There are a lot of short films at Iris. It is a short film festival after all. This reviewer didn’t get to see anywhere near as many as he’d have liked at the festival, but on the bright side, it does mean that the films are more likely to remain in the memory. Film festival burnout is already bad enough for most cinephiles – when paired with a blitz of shorts, it gets even worse.
As such, some have already slipped away into the fading memory. I struggle to recall much about Two (UK, Kenneth O’Toole, **), Something About Alex (Netherlands, Reinout Hellenthal, **) or Michael Joseph Jason John (USA, Scott T. Hinson, **), not because they were bad films. They were all professionally put together, with perfectly solid craft and acting behind them. But they just left a very small impression. It happens.
Yet, beyond that, it must be said that overall standard is exquisitely high. It’s rare to find films at Iris that look amateurish in any way. Those that can stand out from an already busy crowd are certainly doing something right. Of the Best British Shorts programme, which constituted much of this writer’s viewing, there were plenty of exceptionally strong films.
Lehenga (Nathaliya Syam, ***) and Crashing Waves (Emma Gilbertson, ****) were both very short shorts of under five minutes. The former dealt with the issue of transgenderism and sexuality in British-Indian communities in a brilliantly succinct and effective way, where it didn’t say much but say it very efficiently. The latter was a dance film, exploring same-sex relationships through a beautifully shot and choreographed performance from its two leads. It caused me to wonder why dance as a genre and a way of movement isn’t used more often in films. It is after all, more inherently visual than theatre, but outside of musicals, with their own stagey restrictions, it is used remarkably little to actually explore emotional responses in an integrated way into the narrative. Once you exclude films in which the main characters are dancers or musicians (The Red Shoes, All That Jazz, Black Swan), the list is even shorter. Only Beau Travail by Claire Denis and pieces of the brilliant career of Denis Lavant really apply, to the best of my knowledge. Filmmakers, let’s have more of this please.
The first block of British shorts, themed around Family and Faith, had probably the greatest amount of stylistic variety. There was the previously mentioned Lehenga, but it also featured two of the best shorts of the festival; Courted (Andres Heger Bratterud, ****) and Wren Boys (Harry Lighton, ****). Wren Boys, as some of you may know, won the Buzz Audience Award, selected by the public, and it’s easy to see why it plays well with cinema-goers.
It looks stunning for one thing, shot on gorgeous, grainy, 16mm, a rarity these days but even more so in a short film. It has elements of a thriller to it – there’s an air of mystery to begin with, and there’s a superb fakeout. It tells the story of a priest (Lalor Roddy) who drives with his nephew to prison in County Cork. I won’t spoil more than that, as the way Lighton works the reveal is superbly-crafted. The dialogue is excellent, revealing so much of the characters’ background in little tics of speaking habits and attitude, to which the performances are the cherry on the cake. Roddy is masterful. One of Ireland’s most respected theatre actors, here he creates a completely full character in very few movements, so little effort. I initially thought he may have been an amateur who was mostly playing himself, and that is no small praise.
Courted tells the story of an aging Jehovah’s Witness who, whilst going door-to-door, stumbles into the marital home of his secret lover. One thing leads to another, and soon his fellow Witnesses find out about his “sinful urges” as they call it. It is heart-breaking watching the protagonist Stuart (Nigel Anthony) struggle between his honest human desires and his faith, the very specific support network that the Witnesses have provided him over his long life, and his need for passionate human interaction. At his age, it would be near-suicide to give up such a support network, leaving him adrift. By being honest about this reality, Courted is in turn one of the most powerfully human films in the festival.
The other two blocks of British shorts, Queer Now and Queer Then, had plenty of other stories on other, but the programming for these didn’t feel quite as cohesive as with the first block. Queer Now had Crashing Waves, as well as two other very good films in Bleach (Jesse Lewis Reece, ***) and Ladies Day (Abena Taylor-Smith, ***). The former tells the story of a trans boy in a grim Northern estate (I’m a foreigner here, I suck with accents, I think it’s Liverpool) trying to fit in who finds a home in a run-down boxing gym. It’s beautifully-shot and effective, although it does tend a little bit too much towards grim council estate realism that we’ve seen a lot of in British cinema through the years. Ladies Day is much breezier and gentler, about a visit to a hairdresser’s for a teenage girl thinking about coming out. In a few minutes, it conveys the challenges for LBGT+ people amongst Britain’s ethnic minorities with a solid dose of humour and a light touch. Occasionally, the dialogue is a little bit obvious, but the potential is clearly there for Taylor-Smith. The film was justifiably popular with the public too in our audience award.
Trigger warnings ahead, but only one film in this block was an outright dud (and truth be told, it was the only genuinely bad film I saw all week) and that was 46 (Joseph A. Adusenloye, *). It tells the story of a young man who throws a party, to which he invites a guy who he is clearly attracted to. The two have a chemistry, but the latter has a girlfriend. The young man opts to spike him, locks him up in his bedroom, and well…yeah. It just felt ugly, and a part of me questioned why such a story was being told at an LGBT+ festival. There are, obviously, horrible people everywhere, including the LGBT+ community, but there is no nuance, no other purpose to this nasty story. It wouldn’t have looked out of place as one of those ‘gay danger’ propaganda ads from the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Queer Then, the final block of docs, concluded with a series of documentaries, which were all very straightforward. The best for me was Bachelor, 38 (Angela Clarke, ****). With empathy and honesty, it tells the story of Bryan Bale, a Cardiff local who ended up in London in the ‘60s, and the story of the love of his life. I heard more than one or two tears being sniffled, choked back, or wiped away during this exceptional short, including my own. It just goes to show what sheer human empathy can do to you.
Queer Then also had Beyond (There’s Always a Black Issue Dear) (Claire Lawrie, ****), a collage-like piece detailing the many experiences of growing up gay and black in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The film’s interlocutors, many of whom have made a significant cultural impact on the UK, were all engaging speakers. If the film can lose its focus at times, it makes up for it in character, humour and prescience, telling the story of a group of people who can rightly claim to have been ignored by other historians of Britain’s 20th century social movements. Not my personal favourite of the British shorts, but certainly a deserving winner amongst the jury.
It’s difficult to really nail down much else of what I’ve seen of the shorts. The War Room (Israel, Ben Hantankt, ****) was a difficult, abstract but utterly bewitching exploration of masculinity and queerness in the context of conscription in the Israeli Defence Force. Pre-Drink (Canada, Marc-Antoine Lemire), about a gay guy and his trans woman best friend was touching and sensual. It’s a brave film to make and an exceptionally difficult balancing act. What could have been exploitative, even pornographic, is a heartfelt exploration of friendship and the lines of attraction. Sometimes, we’re attracted to something, we want to explore it, and we cannot explain why. I think Pre-Drink is honest about that.
Three Centimetres (UK/Lebanon, Lara Zeidan, ****) was a fascinating one-take short. A worthy winner of the Iris Prize (even if, again, it wasn’t my personal favourite), it managed to convey the complexity of a close teenage female friendship group, and the way sexuality can change the dynamics of such a group, for better or worse.
If pushed for an outright favourite short, it has to be Mrs. McCutcheon (Australia, John Sheedy, ****). A young trans girl arrives at a school to a mixture of befuddlement and confusion from classmates, save for one helpful teacher and an Aboriginal boy. The boy and Mrs. McCutcheon bond immediately over their outsider status, despite the pressure of the school principal, school bullies and Mrs. McCutcheon’s mum for her to conform. The film is endearingly sweet and care-free but packs a smart underlying punch. There’s a plentiful hint of Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki in the film’s dry humour, response to authority figures, and empathy for the underdog. Full of charm and lightness, Mrs. McCutcheon is precisely the type of fimmaking that makes you leave the cinema with a spring in your step, and even with a hardened cynic and professional grouch like me, hope for the world.
words Fedor Tot
An overview of Iris is available here
Reviews of the features here
