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7:57 AM-PM
DIR: Simon Lelouch France, 11 min. Documentary
Director's Statement
On January 12th, 2007, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s best musicians, played one of the greatest classical masterpieces on a 1713 Stradivarius in the Washington subway.
Forty-five minutes later, over a thousand people had walked by him yet he received only a few dollars for his musical efforts.
On May 25th, 2009, his French counterpart, Renaud Capuçon, decided to take part in this film by interpreting Gluck’s masterpiece "La Mélodie d’Orphée" on a 1737 Guarnerius nicknamed "le Vicomte de Panette" on Line 6 of the Paris metro.
At the end of the day, over eighteen thousand people had passed him by and his final haul was an only few euros.
Two days later, he gave a sold-out concert at the prestigious Theatre des Champs- Elysées in Paris.
The History of Aviation
DIR: Bálint Kenyeres France/Hungary, 15 min. Live Action, North American Premiere
Director's Statement
The idea for this film started about three or so years ago. We were working on a script with writer Tamás Beregi, an old friend of mine from university with whom we have been writing a feature film for some time now that we are just about to finish... anyway, me and Tamás were in the middle of writing and I remember it didn't go too well that day. To ease the pressure, we took a 5-minute break. I was lying on the couch while he was pacing up and down the room, and I told him about a short film idea I had always wanted to make. It had nothing to do with the story of The History of Aviation, but using it as a starting point, in about 10 minutes there we were, hammering out the main idea of this film.
It was the story itself that drew me to the 1900's because, to be perfectly honest, in the beginning I was slightly apprehensive of making a movie in that period. I was wondering how this world of frocks and frills, picnics and pink-laced parasols would work visually. Personally, I am much more into the twenties and the thirties of the twentieth century, or even the First World War years; the feature film I am working on right now takes place in that era, in Berlin. While making The History of Aviation, I was consciously trying to tone down the schmaltzy, pretty-pretty world those frocks and frills would instantly evoke. With cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, we tried to make sure that we balanced this world with coldness and distance properly. This distance was also inherent in the story itself, and we enter the viewpoint of the mother and the little girl only. Everything else is shown and touched upon from the outside. Luckily for us, in this film the backdrop, Nature itself, is completely indifferent in the face of human concerns and tragedies. No sentimentality. You look around in a place like this and you realize you are worth no more than any pebble on the shore.
Moore Street Masala
DIR: David O'Sullivan Ireland, 6 min. Live Action, U.S. Premiere
Director's Statement
I was one of those Irish expat kids who grew up in the Middle East in the 1980’s. In our house Indian films were compulsory TV viewing on Friday nights. Arranged marriages, unrequited love, violence, death and slapstick comedy were part of everyday life and didn’t seem so unusual. Since that time Bollywood has gone global and there has been an explosion of films within the Indian Diaspora internationally. Moore Street Masala is perhaps part of that except it’s an Irish director doing his take on Indian cinema in a Dublin setting. What matters to me is that we have taken Irish culture someplace else and aspired to be part of the Bollywood/Indian cinema tradition. By the way, I have never known any films to be so singularly manic, innocent and incredible as those Friday night Indian films.
The Cage
DIR: Adrian Sitaru Romania/The Netherlands, 17 min. Live Action, North American Premiere
*Filmmakers expected
The Da Vinci Timecode
DIR: Gil Alkabetz Germany, 3 min. Animation, Student
Kavi
DIR: Gregg Helvey India/USA, 19 min. Drama, Student
*Filmmakers expected
Director's Statement
I was shocked to learn that 27 million people around the world are enslaved today. As I began to research and understand the extent of modern slavery, I knew that I had to make a movie about it. People had to know. Kavi is my USC thesis film. It’s a 19-minute fictional film about a young boy in India who wants more out of life than work… Kavi wants to play cricket and go to school, but instead he is forced to work in a brick kiln as a modern-day salve. Kavi will be the first fictional film of its kind to expose the reality of ‘bonded labor,’ a form of modern slavery. My goal is to reach at least 50,000 people with Kavi in the first year. The purpose is to motivate action through awareness. To such an end, I will collaborate with anti-slavery organizations that will link viewers to actual steps they can take to help end slavery. Additionally, this short film is the springboard to a feature length version for theatrical distribution. I hope you enjoy this story and are moved to action.
My Way
DIR: Veljko Popović Croatia, 7 min. Animation, North American Premiere
Director's Statement
This film is a adaptation of a book written and illustrated by Svjetlan Junakovic. The main goal during production was to animate and composite drawings in such a way to keep the original look of paintings as much as possible.
The Mourning of the Merry Stork
DIR: Eileen Hofer-Boutros Lebanon/Switzerland, 14 min. Live Action, North American Premiere
Director's Statement
The story is inspired by the interview I did of my father and mother a year ago in Geneva. They are now divorced but when my mother was pregnant with me they had to escape from the war in Lebanon in order to reach Switzerland where my father actually comes from. I did not want to fall into sentimentalism in this film. I just wanted to show some details of this day. After 33 years, my parents where not able to remember everything about this period it was nice to see how their perception was different. They remembered details without importance sometimes. The not moving camera and the passivity of the protagonists insist on the fact that they were not aware of the real importance of situation at that time. You always think that this could not happened to you. I wanted this story to happen in 1975 but also in 2006 (last war) it can be in Lebanon or somewhere else. It could be my parents or just some other parents.
Franswa Sharl
DIR: Hannah Hilliard Australia, 14 min. Live Action, North American Premiere
*Filmmakers expected
Director's Statement
Franswa Sharl is a story about a twelve-year-old boy who, on holidays with two families in Fiji reinvents himself as a French girl so he can enter the Miss Fiji beauty contest – much to his father’s dismay. This film is based on a true story and explores themes of identity, parental-child struggle and emerging sexuality. This story is framed in the foreign but colorful landscape of a Fijian resort in 1980.
The inspiration for the film came from a documentary I made about a gay marriage in South Africa. While interviewing Greg Logan’s family, the story of his childhood reinvention as Miss Fiji emerged. At the time he was focused on the revelation of his marriage to his family through the documentary, but I kept on his case until he agreed to work with me to develop a fictionalized account of his experience into a short drama script. I was captured by the charismatic and vibrant nature of the film’s lead character and the magical world of an exotic environment. I knew this would make a great short film!
This story appealed to me because it was warm, funny and real. I had made a lot of dark themed high drama short films and was very keen to make a film that was tonally light-hearted and entertaining but which also had an emotional depth to it. I knew that this would be a challenge but I felt that this was the perfect story to put to the test. Franswa Sharl has a fairytale feel to it. Although the darker side to the story relies on the underlying conflict of parental-child relations that to add to the tension and texture of the story, overall the mood of this film is uplifting and one that ends on a winning note.
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