MIFF 2023 - Best of Shorts
Melbourne International Film Festival has officially wrapped up, having boasted its 71st edition. This year's MIFF was again chock full of exciting international, local, and experimental films, in both feature and short format. And after weeks of browsing through the program, swapping sessions, making and re-making calendars, and watching screeners, I'd like to think I have a decent handle on some pretty cool short films.
Leading the Experimental Shorts block is, in my opinion, Cave Painting. Making use of photos of caverns, rock formations and, well, cave paintings, this is an intensely immersive art experience that blends digital trickery and stop motion into a tour-de-force of sound and texture. Lotus-Eyed Girl features some neat, sepia-toned imagery, but due to its brief six minute runtime, it fails to really connect. It's apparently based on the erotic poem Caurapañcāśikā, so maybe there's some context I'm missing, but I found the shot of pomegranates falling from a woman's mouth to be used far too repetitively and without any clear motivation beyond an attempt at being provocative. Then finally we have Blinded by Centuries, which is based on the Buddhist tale of Twelve Sisters, which winds up feeling more like an amateur student film that's trying too hard to be edgy but ends up coming off as more grating than anything.
Not included in this block of programming is AliEN0089, which was nevertheless quite experimental, blending POV shots with 3D rendered scenes to tell the story of a gamer who finds herself the target of malicious cyber attacks simply for being a woman playing a video game. However blunt its messaging may be, the form was quite well-utilised and despite being on the longer side at just over 20 minutes, it certainly didn't feel it. Likewise, Fredrik S. Hana's FROM.BEYOND pushes boundaries beyond its blend of manipulated real-world footage, mockumentary and practical effects trickery. Focusing on a world where alien contact has happened (not unlike an even bleaker take on District 9), the short takes first contact and turns it into first climax, earning its spot in the appropriately named WTF Shorts package.
In the animated category, there's Priit Tender's claymation Dog Apartment, which imagines a post-Soviet world where animal and utility are one: chickens with axes for heads, an apartment that barks, a fish in a violin case that drinks milk. Through this lens it recontextualises the way capitalism dominates our lives and art - showing up to work to dance for cows so they produce milk, to be paid in sausages so that you can feed your house. It's like Animal Farm, except the animals are the farm. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, yet even more enjoyable is Shackle, a Scottish stop-motion short that blends puppetry and real-world environments to dazzling effect. It's exactly the kind of escapist fantasy that I love, echoing Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal, with weird little creatures that look like a mix between a bird, a Furby and a goblin. The environmental photography is amazing, the occasional frame being intentionally overexposed, giving off the illusion that what we're seeing is actually flickering and sparking with magic.
Last but not least, the Fulldome Showcases were something else. Though I missed out on tickets to see Recombination on the Planetarium's wonderful 180° screen, I did get to witness -22.7°C in the comfort of my own home. Using electronic artist Molécule's texture-laden beats, which were apparently created using recordings from his time in Greenland, the short depicts a trip through the Arctic Circle, filled with 3D renders of glaciers, aquatic life and, eventually, the Northern Lights. The two I did manage to catch at the Planetarium were Trial and Biliminal, the first of which offers up a purely meditative space, first beginning in monochrome with a collection of particles. It was a fairly calming experience, though I felt it ran a bit long, without enough variety in the audio or visuals. Biliminal fared quite a bit better, as it seemed there was a more logical progression, soaring in ethereal planes before being plunged into darkness, obliterated by abrasive and distorted booms of bass.
Though I didn't get to catch some other highly anticipated shorts like Grain of Truth, Laberint Sequences, the XR-augmented virtual reality experience In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, or the Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke starring Strange Way of Life (not to mention all the others that may have slipped under my radar), this year has been a pretty big win for MIFF. I'm eager to try and catch more of these shorts as they become available, and even more eager to start the countdown till next year's festival.
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All of the shorts mentioned above screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, running in metro cinemas August 3-20 and online August 18-27.
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