Clapham International Film Festival
This was my first visit; I understand it will be a monthly event.
I have specific rules for short films, well, fundamentally, one.
If it’s shit, I won’t review it.
Also, the ability to avoid spoilers is so much more complex that I go for allegory. It’s simple in that every film I watch is something I have to relate to
This changes more if it’s independent. In big studios, I feel far more inclined to call out bobbins when I see them, but the sheer effort that goes into shorts means even if I don’t like it, I’ll swerve it in my comments. So it is with some delight that I enjoyed each of the films in this curation.
Making ends Meet (Dir. Anne Sophie_marie)
I recently visited two newlyweds. Old friends. They had bought an excellent middle-class flat with no middle-class jobs in Dulwich. It was classic, shiny but off, with the weird step in the middle of the kitchen and the leaning eaves in the toilet you could only use sitting down. But this is where the link between aspiration and reality always comes knocking. Making ends meet pushes this level to the forefront as we watch a burgeoning, somewhat flirtatious couple of teachers marking both their students and their lives over a relatively lean script that punches well above its expectations, bringing in a delicate glazed topping of Jeunet and Caro, while the litigious comedy and misunderstandings of Gilliam and Allen. The main course is served with a sparkling rose filter on the chemistry of the odd couple, but the finale, I have to admit, was slightly overcooked. It is an excellent starter, and I look forward to seeing the main course.
Blindspot (Soph Webberley)
When I was 14, I thought life would be easier if I were brown. It’s a small world school, and to my mind, I would still have white teachers making comments about my lack of writing skills and trying to stream me into special needs. But at least the black and Asian kids who bullied me for my passing paleness would perhaps let off of me. Then I think about being in my 40s and my dad driving me to and from the same school as a key worker; I can’t drive, we have one car, and Mum was part of the highly vulnerable shielding list. Neither Dad nor I wanted to be where we were, but there we were, bickering and commenting throughout the journey for every yard. Age doesn’t change that as we watch a father-daughter do the same thing while fielding many of the issues between themselves and today’s world that I didn’t have to. It’s caustic and warm and bitterly funny on so many levels. It shows how bullying can be repeated both within and without the home and how it sometimes takes a bit of perspective for families to grow rather than repeat and lift gear with incredible drive.
Down Down Down (Lily Rose Thomas)
More middle-class kids went to the local school when I was a child. When I think firstly, I’m thinking of the middle 80’s. Sam’s mum was Martha; her posh dad had an affair, so she and she lived on Abbeville Road just before it became a village. Even before Clapham and gentrification were words, it was seen as a posh street. I came to know her mum more when working in the office. Bitter and charming and funny and furious and then bitter again. She occasionally asked me to date Sam as I had a job and, being pudgy, wouldn’t run off with a youngster. Sam hesitated. I then saw Sam in a beer garden. Sloshed and happily miserable, I briefly said hello, and her eyes flickered. I was walking past. I was unemployed. Down, Down takes the bourgeois and Beaujolais aspects of Thai life and shows that it’s absolute and far from fabulous for the chaos it can bring. With the tippled triptych playing the mood swings to the hilt in front of uncomfortable beaus and couples, it’s a riveting character study that suits the strong impact a dramedy can have been more significant than the sum of its parts.
Not a mourning person.
My mother had a traditional catholic funeral. We had it during the pandemic, so we had a group of six, and some people who knew her locally came. It was relatively easy, given she had her last rites while still alive and had the faculties to talk me and Dad through what she wanted. A wake was not one of them. I remember a family friend once saying, “Who wants to pay for a stranger to drink a Guinees you paid to pour while leaning with his fucking elbow over your nose in the pub”. But I was familiar with the rent a mourn scene. Some cultures even have strippers, which I have instructed one friend to hire as a surprise pop-up if they outlive me, and a cousin to pay for flowers to say “ sexy boy” anonymously. He agreed.
If any of these seems absurd and unethical or a walk of fantasy, then you need this film. Focussing on professional funeral crashers, albeit for hire, we are given a fantastic voyage into the bittersweet comedy that funerals can bring and the turmoil that can come from nowhere during it. The swerve balls, highs, and lows within such a compact moment and the spiritual guide can only offer you a tampon or a pie. It is a film that may jar some unfamiliar, but I would say dive headlong in and let it swim over you with its energy and upheaval. It’s a wave worth surfing.
Room 20 Riachbros entertainment
I was a teen and tried to write an epic fantasy setting once. It was a very dark tower and a wandering man. Then, being the wandering young man of my 20s, I affected a fedora that in no way made me a journo or gunslinger, just chubby already with a moon face. But that ideal and question of outward search for self is Jungian and never changes. Room 20 brings this to the fore and is not so much cliche and craft. Building on every archetype and scoring to perfection on its hero’s journey. Mesmeric and meditative for fans of Outland and Samurai Jack, the team here has put their heart on their shawl with this one, and it shows within each digital frame. An excellent set of vistas and visitations for aural and visual that makes it one to seek out on the sharpest screen you can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVm5CWmXF_k
The Irish Indian Times. 
Leave a comment