GSFF 2017: Five Scottish short films not to miss

Glasgow Short Film Festival is now approaching its tenth edition, and over the course of that near-decade it’s flourished to become Scotland’s biggest, sharpest and liveliest celebration of short film. You’ll not find any red carpets, black tie dinners, celebrity hounding paparazzi or overflowing champagne flutes at GSFF, just a passion for cinematic expression and invention.

Putting together a showcase for short film is not easy; it’s not simply a matter of taking 100 minutes-worth of great films and cramming them into a single lineup. For a shorts programme to work, the films need to talk to each other in some way, whether in harmony or discord, but that sense of thoughtful curation is essential, and that’s where GSFF really comes into its own.

Perhaps Christoffer Olofsson, the programme director for Uppsala International Short Film Festival in Sweden, and a regular attendee at GSFF, put it best recently when asked to comment on GSFF’s milestone. “Having bounced around the short film circuit for a good while,” he said, “I can safely say that I've seen the best and the worst of these attempts at beating the unkempt cacophony of short film voices into the shape of one smooth and semi-coherent programme, and nobody does it better than Glasgow.”

We’ll be looking ahead to some of the specially curated GSFF programmes in an upcoming post, and we’ll be rounding up the best of the International Short Competition after the festival, but before then we’ve some short films from the Scottish Short Competition to recommend. We weren’t able to see all 19 films in competition, but of the dozen or so we were able to track down, these are the Scottish Shorts we’d compel you to seek out over GSFF’s long weekend.

Man

Dir. Maja Borg

Glasgow-based, Sweden-born filmmaker Maja Borg impressed us with her road movie-slash-soul-searching cine-essay Future My Love, from 2012, but she’s knocked our socks off with this stunning study of gender and physical transformation. On the soundtrack we hear the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice as well as pensive strings by composer Ela Orleans, while on screen – shot in grainy, gloriously distressed 16mm film – we see the director herself act out various notions of masculinity: the dominant lover, the training boxer, the leather jacket-wearing biker, the Wall Street trader. Borg even becomes the Vitruvian Man, Da Vinci’s ultimate symbol of male perfection.

These evocative, sensual, beautifully textured images are mirrored in the second half of Man, but with a significant change to Borg’s physicality. We won’t spoil the surprise here, but the result is a sublimely queer celebration of kickass womanhood.

Screening in Scottish Competition 2: The Parent Trap, Fri 17 Mar, CCA, 9.15pm

Life Cycles

Dir. Ross Hogg

Wake. Shower. Walk to work. Check emails. Sigh. Work. Send text. Sigh. Eat. Work some more. Check Twitter. Walk home. Eat. Piss. Watch news. Brush teeth. Set alarm. Sleep. Repeat. It’s a pattern that’s sure to be familiar to anyone, and it forms the structure of Life Cycles, Ross Hogg’s witty critique (and mea culpa) of how our busy, ordered, repetitive lives leave us numb to the world around us.

Hogg is an endlessly inventive animator, preferring hand-crafted animation techniques that keep him closer to the medium. Life Cycles sees him experimenting with images from his own life, which he realistically renders in monochrome watercolour. The results are much more controlled than some of Hogg's earlier animations, but they still retain the vibrancy of that looser, more expressionistic work. This should prove popular with anyone who follows Scotland’s lively animation scene, as it's chock-full of in-jokes.

Screening in Scottish Competition 3: Privilege, Sat 18 Mar, CCA, 6.45pm

Greylag

Dir. Ben Hunter

In this striking, deeply cinematic piece from Ben Hunter, we see a farmer and his son live out in chilly companionship on a desolate farm where the animals have long been culled following an unnamed outbreak. In his spare time, the son likes to lounge with a Henry David Thoreau in his hand or compose poetry. The father’s only hobby, meanwhile, seems to be glowering in resentment. The only time there’s joy on the farm is when the son’s sweet, giggly girlfriend pays a visit – but she’s off to uni soon and the son knows he has a big decision to make.

Dialogue is sparse throughout much of Hunter’s film. Meaning becomes discernible through James McAlpine’s stately grey cinematography and the son’s poetry, which we hear on the soundtrack over dreamy vignettes. In moments, the film’s stark beauty remindeds of Bergman and Tarkovsky, while the arresting conclusion comes straight from the Apichatpong Weerasethakul playbook.

Screening in Scottish Competition 2: The Parent Trap, Fri 17 Mar, CCA, 9.15pm

Rolls & Shutters

Dir. Stina Wirfelt

We love Stina Wirfelt’s zig-zag train of thought as she ponders the photographic archives of the Thistle Foundation and Craigmillar Festival Society. Wirfelt, whose accent sounds midway between Strathclyde and Stockholm, confesses in the film’s conversational voiceover that when she sees an old photograph, she identifies more with the photographer than the subject.

This perspective takes the filmmaker to a huge warehouse charity shop, where she muses on the ordering of the colourful bric-a-brac, which she finds both predictable and random. Then her thoughts fly back through time to her own memories of taking photographs as a young woman, and then on myriad other left-turns, skipping from Scottish landscapes to urban myths to a story about a penguin that we never get to hear in full, nd finally to the powerful images that humanise the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. Wirfelt realises that a photograph, in some cases, can be so vivid that you don’t even have to see it to feel for its subject.

Screening in Scottish Competition 3: Privilege, Sat 18 Mar, CCA, 6.45pm

Record/Record

Dir. Robert Duncan

What is an image? Is it what we see with our own eyes? What we record in photographs? What we retain in our minds? This is what Robert Duncan explores over five quietly gripping minutes in Record/Record. The story is simplicity itself: a woman observes a landscape and takes a photograph, and we’re privy to the differences in her perception and that of her boyfriend’s – we get to see what’s literally on their minds. The form this wordless animated tale takes, however, is anything but simple.

Duncan's cutout style, which uses white paper separated by layers to create perspective, looks painstaking, even by stop-motion animation standards. The beautiful, clean lined, and strangely sad images this unusual technique creates, however, makes it worth the effort. Duncan is a recent graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, and Record/Record suggests he might join the ranks of the great filmmakers who’ve emerged from its animation programme over the last few years.

Screening in Scottish Competition 3: Privilege, Sat 18 Mar, CCA, 6.45pm

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Glasgow Short Film Festival runs 15-19 Mar. For the full programme, go to glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-short-film-festival