Short Film Corner: In Competition

This year's selection of short films in competition hails from the world over: from Israel to Brazil, Latvia to Australia, there is a little bit of everything in these intelligent, poignant short films.

Edward Housden's Australian short Muscles tells the oft-recounted story of the "other" sibling--Richard's older sister Millie dreams of being a body-builder. With the rest of the boys in her neighborhood, she amuses herself with typically "male" activities: smashing the windshield of an old car, tormenting Richard's pet donkey, learning to shoot a rifle. Richard, on the other hand, feels left out: as a young boy, he has hardly come to terms with his masculinity, but he is overshadowed by his older sister. Through strong visuals with very little dialogue: Millie rips the head off a Barbie doll and tapes it to the body of a body-builder doll, Richard holds his sister's ruffled skirt in front of his waist in the mirror, Richard's pain and confusion is made apparent to the audience. In the culminating moment, Richard drops his sister's doll taped to a brick over an overpass, smashing the windshield of another car. As he flees back to his pet donkey, his mix of emotions--confusion tinged with anger and a sense of displacement--resonate with the audience. The young actor playing Richard is especially poignant in his relatable conveyance of the difficult combination of emotions that comes along with being a preteen.

In a completely different vein, Jurgis Krason's To Swallow a Toad, a social statement is made through an animated film without dialogue. This Latvian film recounts the story of two groups of people--"rounds" and "squares." The squares take advantage of the intellectual rounds, making a habit of cutting off their ears and causing them other bodily harm. The rounds are able to put up with this treatment thanks to their ability to swallow toads. However, as the film progresses, the rounds become more and more dependent on the toads--a sort of drug that makes them apathetically content--which leaves the squares free to take even further advantage of them, creating a dance club in the living room of the story's central family of rounds and even raping the wife/mother character. The rounds give up everything without a fight, descending into the sewars, where they spend their entire days consuming toads, losing their humanity until, finally, they undergo true metamorphosis, becoming deranged versions of the monsters they have been consuming until, finally, they consume one another and themselves. An interesting commentary on apathy and the means people employ to arrive at this state instead of pragmatically confronting their problems, this film employs an interesting sketched style of animation to relay an important point of view.

From Brazil comes Marcia Faria's Estaçao--the story of Inès, a young would-be actress who finds herself living in a bus station in Sao Paolo in order to persue her dreams. The beauty of this film comes from the sheer reality of it: Inès' problems are not huge or life-changing, but rather the day-to-day trials one would assume would arise while living in a bus station. Inès runs to answer a pay phone where her mother has been calling her, thinking that she is living in an apartment. She spends her evening trying to find places to sleep--on the floor, on a chair, in an arcade. She "showers" with handiwipes in the bathroom stall, and her closet is a luggage locker with an orange plastic-topped key. This short seems to tell the story of a normal girl's life--it is easy to forget the circumstances of her situation for a moment.

The official shorts in competition this year at the Cannes film festival is as follows:

Chienne d'histoire, Serge Avédikian

Ezra Rishona, Yarden Carmin

Estaçao, Marcia Faria

Muscles, Edward Housden

Mickey Bader, Frida Kempff

To Swallow a Toad, Jurgis Krasons

Rosa, Monica Lairana

Maya, Pedro Pio Martin Pérez

Blokes, Marialy Rivas

- Emily Monaco