mediterranean Short Film Festival in Tangier, 2011
Sally Shafto
I think it is impossible to be both creative and to make a film you know will work. Being creative necessitates a certain risk, since something new is being offered. By the same reasoning, a new idea is one that hasn’t yet been tested. You can’t be a 100 % sure of its reliability or its success. This film is my first step toward a world of absolute and unconditional creativity.
- Riad Makdessi, director of “Flu” (Syria, 2010, 29 min.) -
Short films are often, wrongly, regarded as just perfunctory exercises on the route to making a feature film. But the recent “FESTIVAL DU COURT-MÉTRAGE MÉDITERRANÉEN” in Tangier, demonstrated just how exciting and satisfying this format can be for the spectator. Sponsored and expertly organized by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain, this festival is unique in its genre in the Maghreb, since the disappearance of the International Short Film Festivals of Oran and Taghit in Algeria.
Featuring fifty-five shorts (out of a total pre-selection of 450 entries) from twenty different countries, all bordering the Mediterranean, this year’s festival, its 9th edition, was particularly rich and varied. Five countries were represented with five films: France, Greece, Morocco, Spain, and Turkey. The filmmakers—twelve (or 22%) of whom were women—ranged in age from 23 to 50 something, and their budgets were equally diverse. Many of the films shown were student final projects with budgets as low as 400 €, while films on the opposite end of the scale cost roughly a maximum of 150,000 €. Many, but not all, were shot digitally.
The festival premiered with a screening of the short “Mémoire 14” (Morocco, 1971, 30 min.) by Ahmed Bouanani who died earlier this year and who, despite the brevity of his oeuvre (four shorts and one feature-length film), is considered one of the founding fathers of Moroccan cinema. After graduating from L’IDHEC in Paris in 1963, Bouanani worked as a film editor for the Centre Cinématographique Marocain, and “Mémoire 14”—based on his own poem of the same title and composed of CCM archival footage of Morocco during the French Protectorate and his own still images (photographs and paintings)—shows his people deprived of their History and memory.3 Bouanani deserves to be better known.
All of the entries in this year’s festival, ranging in length between 5 to 39 minutes (45 minutes being the official limit for a short film), demonstrated that, despite the inherent challenges, it is possible to successfully tell a story within a short time frame. Many of this year’s entries, including the four principal prizewinning films, focus on children. Childhood here is not always held up as a kind of paradise lost, but rather as a time marked by the loss of innocence, as exemplified by the following themes:
Sexual molestation of minors: Rok Bicek’s “Duck Hunting” (Slovenia); Baya Kasmi’s “I Could Have been a Hooker” (France); Myriem Riveill’s “Taboo” (Tunisia), and Haris Vafeiadis’ “13 ½” (Greece). Children with guns: George Grigorakis’ “Reverse” (Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Children with guns: George Grigorakis’ “Reverse” (Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Children who are forced to leave school because they’re illegal immigrants: Uda Benyamina’s “Road to Paradise” (Morocco)
The sequestration of a child: Halima Ouardiri’s “Mokhtar” (Morocco) and Pierre-Marie Jézéquel’s “Grounded” (Portugal)
A child is witness to conjugal violence: César Esteban Alenda & José Esteban Alenda’s “The Order of Things” (Spain).
Interestingly, two of the principal prizewinners, also about a child, escape this paradigm: I. Serhat Karaaslan’s “Bicycle” (Turkey, 17 min., 2010), winner of this year’s Grand Prix and Irene Zoe Alameda’s “Uniformed” (Spain, 2010, 18 min.), winner of this year’s Best Screenplay. Like many of the films in this year’s selection, “Bicycle” carries no dialogue. And while its title, subject matter, and very style recall that of Vittorio De Sica’s Neorealist classic, Bicycle Thieves (Italy, 1948), it’s a far quieter film than its Italian antecedent.
At the film’s outset, a father and son head out from their home as the cock crows, armed with empty burlap sacks in which they will collect their findings taken from dumpsters around the city. It’s a Turkish version of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (France, 2000). Despite their poverty, the father and son don’t seem particularly unhappy, even though a wife and mother remains absent from the narrative. The first highpoint of this quiescent drama occurs less than two minutes in, when the boy discovers the eponymous bike. The fact that it’s missing its back wheel doesn’t dampen his enthusiasm, as he struggles, in the driving rain, to bring it home. The film is made up of a serious of exchanges between father and son. First, the father offers the boy a new cap and then a second wheel that’s too big for the bike. Later, we discover with the son, as the camera pans downward, that the father, in the midst of winter, is shod with open sandals wrapped in plastic bags. In the next scene, the boy triumphantly presents him with a pair of smart, leather loafers. They’re all wrong of course for this man, but no matter. He smiles, and after a struggle, manages to slip his heel into the shoe. At the close of this narrative, the boy playfully dons one of the burlap sacks that has two holes for his eyes, suggesting a burqa. Beautifully shot, the film reminded me of an admirable student film from l’ESAV that I saw last spring, (Mehdi El Azzam’s “Pond,” 2009, 15 min.) where young boys cavort and have fun in a less than propitious landscape.
The Spanish short “Uniformed” has high production values and an unusual story. A little girl named Margaret manages to resist the many messages, direct and indirect, aimed at conditioning her gender responses. To the age-old question (“What do you want to be when you grow up?”) Margaret replies—to the astonishment of her teacher and classmates—that she wants to be a man! It brought to my mind Leontine Sagan’s ground-breaking classic Mädchen in uniform (Germany, 1931) that similarly tackles a Sapphic theme.
Film criticism is inherently subjective and so I’ll admit upfront, as much as like “Bicycle,” to have been disappointed that one of the Greek films didn’t garner the top award. I was particularly taken, for instance, with Yiorgos Zois’ “Casus belli” (Cause of War, 2010, 11 min.). An intelligent, nearly silent short, it shows people lining up in seven different queues in Athens (my favorite is the one in the art gallery, complete with artspeak jabberwocky), filmed in a long traveling shot, with the first person of each queue becoming the last in the next—until finally this human chain is leveled by a massive domino effect.
“Casus belli” elegantly sums up the dire situation currently facing not just that particular Mediterranean country, but the rest of the Euro zone too. Prizes at film festivals are awarded for a wide variety of reasons, and acknowledging Greek cinema in the face of its present economic impasse would have been, well, just. For months, we’ve been hearing about the latest recommendations for austerity that will affect the Greek people for years to come, but it seems to me that the word austerity is a nasty euphemism for Greeks whose modest paying jobs have been axed, as the government struggles to reduce its national deficit. Long before the appearance of social networks and the indignados movement, films encouraged us to think beyond national boundaries. We are all unemployed Greeks.
In fact, Greece did something better than win the Grand Prix: it proved, despite these difficult times, the incontrovertible vitality of its national cinema, with several other entries, starting with Yiannis Bougiokas’ “Mario and the Raven” (2010, 20 min.) Its opening three minutes neatly characterize the relationship between Mario and his wife, Despina.
The husband, as a self-respecting, middle-aged Greek male, barks repeated orders at his seemingly docile wife: bring me the phone, bring me a cigarette, bring me my shirt, iron my shirt, etc. But then all at once, the world of this domestic tyrant, like the domino effect in “Casus belli,” collapses, when he learns that Despina (in Greek, the name, meaning “mistress” or “lady,” is associated with the Virgin Mary and suggests a strong-willed woman, capable of initiative) had an affair, several years before, with another man. The rest of the narrative is preoccupied with Mario’s coming to terms with his own shortcomings and Despina’s infidelity. Finally, I was also very impressed with Dimitris Kanellopoulos’s film “Farewell Anestis” (15 min.), which was singled out for a Special Mention from the jury. It’s a simple story of two young men who dream of leaving their village to live in the capital. To do so, they will have to say good-bye to their donkey Anestis. I loved it not least for the way it filmed the Greek rural landscape.
In all fairness, this year’s jury—presided by the Moroccan film critic Mohammed Bakrim who said the jury’s choices would be based on coups de coeur—had an embarrassment of riches from which to choose.
And at least one Greek, George Grigorakis, was honored for best direction, even if his film, “Reverse” shot in Sarajevo, represented another country (Bosnia-Herzegovina). (His multi-national crew—with a Spanish director of photography, an Albanian screenwriter, a French composer, etc.—represents today’s protean Europe. And Grigorakis himself exemplifies the mobility of contemporary young Europeans: he is currently continuing his studies at the National Film and Television School in London). If the cinema is emotion, as Sam Fuller famously says in Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), then “Reverse” packs a particular punch (and this impression was corroborated during the screening when not a sound could be heard in the audience, so intent were we all on what was happening on screen). Shot digitally in black and white where the predominant tonality is gray, “Reverse” is the story of two pre-adolescent boys who fight over their mothers. When Daniel, whose mother died the year before, returns home from school after being beaten up by Adis, his father Marco tells him “If you don’t protect yourself, you’ll be pushed around all your life.” In the film’s dénouement, Adis, who speaks with difficulty and uses sign language, unexpectedly turns Marco’s lesson on manhood on him.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the only country in southeastern Europe that stood out in this year’s selection. Three others were Martin Turk’s “The Things We’ve Never Done Together (Slovenia, 2011, 10 min.), Rok Bicek’s “Duck Hunting” (Slovenia, 2009, 23 min.) and Dane Komljen’s “I Already Am Everything I want to Have” (Serbia, 2010, 33 min.). The first is the story of two half-sisters, expertly shot in black and white by Ziga Koritnik. The latter two—notwithstanding their no frills’ student budgets—convey a serious sense of filmmaking. The first is about two boys, one of whom stutters, who go duck-hunting with their father. The father, who apparently abused his children, serves time in prison. When he gets out, his sons are young men.
Scenes of hunting invariably evoke masculinity and potential bloodbaths, and bring to mind other well-known films where a hunt scene is central, as in Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) whose country was then on the brink of war; or Carlos Saura’s magisterial first feature La Caza (Spain, 1965), where four men from opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War unite twenty years later for a weekend of hunting from which none will return. In the current example, the final killing of a duck is preceded by the murder of the paterfamilias. The film is memorable, in particular, for the scene where the son with the speech problem runs into the foreground of the frame and as the hand-held camera trembles, he vomits, while in the background of this extremely deep focus shot, bathed in autumnal colors, we see the other son digging a trench for the corpse. In the film’s final shot, the sons are seated at dinner with their mother, whose hand nervously moves about the table, searching for her spouse, as she says: “Your father should be back by now.” Dane Komljen’s “I Already Am Everything I want to Have,” which won an award at Cannes’ CinéFondation in 2010, is set in New Belgrade, in the area of the city developed after the Second World War; it focuses on the relationship between a brother and sister. The director filmed with a hand-held camera in order to remain close to his actors.
With its five official entries and the rich parallel Panorama of forty-six additional Moroccan short films not in competition, Morocco demonstrated, if further proof was needed, just how active its current production is.
One of them, Uda Benyamina’s, “The Road to Paradise” (39 min.) was rightly singled out by the jury’s Special Prize. It’s the moving story of Laila, a young Moroccan illegal immigrant barely scraping by with her extended family in a camp on the outskirts of Paris. She wants to immigrate to England to join her husband; to earn the money to pay her family’s illegal passage, she dances in a club where her gyrations promise to take the male clientele to paradise . . .
The actors are all superb, including the children, and the film plays out, in part, in its exchange of glances between Laila and her daughter. The theme of immigration reappeared in the Güclü Yaman’s somber “Journey of No Return – Last Stop Frankfurt Airpot” (Germany/Turkey, 25 min.) that tells the true story of a Sudanese man living (legally) in Frankfurt whose nightmare begins when he reports the theft of his i.d. papers at the local police station. Despite having won several awards, the film has yet to be shown in Germany.
The drug is particularly dangerous because those who take it lose all sense of normal inhibition and commit terrible, grave acts. It’s not an easy film to watch, particularly when we see the junkie’s scarred torso with his self-inflicted lacerations. Striving not sugarcoat this tough reality, the filmmaker made the film in order to raise awareness on this scourge of Moroccan youth.4
Two of the three Italian films also stood out for me. In the first, Massimo Cappelli’s “41” (18 min., 2010), a middle-aged man finds himself in a museum, indifferent to the masterpieces around him, despite the promptings of his acoustiguide.
But in tuning in more closely, we realize that his is a special audio-guide that delivers pithy remarks, not on the paintings on the wall, but on the fate of those around him. Is his number up?
I was equally impressed by “Salvatore” (Italy, 2011, 14 min.), by the brothers Bruno and Fabrizio Urso. It’s the bleak story filmed in drab, unsaturated color of a young woman who loses her factory job when her boss learns she is pregnant. Her boss offers her a terrible choice: she can have her job back, if she has an abortion. But she and her husband who is a fishmonger unable to make a living because he doesn’t have the requisite permit decide to name their baby boy “Salvatore” (Savior). “Salvatore” brings to mind another set of brothers (Dardenne), and the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia.
Despite the damage done to Tunisian film culture by former dictator Ben Ali who regularly shut down film screenings,5 Tunisia was well represented by two shorts: Walid Tayaa’s “Life” (2010, 18 min.) and Meriem Riveill’s “Tabou” (2010, 15 min.) The first represents the colorless existence of Hayet, a forty-year-old widow whose son has immigrated to Canada and who works in a French call center in Tunis.
Fun in her life consists of dancing on the beach by herself and blowing bubbles in front of a mirror, as she washes her face. . . . She lives in an apartment building, the uniformity of whose circular windows represent the morose monotony of her and her compatriots’ lives. In his films, Tayaa seeks to pay an eternal homage to women and “Life” is his fourth about the female sex. In his q and a, he noted that women in Muslim societies suffer twice as much as their male counterparts: After work “Men can go to a café, whereas women are condemned to return home, where their second job awaits them. Such women are heroines.” Tayaa, who recently participated in a Sundance workshop, is currently at work on his first feature film. In “Tabou” Riveill who carefully composes her shots dares to brave the topic of incest.
Tanguy Bernard’s “I Could have been your Grandmother” (France, 2010, 20 min.) also deserves mention. It’s the fictionalized true account of a successful Parisian lawyer who on his way home from work one day sees a Romanian, homeless woman (who plays herself) camped out in front of his building. She’s holding up a poorly written sign, which sets him on a campaign to re-write the signs of street persons in his neighborhood, just one of which is the film’s catchy title. Other bons mots include “Le temps des crises” (a word play on “Le temps des cérises”), “All We Need is Love and 1 €,” are successful, as passersby are incited to be more generous. The film is both funny and sad as it tells the story of this white-collar worker who suffers a profound crise de conscience and quits his high-paying job, as he remembers his own modest origins (he’s the first in his family to attend college). It reminded me of the award-winning American documentary The Cats of Mirikitani (by Linda Hattendorf, 2006) where Hattendorf, a New York filmmaker, takes in a Japanese-American artist living on the street near her building. Still, the French film, which undoubtedly benefited from one of the largest budgets of these short films, raises ethical questions on how best to film poverty, questions that the increasing democratization of shooting digitally brings inescapably to a fore. (Kiarostami, for instance, has said that he cannot bear images of poverty; in his Iranian films, shot on location, the natural décor is cleaned and rendered aesthetic for his camera.) During her Q and A, Tunisian filmmaker Myriem Riveill, observed “everything technical represents a moral choice.” Like the Serbian director Dane Komljen, she noted that shooting digitally enabled her to feel closer to her characters and that she couldn’t have shot her film in 35 mm. It’s that kind of proximity, it seems to me, that is lacking in the French film.
One of the funniest films in this year’s selection was Ryad Makdessi’s “Flu” (Syria, 2010, 29 min.) whose black humor recalls that of one of his film heroes, Emir Kusturica.
Makdessi, who studied at the Beaux-Arts in Damascus, previously worked in television and commercials, and this is his first film. A few years ago, citizens from around the world were inundated with updates from the World Health Organization on the H1N1 bird flu; for his film, Makdessi imagines a Mediterranean fishing community devastated by. . . a fish flu. Symptoms of the flu include frequent sneezing and, more improbably, fits of laughter! Thus, one couple who previously bickered incessantly are now reunited in uncontrollable fits of laughter. All is set right when a vaccine is discovered with the help of a seventy-year-old beggar, who is immune to the H5N9 virus. The film, which would have benefited from a tighter edit, is more than redeemed by its actors.
In addition to Makdessi’s “Flu,” another film, Kenneth Scicluna’s “Plangent Rain” (Malta, 2010, 14 min.) features the Mediterranean Sea and an implacable rain. The film is inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet; it tells the story of a young sailor condemned to row a rotting boat around the island, as his mother prepares to marry his uncle. “Plangent Rain,” shot in black and white, manages to combine two seemingly antithetical film styles (the Fantastic film with Neorealism). Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who saw the film at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, gave it high praise, saying that he “liked its atmosphere very much, and its peculiar sadness.”
While many of this year’s shorts tackled serious topics (immigration, violence to women, poverty, etc.), several outstanding films were more intimist in nature. One of the very best in this category—which was showcased earlier this year at the Festival du Court-métrage de Clermont-Ferrand, a principal vitrine for short films in Europe—was Joao Viana’s experimental “Alfama.”
Sans dialogue, this complex, ambitious film tells the story of a young woman who discovers, after boarding a train with her lover, the ultimate dangers of the cell phone, when involved in an extramarital affair. Inserted in the middle of this highspeed train ride is a passage of Fado, the melancholic musical genre of Portugal emphasizing unfulfilled love and jealousy; the film’s title refers to one of the oldest neighborhoods in Lisbon, famous for its Fado bars. Shot in black and white, “Alfama” features a beautiful deeply contrasted photography, shot by the young German photographer Sarah Blum. (Part of the film was shot on a cell phone and then transferred to 35 mm film). The film pays homage to a dying love affair and to the art of black and white cinematography, equally moribund. Viana comes to filmmaking after having worked for such notable filmmakers as Manuel Oliviero, Jean-Claude Biette, Werner Schroeter, and others.
Also in this category of personal films that pushed the filmic form was Jean Saint Germain’s “Orpheus Fire” (France, 2011, 27 min.) Highly stylized and oneiric, the film echoes Cocteau’s Orpheus and Jean Delannoy’s Eternel Retour (1943). During the q & a, the director, who is a well-known television actor in France (Jean-Pierre Germain) and co-star of his film, revealed that Jean Marais was a personal friend and quoted Leo Ferré (“Le style, c’est le coeur”; “Style is everything.”); I liked it a lot, but found it overly long and aesthetically self-indulgent, no doubt because I don’t agree that style is everything.
The Moroccan film “Mokhtar” reveals the deep cultural differences on the meaning of an owl. Some Western cultures revered the bird with large eyes and in ancient Greece it was associated with the goddess Athena. By Roman times, though, it had become an omen of death, and the deaths of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, among others, were thought to have been presaged by its call.6 Similarly, in Morocco the owl represents a baleful influence. When a young shepherd (Mokhtar) discovers a wounded baby owl, he brings it home to nurse it back to health. His father, however, tells him that the bird is an evil omen and punishes the child by sequestering him, until the child relents and kills it.
Based on a true story and beautifully photographed in an Amazigh village near Agadir, with a non-professional cast, the film is particularly noteworthy for its initial documentary images of goats in trees that were startling for a foreigner like me.
Not surprisingly, many of the films showcased in this year’s festival have garnered awards elsewhere on the international film festival circuit. One such film is Elie Kamal’s “2 ½” (Lebanon, 14 min., 2010), which was awarded the 2010 prize for best short by FIPRESCI (the International Federation of Film Critics) at Dubai. After studying first in Beirut, Kamal continued his film studies in Brussels, and his film, based on a true story, brings to mind an updated, Arab version of Chantal Akerman’s masterful and minimalist Jeanne Dielman (Belgium, 1975), about a middle-class mother who stabs her john. Here, however, the working-class mom in Beirut is hideously attacked by her own progeny. During the Q and A with the director, the Algerian film critic Mohamed Bensalah suggested the scene would have been more effective if left unshown and that’s my feeling too. In Jeanne Dielman the dialogue is spare, while “2 ½” is stripped of all dialogue. The other entry from Lebanon was even more powerful in its quiet understatement: Sabine El Chamaa’s “Tuesday” tells the story of an elderly woman who finds a policeman on her doorstep, after she exits a Beirut clothing store wearing a new black suit that still has its price tag, without having paid the bill. He continues to visit her and plays on her recently deceased husband’s Oud (a kind of lute).
In addition to the Panorama of Moroccan Short Films, the festival also showcased several films not in competition by Moroccan film students.
One of them “Rahma” (2011, 12 min.) by Mounia Roukhe (her uncle Driss Roukhe is in Babel, 2006) evokes the sad reality, still apparently prevalent, in Moroccan villages where adult men continue to take child brides who still play with their dolls.
In a new documentary on current trends in filmmaking in Algeria, Un Noueau soufflé du cinema algérien (2011), Mounia Meddour reveals that making short films in Algeria today is an end in itself where young talents can tackle new subjects, without the burden of taking on a feature film. The high quality of this 9th edition of the Mediterranean Short Film Festival in Tangier suggests that young filmmakers all over the Mediterranean share this parti pris. Vive la jeunesse méditerranéenne!
NOTES
1. Riad Makdessi quoted in “Le digital a democratisé le cinéma,” Le Journal du Festival du Court Métrage Méditerranéen de Tanger, no. 3, Thursday 5 October 2011, n.p.
2. Mohamed Bensalah, “SOUS LE SIGNE DE L’HUMANISME ET DE LA GÉNÉROSITÉ,” L’Expression [Algeria], 11 October 2011.
3. Aïcha Akalay, “AHMED BOUANANI: PORTRAIT, LE SANG D’UN POÉTE,” Tel Quel (Morocco), 2009.
4. For more on this drug, see: Jaouad Mdidech, “LES EFFETS DU ‘KARKOUBI’ SUR LA JEUNE MAROCAINE,” La Vie Eco, 16 January 2007, consulted November 7, 2011.
5. Interview with Walid Tayaa, Tanger, October 2011.
6. See “OWLS IN MYTHOLOGY AND CULTURE,” accessed 5 November 2011.
Sally Shafto teaches at the Polydisciplinary Faculty of Ouarzazate (University of Ibn Zohr) in Morooco. A specialist of French as well as European art cinema, she is developing an expertise in Maghrebin film. In 2007, she published The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 68 (Paris Expérimental). She is currently working on the Moroccan filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011).