Glasgow Short Film Festival 2017: Best of the Fest

Last weekend, in a ramshackle old snooker hall above a Cantonese restaurant in the centre of the world’s smallest Chinatown, the curtain came down on one of the UK’s smartest and most vibrant film festivals.

This year’s Glasgow Short Film Festival was a typically playful affair, full of inventive shorts, sharp curation and wild parties. With the festival reaching the milestone of its tenth edition, there was a fair bit of looking back. The opening night saw an eclectic programme of shorts from each of the previous nine GSFF programmes, while the Magic Lantern, the short film night programmed by GSFF founders Penny Bartlett and Rosie Crerar, made a one-night-only comeback. It was a zingy lineup, from Jane Campion’s brash debut Peel to Margaret Tait's cinepoem A Portrait of Ga to Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s melancholic coming-of-age film Needles. By closing with Edinburgh-set tragicomic masterpiece Home, Magic Lantern's programme also reminded us what a talent its director Morag McKinnon is and what a shame it has been that she’s not had a chance to show off her skew-wiff style on the big screen since 2010’s Donkeys.

A great addition to the festival was the aforementioned former snooker hall, which has been “transformed” into the wonderfully named Joytown Grand Electric Theatre – and by transformed we mean the snooker tables have been removed and the lights have been turned down so low that you could barely make out the crumpled signed poster above the bar of 80s snooker legends Steve Davis, Terry Griffiths, Tony Meo and Dennis Taylor. The venue may have been low on frills but it has its dilapidated charms, and proved the perfect arena for a great special event at the heart of the festival.

Poetry and short film collided with An Evening with Bukowski, which was centred on a fascinating and previously unseen interview with the great poet Charles Bukowski at his San Pedro home in 1981. He proved a wry and wily interviewee. “Why would I want to talk to other writers?” he said in the film with mock incredulity to Italian journalist Silvia Bizio. “For me to speak to a writer would be like drinking water in the bathtub.”

The charming Tam Dean Burn was host for the night and proved an expert reader of Bukowski’s work, while poets Stephen Watt and Nisha Bhakoo provided lovely readings of their own poems, admirably making themselves heard above the racket from people chatting at the bar – we think Bukowski would have approved that his audience was made up of loud-mouthed barfies. Shout out to the heroic beanpole who charged to the back of the room to tell everyone to shut it – they did, but he got thrown out by a bouncer for his trouble.

With the folks at the bar quietened down, Chrissy Barnacle delivered a gleefully filthy set of dark ballads that sounded like they’d been cribbed from Hannah Horvath’s dating journal and the night edged its way to a raucous finish with the ‘doom wop’ of Jacob Yates and the Pearly Gate Lockpickers. It’s was kind of effortlessly cool night that GSFF annually pull off without breaking a sweat.

As ever, we were impressed by GSFF’s choice of retrospective too. The subject was Norwegian filmmaker Gunhild Enger, who was cutting her filmmaking teeth at Edinburgh’s College of Art around the time the debut edition of GSFF was kicking off. Her films are squirm-inducing social comedies satirizing middle-class consumerism. The near dialogue-free A Simple Life, for example, is a vivid portrait of a middle-aged couple whiling away their empty lives. While the woman works hard on her joyless and punishing fitness regime, her husband potters around in the garden looking for ways to make his light gardening chores even less labour intensive. The long static shots, deadpan performances and bone-dry humour brought to mind the films of fellow Scandinavian absurdist Roy Andersson.

Communication – or lack of it – is also one of Enger's chief themes. In one shot wonder Premature, a Norwegian lad brings his Spanish wife, who’s pregnant, home to meet the folks. Awkward chitchat in English soon descends into the well-meaning parents digging a hole for themselves with some unwelcome and bracingly pessimistic words of wisdom about pregnancy. Enger sustains the toe-curling intensity visually by setting the encounter in a cramped hatchback and filming in one uninterrupted shot with the four actors squeezed uncomfortably into the frame.

There was plenty of looking forward too with GSFF’s VR Movie House, although in its current guise this future hardly looks rosey. The virtual reality shorts we managed to make it through were uniformly awful. There was the insufferable Ashes to Ashes, a tone-deaf family comedy from the Netherlands shot from the point of view of an urn containing the last remains of a patriarch who’s left his annoying brood some bizarre instructions on what to do with his ashes.

But at least Ashes to Ashes' filmmakers were experimenting with the form, creating a colourful and immersive theatre piece in which the viewer was at the centre. The Perfect Couple, a mercifully brief dance film, had viewers twirling clockwise on their revolving chair to follow a couple as they morosely shimmied through a posh house. The banal takeaway: being rich and good-looking makes you sad.

Some people we spoke to found merit in I, Philip, a creepy sci-fi short in which you were placed in the point-of-view of the first android human as he slowly gained autonomy, but it seemed to us little more than a poor rip-off of the POV shots from Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop.

Are we being too harsh? After all, VR is in its infancy; it took years for filmmakers to find the grammar with which to tell sophisticated stories on the cinema screen. True, but even with the world’s first movie, Train Pulling Into A Station, the Lumieres knew roughly where to place the camera to create some tension as the locomotive slowly pulls into Marseille Station. The VR filmmakers don’t even seem to have worked that out yet.

The two options seem to be to shoot the films from the POV of a character within the story (see Ashes to Ashes and I, Philip) or plonked the camera arbitrarily at the centre of the action, leaving the viewer to play director and choose where to look. The worst offender of the latter was The Circuit, billed as “Scotland’s first 360 degree film.”

The artless doc drops us into Ayr races while a jockey drones on in voiceover about his profession. The camera is placed bizarrely high off the ground, perhaps at the level a jockey might sit on their horse, which would make sense if we were in the paddock or the starting line, but instead we’re discombobulatingly floating at random spots around the race course: by a queue to the bar, at the finishing line or milling around the course's ring of bookmakers. The awkward placement of the camera never makes us feel immersed in the action, and it’s hard to concentrate on what our narrator is saying when you’re busy trying to find something – anything – interesting to look at among the throng of racing punters.

The mediocrity of the VR films was more than compensated for, however, by the sharply curated International Competition Programmes, most screenings of which were filled to capacity with short film nuts. Here are our three favourite from the competition:

The Last Leatherman of the Vale of Cashmere

Dir. Greg Loser

On the surface this is a charming – and hilarious – character study of an old man looking back on his halcyon days. Our subject is an aging leather-clad dude, who in his younger years used to cruise for cock in the Vale of Cashmere, a notorious gay cruising spot in a corner of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Today, however, our hero feels a bit like he’s the only gay in the (West) Village.

Over the brilliantly hardboiled voiceover our guide recalls the thrill of the hunt, the coquettish dance he would go through to get a quick blow job in the bushes. No-one’s biting today. One prospect appears, but he turns out to be a Park Slope birdwatcher on a date with his girlfriend.

And of course there’s no action. Young gay men looking for casual sex have long taken their arveristic hunting online, leaving this leather-clad anachronism alone in the thickets. It occurs to you, too, that many of the men our leatherman used to tangle with in the park didn’t make it through the AIDS epidemic, and if they did, they’re probably now running a bed and breakfast upstate.

This wry elegy to one man’s lost youth also becomes a lament to a city that’s been transformed through gentrification. Time was, says the leatherman, “you could walk down Christopher Street and not meet your boss as he was trying a new bistro.” Progress doesn’t work for everyone, and the leatherman has been left out in the cold with only memories keeping him warm as he wanders the Vale of Cashmere after dark.

The Hunchback

Dir. Ben Rivers, Gabriel Abrantes

A typically playful sci-fi riff from filmmakers Ben Rivers and Gabriel Abrantes. The former is British, the latter Portuguese, and their distinct sensibilities work well together in this wildly imaginative tale of a dystopian future where the employees of a mega-corporation are forced to relive the squalor of medieval times as a form of relaxation, where they can reconnect with outmoded human emotions and behaviours – like getting drunk and having sex.

This is Westworld by way of Arabian Nights, with a little reality TV-style Rashomon thrown in. Within the VR simulacrum of a medieval village situated in a sun blasted landscape, the company employees are assigned specific roles – blacksmith, clergyman, merchant, tavern wench, etc. Our hero, Timmi, is given the “wild-card” character, the town’s Hunchback. A few pills and a quick practice at reading his lines – “Can any of you spare some charity for a poor hunchback?” – and Timmi is transformed into the pitiable creature.

His fate follows that of Scheherazade’s Little Hunchback, although with more shagging, wolves and Trouble with Harry-style slapstick. Periodically we flash forward from this mud-splattered world to a slick corporate debriefing, where the chain of events that leads to the Hunchback/Timmi’s head flying off his shoulders from a single punch is being investigated. In its own skew-wiff way, this experimental short is as politically vibrant as a Ken Loach picture, with the working man once again being exploited by his heartless employers and sold down the river by his cowardly co-workers – The Hunchback just happens to be a hell of a lot funnier.

The Committee

Dir. Gunhild Enger, Jenni Toivoniemi

As mentioned above, Gunhild Enger’s retrospective was an absolute treat. The Norwegian filmmaker was also in town with a new movie co-directed with Finn Jenni Toivoniemi and produced by Swede Marie Kjellsson. The concept of the film is deliciously meta: this Nordic co-production is all about another Nordic arts collaboration. In this case, the design of an artwork to place on the geographical spot in deepest darkest Lapland where the three nations’ borders meet, with the eponymous committee heading the project consisting of a delegate from Norway, Sweden and Finland.

The trio gather to check the progress by their chosen artist, Torgeir, the kind of man you wouldn’t trust to do the shopping, nevermind lead an multi-national arts project. Instead of a tangible art piece – say a steel sculpture or stone monument – Torgeir has created a bizarre dance celebrating the friendship between the three nations. In the face of this ridiculous performance piece, the committee barely bat an eyelid. The matronly Swedish delegate is supportive and the Norwegian delegate reckons with a user-friendly app the dance could go viral. The gruff Finnish delegate, however, is perplexed. “But would there be anything on the border?” he asks. “I will be there! You will be there! Someone will always be there!” is Torgeir's mysterious answer.

Anyone who’s been involved in these type of ventures will immediately recognise the bureaucratic language, passive-aggressive chumminess and the absurdity of democratic decision-making. Enger and Toivoniemi give the proceedings a comically epic grandeur by interrupting the petty boardroom bickering about which nation will get to represent ski jumping in the dance with brutal edits to the Nordic landscape, accompanied by the booming strings of Peer Gynt's Journey Home. The final line, spoken by a local whom the three bureaucrats try to incorporate into a selfie, is priceless.