R&A Shorts: Our Bodies, Ourselves

In the essay-style documentaries of the screening, the computer and phone screens serve as tools for thinking and the canvas for the story. These desktop documentaries of the meme generation, brimming with intertextuality and pop culture references, address questions of gender and body politics through the lens of personal experiences. Filmmakers put themselves on the line in these works, which delve into meta-levels and exert feminist media critique with a force.

Playful collage animation Obey, obey visualises the dress code and appearance regulations, such as rules about hair, set by the Japanese educational system for its students.

Getty Abortions examines how the media illustrates and frames articles about abortion. This cultural-historical study spans different eras and media products. The repetitive similarity of the stock images used starts to become amusing, but there is, of course, a serious side to it: the images carry significant political weight and influence the perceptions surrounding the issue.

In the energetically bouncing Xena’s Body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iPhone), filmmaker Occitane Lacurie quite literally puts her own body on the line. She embarks on a journey through period tracking apps, using them as a springboard to reflect more broadly on our bodily relationship with technology, eventually leading to explorations of video calls and doomscrolling.

The Mechanics of Fluids begins with a haunting discovery: a suicide note stumbled upon online, written by a man who identified as an incel – someone trapped in involuntary celibacy. Something about his words lingered with director Gala Hernández López, sparking this gripping and sharply observed exploration of digital capitalism and loneliness, the world of dating apps, and the sprawling, insidious network of the misogynistic manosphere.

Annu Suvanto