Shorts

The Trapped Pig tells the almost surreal story of a Wuhan truck driver, who is travelling home for the Chinese New Year with a precious boar, being trapped in one-person quarantine zone at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is one of my two comedy coups de coeur of Clermont-Ferrand 2023. The Trapped Pig is both totally absurd and at times very much laugh out loud. With skilful comedic timing, Lin Binghan tells a story that’s also full of heart and compassion for its trapped (...)

A keen video essayist, Richard Misek’s work involved endlessly googling archive images. In 2018, he noticed that the download function had been disabled on Google. He dug deeper and found out that Getty Images had threatened to sue Google. The more he looked, the more Richard noticed that Getty had their logo imprinted everywhere and the scope of their reach became clear to him. This very cleverly edited short film questions the proprietary ownership of images from our collective history and (...)

Two fishermen find a Dolphin accidentally caught in their nets. The Dolphin, on its turn, finds a fisherman drowning in the water and tries to save him. More myths and legends as inspiration at this year’s Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival! This time, they come to us from Greece and through the lens of Isabella Margara in an astoundingly original short that one member of the audience loudly claimed was "the best film he’d seen this (...)

Set in a small Ghanaian town at the edge of a large landfill site that spills into the ocean, the sons of a fisherman, Sowah and Okai, struggle to cope with loss of their eldest brother who drowned during a fishing expedition. Haunted by his demise, Okai believes their brother is still out there… Speaking at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, filmmaker Amartei Amar explained his choice to draw on the aesthetics of such movements as Afro-futurism. He does so masterfully. (...)

On a hot August afternoon, the family gathers at the table. The memories of each are crossed to tell the story of uncle Botão. From the dictatorship to the emigration to France, where he worked as a garbage man, and when he arrived with the van filled with “garbage”he transformed into treasures. What a man uncle Botão clearly was! Laura Gonçalves paints a tender and heart-warming portrait of a hard-working man who seems to have been as eccentric as he was likeable. Café court / Short Talk - (...)

CIVIC is a short film that follows Booker on his first trip back home to South Central, L.A. after several years of self-imposed exile. Without any clear motive, or even a warning, Booker returns to the place that holds his origins and the people who shaped him. An impressively mature and reflective debut short by Dwayne LeBlanc. There is a lot to unpack from Booker’s journey through his past, but this gives the film richness and texture as opposed of weighty and opaque complexity. LeBlanc, (...)

The Voyager probe is about to leave our solar system. At the same time, on Earth, Alain Diaw begins his first day of work in a prestigious automobile company. He has come a long way and is also aiming for the unknown. Soufiane Adel’s Le Jour où j’étais perdu (the title is taken from James Baldwin’s book) is a beautiful and graphically ambitious meditation on social, physical and technological mobility, merging an individual’s own desire to reach for the unknown and the ambitions of the global (...)

“Nothing can be heard anymore; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are heading straight to the world’s biggest display of soundproof fireworks, and soon we will drop our bombs.” Palestinian filmmaker and artist Kamal Aljafari has built a solid reputation for his cutting-edge experimental filmmaking over the years, with work shown at the Berlinale, Locarno, Venice.... and here in Clermont-Ferrand! Aljafari’s new film certainly doesn’t disappoint. Its title is taken from a short (...)

Set in Kabul, Afghanistan. Pari, an in-house tailor, must find the means to purchase her prescription glasses to save her job. I did a double take when Salar came on to this video interview. I’ll be honest and say that I expected him to be a woman. Salar has a real knack for writing female characters. Bad Omen is an intelligent, well-crafted story and I look forward to seeing more of Salar’s work. He joined us at the Brasserie du Court for this quick (...)

Shooting on location in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, director Salar Pashtoonyar uses a thought-provoking yet powerfully humane hybrid of documentary and fiction to delve deep into the experience of a woman forced to the edge of her society. This is the second short Salar has had in competition at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival. Bad Omen, which was in competition last year, showcased his ability to write three dimensional and complex female characters. In Hills And Mountains, yet (...)