I wasn’t as proactive as I had hoped for this festival; running on a budget and knew I was going to fatigue quite quickly in the same manner that I was back in SxSW – falling asleep through a handful of films! I bought a Matinee pass which allowed me entry into 6 films with a few restrictions (daytime screenings). Couldn’t get all the films that I wanted, but managed to narrow it all down to the following six plus a few extra things:
- Cutie & the Boxer
- Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
- Shorts: Let There Be Light
- Powerless
- Inside Out: The People’s Art Project
- Shorts: Character Witness
- Lil Bub & Friends
- The Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination
Lil Bub and Friends was streamed online and it was quite cute. The biggest take-out was the fact that a meme manager existed!
The Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination was a pretty cool experience; you can’t go wrong with free drinks and popcorn, crowd-sourced transmedia projects and telling more than you should to a cute little robot. We’ll need to follow up as to whether any of our rantings made it to the final cut for the robot documentary project. Kudos to Bombay Sapphire!
And my favourites as below:
Cutie & the Boxer – a look into the relationship between oddball artist Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko. Even in their post-screening Q & A, there is still a lot of passive-aggressive, yet, endearing bickering between the two.
Powerless – a documentary exploring a power supply and theft problem in a large city in India; looking at both sides – from the MD of the power-supply company, to the local thief-bro who specialises in hooking people up with free electricity in the neighbourhood.
Shorts: Character Witness – this was an intense 7 shorts, with the theme centralising around death and destruction. It was particularly emotionally-draining, but insightful – cryogenics, photography-recovery, post-death belongings and surfboards were all discussed at some point.
Plasmo and the Infinite Sadness 