The festival had 21 short films in two sessions. I’m going to do longer posts for my favorites, and then summary reviews of the others over the course of the next week or two.
Three things kept occurring to me as I watched the various films, so I’m going to give them their own entries. More later on what, exactly, I mean by each of these:
Establishes world: How well does the film ground us in its reality?
Character leftovers: Take away the plot and is there anything left of these people? Could they be real people, in some way, or are they just puppets to carry out the plot?
Tells a story: These are short films, so the stories are correspondingly short, but there is a difference between a story - even a tiny one - worth telling and one that make you wish it were a better story.
To start with, my favorite of the festival:
Foxes (Here’s a trailer)
Lorcan FinneganA husband convinces his wife that they should buy a house in a new development, but the development went bust and they are now isolated. They can barely cover the mortgage, since her work as a photographer isn't going well. A pack of foxes is getting into the garbage and the wife is taken with them, eager to photograph them. She is drawn into their world and becomes feral. After she disappears, her husband is alone, but we know – and maybe he knows – that his wife has become one of the foxes.
Establishes world: Better than I could have imagined.
Character leftovers: We know how they came to be where they were and we can guess why they don’t just leave. There are only two characters, but they work.
Tells a story: The story is the setting, but it has direction as we watch nature — in the form of the foxes — take back the last of the houses from encroaching humanity.
“Where did they film that?” I asked my wife while we waited for the bus.
This is a film of its time. Over the last five years, we have heard and heard again of people stuck in houses they thought they could afford. We've heard about how neighborhoods empty out, and watched streets littered with For Sale signs.
"Foxes" turns all this up to eleven. We see a housing development abandoned, with brush growing up about the sidewalks and filling back yards. I wonder if Ireland is even worse than hard-hit places in the US. In the film, we don’t see other cars, we don’t see other people. The place is abandoned. In one scene, we see the outside of the couple's house as they turn off the lights, leaving the whole block dark.
So, we know what these people are doing here. The husband persuaded his wife that they needed to get in this great deal, be the first ones in the new housing development, right before the bottom fell out. And it makes sense that they stay. If they can’t afford to move, it must be super, super easy to cling to anything they still have, distracting themselves by nursing their resentments for each other.
And then the foxes circle in.
The foxes aren’t threatening as such. They go away when people are about. Like the brush growing in what should have been flower gardens, you can get rid of them, but they keep coming back.
The husband drives to some kind of job every day, but the wife can't get clients to come all the way out there for portraits. But the foxes let her take pictures. They welcome her.
We watch the wife go feral just like the rest of the neighborhood — and eventually become a fox while her husband just stumbles through his days. It’s not a twist ending that she transforms. By the time we get there, I was rooting for it to happen.
The only thing that was a little heavy-handed was a clue as to what happened to the wife — she had one blue and one green eye and so did the fox she turned into. I didn't think we needed that, but the filmmaker must have been afraid people wouldn't get it.
This was a fun and creepy film, easily the best of the festival.
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