No film festival is immune from problems, as the late withdrawal of Sam Taylor-Wood from her appearance at the 17th Bristol Encounters International Film Festival demonstrated. When your schedule only encompasses four prime-time evenings, losing one headline act to fate is a blow.
But the damage was never likely to be crippling, partly because the great Bruce Robinson appeared as planned and swore for Britain, but mainly since Encounters’ vitality comes direct from the programme rather than the cast list – even though the mechanics of the short film industry mean that you can watch big chunks of that programme on YouTube and Channel 4.
Encounters remains the best late-year antidote to multiplex fatigue for audiences and critics alike, although its success means that change is now afoot: the festival is uprooting to a September slot next year, to better exploit its role as an accredited event for both the Academy Awards and European Film Awards.
Signs of a change in climate appeared on-screen at regular intervals too, every time the logo of the now-defunct UK Film Council turned up attached to films in the British section of the programme. In its last days the former funding body fuelled some very familiar Brit-film situations: familial strife on housing estates, recovering addicts getting back on their feet, children in care, strained relationships, spousal strife.
On the other hand, these stories are a performer’s goldmine, and everywhere you looked the acting talent was tough enough to leave a mark. Vicky McClure, so good in This is England as the flinty wide-eyed Lol, sinks her teeth into the lead role in Cathy Brady’s mother-daughter story Rough Skin like a terrier. Similar lightning strikes in Rob Sorrenti’s Hollow, courtesy of Morven Christie as a pregnant junkie caught in her own cycle of misery and failure. Fearless, the pair of them.
The festival jury ultimately gave its British prizes to conspicuously softer fare. Jam Today, Simon Ellis’ delicate tip-toe around a boy’s first hormonal stirrings while stuck on a houseboat with his parents, has what you’d call a winning lead performance from Oliver Woollford, who manages to make all the spinning cogs in his young mind visible at once. A bright future playing young men caught on the horns of dilemmas awaits.
The Brief South West award went to the downright poetic I’ll Tell You, Rachel Tillotson’s visually lush story of lost friendship. The film is fine in every way, but for LWLies’ money the stand-out local film was Maria from Paul Dudbridge, about a young prostitute who bumps into a familiar face in the classroom. It’s a scrupulously honest treatment of a potentially salacious issue and Amy Burnett, once of TV’s Skins, is great as Maria, all tough outer hide and asymmetrical eyebrows.
Big names and bigger production values cropped up regularly. Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham re-formed their partnership once again in Pitch Black Heist for director John Maclean and looked supremely comfortable in each other’s company, while Bill Bailey managed to offend the machines that control the world in Car Park Babylon and paid the penalty.
But the most drastic crush of big-film values into small-film dimensions turned up in the International programme. Jonathan Caouette’s All Flowers in Time sees the Tarnation director stride into David Lynch territory and set up camp for a rip-roaring 14 minutes. A swirling mosaic of half-meanings, near-clarity and partial-sense in which a TV signal may or may not be tearing reality in half, the film gets the most out of Chloë Sevigny’s ineffable big-screen charisma and drips with atmosphere while it sets about penetrating your head. If you ever yearned to see Sevigny’s face unfold into a scary screaming fanged vagina, now is your chance.
Caouette’s film seems unlikely to win the audience award at any festival outside the Eighth Dimension. At Encounters that prize went instead to Las Palmas, a very funny and only mildly disturbing piece of physical comedy from Sweden’s Johannes Nyholm, which has already been a viral YouTube hit for months. It’s the one where a toddler trashes a bar staffed by marionettes. Or it’s a nifty satire of human behaviour and social norms, depending on your perspective. Either way it ensures Nyholm’s young family a lifetime of mild notoriety. Hopefully they manage to keep the therapist bills to a minimum.
The best foreign short of all was an unsung Spanish entry called Shall we dance? by Daniel Azancot, which effortlessly plays with any number of conventions. A pair of lovers, one of them the fiery Marta Nieto in various states of undress, get into a lovers’ tiff that becomes progressively and predictably highly strung to the point where gunfire breaks out. And then the film just rewinds and has another go, this time with the pair launching into a dance routine backed by Dion and the Belmonts before floating off into the sky under a handful of technicolour balloons. Glorious.
Encounters places animation on an equal footing with live-action shorts, a pairing that emphasises just how much freedom there can be in both forms of film-making. And since animation can delve deeper and more rapidly into the human condition than live action when it wants to, the impact of some animations was every bit as wrenching as the social realism going on in the British Shorts programme.
The Gloaming from the French collective called Nobrain has a benevolent god jump-starting a world from primordial goo, and then watching as his creations evolve into brutish multi-tentacled dictators with more than a hint of Gerald Scarfe about them. The god looks like a cross between a bearded hipster and a young Steve Jobs, and the whole thing riffs on the ‘Godfellas’ episode of Futurama, but it doesn’t lack for impact.
Stronger pacifist fare was Enrique Garcia and Rubén Salazar’s Daisy Cutter, a ferocious anti-war parable which culminates in the image of a schoolgirl running from a nuclear fireball and smiling. Not a sight to be forgotten in a hurry.
But both were left in the shade by Gregorio Muro’s Who Lasts Longer, a 12-minute exploration of reckless youth, brain-damaged children, parental helplessness and existential grief from which at least one audience member emerged on hands and knees.
For more information visit encounters-festival.org.uk
Encounters International Film Fesitval 2011 – Round Up (text) by Tim Hayes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
