Short and Sweet
Elizabeth Goerl
One late summer in 1981, a group of West Berlin underground art students claimed a small stretch of the Wall and re-christened it a movie screen for an evening, projecting their own shaky Super-8 films and slide shows. Later operating out of a rented warehouse loft and financing themselves with small change from behind the sofa, they organized Berlin’s first Super-8 film festival and unwittingly created what would later become one of the most important short film festivals in Europe.
The organizers of the Interfilm International Short Film Festival have long outgrown the days of photocopying the festival catalogue in the student union and stealing projectors for their subversive purposes, but their driving force remains the same: To give short film, a format still living a meagre existence in the shantytowns of Cinematropolis, the attention it is usually denied. In the course of this five-day shorts smorgasbord there are jury competitions, audience competitions, podium discussions, country focus programs, director retrospectives, film workshops, multi-media performances and parties. The festival venues are almost all in Berlin’s hip and happening Mitte distric, making travel on foot between programs convenient, as well as providing an opportunity to explore the central stomping ground of the city’s "in" crowd, where exclusive, alternative shoe stores and minimally decorated designer stores abound, punctuated by galleries, elegant restaurants, sushi bars and busy cafés.
Encompassing roughly one quarter of the 400 films shown is the festival’s main attraction, the International Competition (IC). In ten separate programs of six to twelve films apiece, grouped by theme or format, some of the best international short films compete for Interfilm "Short Awards." Some popular nominees this year were Flatlife (Jonas Geirnaert, Belgium, 2004), an animated study in life and neighborliness in an apartment complex with predictably thin walls, faulty wiring and needy inhabitants who don’t deny their urges to chuck household items from the balcony; the experimental Ku Ku (Rimantas Lucavius, Lithuania, 2005), a suspenseful interplay of structure and sound that ends much too fast, but with a good punchline; a bloody but brilliant rabbit-farm reverse documentary, .nijnok (Leo Wentink, Netherlands, 2004); and the especially poignant Jai (Ariel Zylbersztejn, Mexico, 2004), in which a young Jewish girl inquires about the numbers tattooed on her grandmother’s forearm and receives an honest but unterrifying answer.
However, while the films in the IC get the most attention, the competitions and special programs flanking it give the visitor a better idea of the wildly diverse cinematic possibilities of short film. This year the festival’s country focus programs were on Sweden, Spain and Poland. The Polish submissions were the most intriguing, with films like Fallen Art (Tomek Baginski, Poland, 2004), a disturbing but beautifully computer-animated short with a cryptic antiwar message, and the two retrospectives on experimental video artist Zbigniew Rybczynski. The first featured his early works from the 70s, Square, Take Five and Plamuz, perception-altering dream visions of colors and movements, devoid of any sort of linear narration, and the second showed works completed in the U.S. after 1980, including his music video masterpiece Imagine for John Lennon. Australia has a regular ambassadorship at the festival in "Waltzing St. Kilda," a selection of films from the St. Kilda Short Film Festival, as does Italy with the audience competition "Immaginale." This year it was complemented nicely by the program "A Brief History of Italian Animation," showing shorts by Signor Rossi creator Bruno Bozzetto, and takes on Snow White by Guido Manuli (also known as the Italian Tex Avery), circa 1980.
The festival expanded its children’s sector this year, presenting eight separate programs, three of which were competitions judged by a very selective children’s jury. For budding young film connoisseurs, there were also Polish and Swedish country focuses within the children’s program. My own sophisticated date, aged five, sat enthralled for an hour by smile-inducing shorts like Tom in the Woods (Andreas Hykade, Germany, 2004), wherein Tom, in search of wild strawberries to optimize his bread with honey (the untranslatable "Honigbrot") gets lost in the woods and makes friends with superbly coiffed lightning bugs, or Single Paper (Teng-Min Chang, Taiwan, 2005), a delicate, melancholy story of life in a paper jungle, where the Scissors Monster lurks behind staplers and pencil holders. The commercialized fodder produced by film industry bigwigs with their gigantic budgets and small towns of animators is no match for these tiny masterpieces.
For animation fanatics, the programs "AsiAnima" and "Recontres Audiovisuelles" featured original animation from Asia and France, respectively. The program "Reality Bites" focused on fiction/documentary hybrids that don’t conform to the conventional rules for their genres, and in an unexpected fusion of athletics and art, "Play-Off" showed a collection of shorts and TV ads on the beloved topic of soccer. The excellent skit Abseits! (Stephanie von Beauvais, Germany, 2004) finally solves the mystery of being in offside, while Defensiver Mittelfeldmann (Kyros Kikos, Greece, 2005) is a music video ballad sung in honor of the under-appreciated defensive midfield player.
All the films that are so strange that they defy categorization end up in the audience competition "Eject," which has attained cult status among adventurous Berlin moviegoers. The freak-show takes place at the former Socialist theatre, Volksbühne, where the festival organizers go to great lengths to present these mutant film orphans with fitting theatrics, including voting by hand-held mirror reflection, gaudy wig-clad moderators and intermission skits in Georgian (as in Georgia, formerly a part of the Soviet Union). And for those who aren’t satisfied just watching short films, the KinoKabaret/KinoBerlino filmlab provided energetic visitors with the opportunity to plan, film, cut and present short films in 48 hectic hours.
Apparently determined to keep up with the times, Interfilm hosted the first competition worldwide for short films shot with a cell phone during last year’s festival, the MicroMovie competition. It was a success, and as a follow up, selected filmmakers from that competition were invited to document this year’s festival in the same form. Visitors within the designated broadcasting zone could download the results to their cell phones with a Bluetooth receiver, along with the very first "visual festival journal," which alternately showed behind-the-scenes looks at the festival and reminded visitors of special programs happening each day. It all sounded a little too Jetsons-y, but after I watched a little movie on an otherwise so routine tool, it suddenly seemed very conceivable that these mini-movies could find a marketing niche in the cell phone universe.
By far my favorite program in the multitude was the spotlight/retrospective on the artist duo Phil Mulloy and Vera Neubauer. In Phil Mulloy’s latest animated series The Christies, a family of heads silhouetted against aggressively cheerful colors and speaking in absurd computer-voice monotones deliver razor-sharp social commentary, and Vera Neubauer’s graphic yarn-animation films star a dysfunctional cast of knitted rats who copulate, kill, seduce and endure spousal abuse, as well as a Little Red Riding Hood who thwarts the wolf’s evil plans before he gets anywhere near granny.
Throughout the festival week, members of the German short film fan community hobnobbed with shy, excited young filmmakers who were obviously new to the idea of getting so much attention for their work, and people of all ages from the general Berlin public, resulting something that is often absent from events revolving around art: a relaxed, friendly atmosphere. Though the festival has become as large and as internationally respected as it is, its organic beginnings can be felt throughout.
