GSFF: After We Left
Emily Garbutt kicks off our series of articles on the fantastic short films from this years Glasgow Short Film Festival.
In ‘After We Left’ a selection of five international short films explores themes of trauma, memory and history, often in the context of war and death (cheery stuff). Sometimes this takes the form of characters creating their own history, of taking control of their memories in order to live with their trauma, while other films reckon with how you can recount a trauma that isn’t your own.
In the first of these films, 3 Logical Exits, we follow Reda, a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon. He sits, looking straight ahead, speaking to someone behind the camera. These black and white one-on-one interviews are intercut with colour footage of his past. Unlike the interviews, Reda is always with other people in these clips. He is more lively, emotive, chatty. The titular ‘logical exits’ refer to ways out of the refugee camp: drugs, joining a faction, or emigration. “There is no return, otherwise it’ll be in a coffin,” he tells the camera. Despite the emotive themes, the film feels a little disconnected from the subject – the audience feels too far removed from Reda and his experiences. 3 Logical Exits tries to communicate someone else’s trauma from the outside, but doesn’t feel it breaks through the surface.
Eliane Bots’ Cloud Forest explores what it means to learn about a loved one’s trauma secondhand so as not to make them experience it again: “I’m not going to open a wound they’ve already closed,” one of the characters says. The film follows five girls as they take the viewer on a journey through their parents’ experiences of war in Yugoslavia. The visuals are fairytale-like; at no point do we see any images of war and what we see is juxtaposed with what we hear. The girls listen back to voice recordings recounting these experiences; they sit in darkness with only the light from their phone screens illuminating their faces. They whisper to each other, and the viewer is excluded – it is a touching display of closeness and intimacy, of sharing a shared history.
The Heavy Burden is set in the Turkish city of Mardin and starts and ends from the viewpoint of a donkey. It is, ultimately, a film about donkeys – the animals have played a big part in the city’s marketing of itself as a tourist destination, and director Yılmaz Özdil said he wanted to use these “Orientalist objects” to tell a story of “real” life in the city. The film centres around Avdel and his family – his nephew Silah and his grandson Jiro. The city council has said their donkey must be retired from its service as a refuse collector, and Avdel will lose his salary unless he can find a new donkey in a matter of days. Silah, a Syrian refugee, wishes to return home to bring his own donkey to Mardin. It’s an intimate, bittersweet story that retains glimmers of hope despite itself.
The last two films in the selection are animated. The penultimate The Physics of Sorrow recounts a man’s childhood in Bulgaria and his emigration to Canada in adulthood. His memories are presented as objects and ephemera, like a still-life or a time capsule of his own making – the theme of creating your own history in order to live with your trauma reoccurs. The animation is beautiful and the form and the subject work well together – the animation is constantly moving, and the movement is like the hazy motion in dreams.
The final film, Something to Remember, is something a little different – a Swedish musical in which the characters are animals clad in knitwear. The song they sing was originally a lullaby, but the lyrics are new and dark. It’s jarring and strange and a little uncomfortable, but I liked it a lot. After so many films dealing with the trauma of the human experience, it seems fitting to end on a more absurd note – what is life, if not completely absurd?
Social Media:
The Heavy Burden director: @ylmzozdil (Instagram)
The Physics of Sorrow director: @TheodoreUshev (Twitter)
Something to Remember director: @niki_lindroth_von_bahr (Instagram)
