BFI London Film Festival Short Film Reviews - Create Strand

Here are some quick takes on short films showing in the Create strand of this year's BFI London Film Festival.

#21XOXO is a wonderfully imaginative and scarily spot on satire on dating in the digital age. The animated short by Sine and Imge Ozbilge is really visually inventive, melding social media logos onto its protagonist, and showing in a last act twist how even when she flips to "real" video footage her self-image is mediated by this online distortion. Great 80s-style synth pop soundtrack too. Running time 9 minutes.

ALGO-RHYTHM is a 14 minute Senagalese hip-hop musical that bizarrely, wittily and completely speaks to life in Brexit Britain and Trump's America! It embodies social media in a slick hip-hop artist who boasts how he knows everything about us and can harvest our votes with the most subtle of methods. Like #21XOXO and SWATTED the director cleverly intersperses live action with graphically distorted cyber-visuals that suggest a disturbing mix between the real and the online.  The resulting film is like the funky imaginative PSA we all needed in 2015.

SWATTED is a really disturbing but brilliantly imagined 21 minute short about cyber-harassment in the online gaming world by Ismael Joffroy Chandoutis.  I had no idea what swatting was, but apparently it's when cyber bullies call the real world police with a fake threat in order to have a SWAT team break into and generally scare the shit out of their victims.  This strikes me as horrifically juvenile and such a waste of police time, as well as clearly traumatic to the victims. Chadoutis shows this phenomenon by inter-cutting chatroom dialogue as swat attacks are actually happening, with video game footage that seemingly depicts the attacks. However, rather than taking the footage as is from Grand Theft Auto, he kind of hollows it out into a creepy surreal wire-frame world. We also get voiceover from swatter victims.  The results are really beautifully imagined and surreal, and still so human and disturbing.  It's truly a profound and provocative piece showing real technical skill but also crucially the ability to balance that with deep emotion.

THE SASHA is a 20 minute film about the astronaut Charles Duke, who landed on the Moon with Apollo XVI and photographed its surface. Seeing all the old black and white photographs and colour video footage of the mission was an absolute treat. It makes the point that Duke failed to take a picture of the entire earth from space - an iconic photo taken during the next mission - however he WAS remembered for the family photo he left on the moon.  We also get some interesting stuff about the evolution of lunar photography.  But I could have really done without the pontificating narrator Tania Theodoru, especially about half way through the doc when it goes off into some kind of disquisition on the nature of the space. There's just a little too much indulgence in the final five minutes altogether, and I'm always nervous when directors (in this case Maria Molina Peiro) try to ascribe motive and reactions to people when they can't possibly know if that were the case.

London Film Festival Day 4 - KIDS + MONEY

KIDS + MONEY is a thirty minute documentary short by Lauren Greenfield about Los Angeles teenagers attitudes to money. In a series of disarmingly frank interviews teens from different income brackets discuss how far they think or worry about money and how far material possessions dictate their social status and happiness. The subjects range from a poor hispanic kid who seems thankful for what he little he has - after all he at least has food and a fridge - to a rich young girl whose parents have endless domestic staff but who has the self-awareness to feel bad when her best friend can't afford prom. In the middle we have the wannabes who dress above their income to impress - hassling their parents for new clothes so they can vamp like kids from The O.C. - thinking that popularity lies in looking good rather than being nice. Most frightening is the degree to which parents enable these habits, fuelling their kids' excesses. After all, they're as status obsessed even when they should be old enough to know the financial consequences.

The resulting documentary is tightly edited, scintillating viewing and by far the best thing I have seen in the festival to date. It's all the more relevant at a time when the world's market economies are in the midst of massive wealth destruction after an orgy of debt-fuelled excess.

KIDS + MONEY played Sundance and London 2008.

NORTHERN SOUL - Funnier than The Office; shorter too!

NORTHERN SOUL is a 30 minute film by director, Shane Meadows, the man behind the fantastic British movies A Room for Romeo Brass, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Dead Man's Shoes. It is a great little comedy, displaying the same kind of dead-pan uncomfortable humour that we find in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's TV series, The Office and Extras. The film features Toby Kebbell as the gloriously named Mark Sherbert. (Sherbert rhymes with Herbert, and I'm not sure if this also applies in the Midlands, but where I grew up, to call someone a "Herbert" was a great insult.) Anyhoo, Mark Sherbert is a skinny little short-ass who dreams of being a pro-wrestler. In a sort of Timothy-Treadwell-like state of delusion, he brushes aside the reality of his situation. He couldn't care less that he has never actually practiced wrestling with, like, a real opponent. After all, he tells the camera, Bruce Lee practiced on himself. And what's good enough for the Fist of Fury is good enough for Sherbert. Alls I can say, is that I have never laughed so much as when watching Sherbert run around in a tarzan outfit, nor felt so pained as when I watched him fight his first match. British humour does not come more black than this. All fans of Gervais and Spinal Tap should check this out.

NORTHERN SOUL is included as an extra on the DVD version of Meadow's movie DEAD MAN'S SHOES.