Sundance UK Shorts

Short films uk review

Giraffe. (dir. Caleb Femi)

it’s 2010, and I’m working in a South London college with the highest percentage of black students in the UK. I work in the library.

Kamani is a student. This is a typical conversation

You’re a racist!

Sigh. why am I racist today, Kamani

You won’t let me take this book out

I will let you take this book out when you bring back bullet boy

I did get back, bullet boy.

No, you bought a bullet boy with these “Yu gi oh” cards and no disc.

Sir, I was busy.

Well not revising. Because you would already have the book

Sir! I got the exam in an hour.

Fine. I would renew the bullet boy with the box. He would grin.

But I’m keeping the cards until the DVD comes back.

WHAT!

I would get upset if we were a library, and all I had to deal with was kids who wanted bullet boy and yu gi oh. It’s now 2023. Thinking of good times and how hard they were and are for some students. I should have reframed my thinking better. I’m curious what Kamani is doing with his time now, hanging with his mate Sola and having a family and a job. But if you only have the minor card at times. He should have been left to play it out he likes. The film’s duo have a great sense of camaraderie and taking gentrification to the psychosphere; it’s a great sense of where things are going culturally. Warm, poignant and on one level, ‘invasion of the identity snatchers’ and on another, what is progress and the dilution of class politics? It hits home what is happening in the here and now. Integration or assimilation? Cultural curbing or growth? Worth looking out for.

Christopher at Sea (Tom CJ Brown)

As I type this, not far from the cinema is the trans pride and Allies march from Trafalgar Square. As a cis straight ‘vanilla’ (I like boobs, she has boobs, I like ‘She’s’ and ‘She is a she she’  and she’s a she with boobs?…GET IN!), it’s straightforward for my peers and me to think what is it now! which letter.?Another fucking colour! 

The reality is the anxiety and self-doubt with the world around us hits so heavily and hard when it comes to sexual awakening and societal and self-acceptance. Enter Christopher. A lonely soul travelling as a passenger on a cargo ship. It is gleefully animated with impressionism, passion and colour of the emotional spectrum. We can’t help but feel his anxiety, lust, infatuation and neurosis. The ending leaves one with so many questions and an animated heartache that it has left me with. It goes your adrift, but it’s exhilarating waters.

White Ant (Shalini Adnani)

My father and UNcles are many who came from India and another part of South Asia in the 60s—and made families here in the 70s. Now I’m pushing half a century, and they are heading towards the bic cricket with a K 100. They are going ‘back’ for the reasons in this film. It is trying up a property; it’s sorting out residencies. It’s ensuring the children of those who stayed are provided for more than arranged, at best-arranged marriage, and able to leave as people of independence in the diaspora. But I’ve seen the effect on each of my uncles. It’s pathos. They love us; this is their home. But there is an undercurrent of childhood becoming, at best, ephemera in their lifetimes. It’s a film about vistas and the economy. The affluent patriarch we witness in Denzil Smith portrays that classic stiff upper lip of emotional repression of a generation of men I knew growing up, and Asian men, frankly more so. But as the tok talking of the ants undermines this bravado of his. It comes to show his regret with nothing but compassion for the nature of cultural tides and evolution. A fond visit to the past in the here and now. Do seek this film for the big screen vistas and sound.

Birdsong

‘Mix tapes’ ‘paying for texts’ ‘little notes in class you leave with boxes do you like me, yes no, or fuck off, Rob Im a successful 35-year-old science teacher and a lesbian and your 14 and all the sweaty”..ahem. It’s easy to think of these things as the passionate patina of life. On one level, they are as essential to us as the feeling of first love we had at the time, also how they sculpt the narration of our passion and intertwine with our world. In Laos, this is shown through the songs and calls of songs across vast distances. Related via an oral tradition, the effort of all involved escalated the love in this film. We see a culture and a passion that one could also see decay in the digitised age. It’s a great picture of a cultural flux with the technology we all live with. But by placing it in such a landscape and soundscape, it validates its sense of being in the cinema and gives a greater understanding of the scope of what is happening around us