R&A Shorts: Trailblazer Shorts

Directed by Mai Zetterling, The War Game is a silent black-and-white catch-me-if-you-can film about young boys at war. At first the film follows, with a playful, documentary touch, as children play over the ownership of a gun, but gradually the stakes get higher, as the pursuit leads them ever closer to the roof of the building – and its edge…

In her film At the Lőrinc Spinnery, Márta Mészáros gives the women working at the spinnery space to open up about their lives. The women are frank about their finances and working conditions but also share their hopes for the future. This year’s festival’s unexpected hit song, the Hungarian folk-pop tune “Csillag Hajnalka”, a socially critical song about a decent woman who was a good mother and rarely cried, provides the background music for our peek at the lives of these women.

Directed by Chantal Akerman and Samy Szlingerbaum, Le 15/8 depicts mindscape of Chris Myllykoski, a Finnish student living in Paris in the 1970s. Her day is followed in still life scenes, in which we witness mundane events such as her eating bread or browsing her handbag. Simultaneously we hear Chris’s inner monologue flowing from her consciousness, bouncing in focus from dogs jumping on her to the strange looks she gets on the metro. Narrative and picture weave hypnotically together in their own rhythm; the loneliness of living abroad becomes connected to the gaze searching for the last crumb of bread.

Jimi Rosling (translated by Herman Tikkanen)