Encounters Festival: European Film Academy

by Scarlett Sherriff, Fourth Year Modern Languages

'Short Matters' was the Encounters event featuring a wide selection of 2017 European Short Film competition nominees. The European Film Academy, comprised of over 3000 members voted Spanish film Timecode as the winner.

We might be leaving the EU, but the development of fresh European cinema continues. That’s what a day at Encounters, Britain’s largest short film festival, taught me.

It took place at the Watershed, which I’ll always praise for the bar and its view over the river, but also the curation of left field, independent cinema. I managed to catch the ‘European Shorts’ event, featuring a variety of styles from a range of countries and directors.

First up was a German film Wannabe (dir. Jannis Lenz), all about teenage angst. Set in a middle class household it’s about a teenage girl Coco (Anna Suk) who wants to break out of the normal cycle. She’s sulky, skips school and develops a YouTube channel. The shifts between computer screen and real life highlight the blurred world in which the young youtuber lives. Despite being German language, Jannis Lenz’s short film will translate to any teen or post-teen in the modern world.

Set in a completely different world is Matteo Gariglio’s En La Boca, which takes place in a Buenos Aires slum. The Molina family live in a hidden world that is little known to tourists. Matias sells illegal tickets to football games at the famous Boca Juniors stadium, and is constantly in conflict with the police.

They live in poverty, beds are shared, security and money are on their minds at all times. Gariglio uses religious signposts within the film, figurines of Jesus decorate the set and bread is shared between the family. The charismatic mother tries to keep them all together cooking and telling everyone off through all of the adversity they face.

Rûken Tekes’ Hevȇrk, meaning ‘The Circle’, is equally poignant and based on the tragic story of Ezidi Kurds, aka Yazidis. Based on the traditional discriminatory practice of ‘circling’ the Satan, something which has happened to many Ezidis, including in school. An Ezidi prayer starts and ends the film which is an illustration of the diversity in a region including Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish languages.

The protagonist is a young Ezidi girl who gets circled by the other children at school on the day they learn the letter O. The circle is a reference to the continual cycle of violence faced by the Ezidi minority.

There was a whole variety of animations and other shorts, some of which were over-arty and perhaps only relevant for a festival space, but the film that stole the show was Timecode. Directed by Juanjo Giménez, it won the Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2016.

The entire cinema was enthralled as they watched a love story between two security guards with different shifts. Every day, they each dance in front of the CCTV, and leave a post-it note to the other the time on the tapes they should check. When a new trainee is shown around, their boss shows him how to use the cameras and stumbles across a video of the lovers dancing together beautifully and passionately, still in their security guard uniform. The boss and his trainee are as glued to the screen as the audience. It is clever take on love, banality and the connections that can be made through a camera.

I left the cinema to go about my business, optimistic at European and international creativity. Brexit or not, we’d better continue to support it.

Featured Image: Encounters Film Festival / European Film Academy 1: Short Matters / Copa-Loca (dir. Christos Massalas)

Didn't get a chance to see anything at Encounters this year? Check out their website for what you can watch online.

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