Amidst the furor of the Weinstein scandal, the same-sex marriage debate, and the general unruly state of the world, short films are fast becoming the strongest means of sending out a punchy message…Â
They say that whatever life throws at you, whatever dramas it can conceive, someone somewhere has written a song about it. At the moment it seems that all of life’s major dramas aren’t being made into chart-toppers, but taking to the screen as hard-hitting shorts instead. The misogynistic and homophobic state of the world is currently the ‘it’ theme, with filmmakers flocking to produce shorts that in 6 minutes create all the feels of a 90-minute feature.
Earlier this year the spotlight was devoted to In a Heartbeat, a gorgeous animated short about homosexuality in the schoolyard. The film, created by media students Beth David and Esteban Bravo, depicts the story of young Sherwin who has a crush on a classmate. His secret is threatened when his heart jumps from his chest and chases down his crush, revealing his sexual orientation to a judgmental schoolyard. After just two days of being on YouTube it had received over 8,000,000 views, hundreds of positive comments, and even fan art tributes. Appearing when the same-sex marriage debate flared up again, the Pixar-esque feature proved to be hugely poignant and struck home for a lot of people. And it wasn’t just in the feels department that the movie shone! Of course there were negative opinions expressed amongst the tears and mounds of positive feedback, but in a funny twist these criticisms only worked to highlight the film’s message further, turning the anonymous online trolls into the voices of the character’s judgmental peers. And all of this from a student film under 5 minutes long!
Image credit: YouTube
It’s almost as though there’s some omniscient force guiding the hands of artists to not only imitate life, but point out where it’s screwing up. Now amidst the #Metoo campaign, the Weinstein scandal, and the fact that sexism and misogyny are reportedly the biggest problems in the world, filmmaker Charlotte Wells has created a horrifying short just in time for Halloween. Her film Laps follows a young woman who gets pinned on a crowded subway by a man with no sense of personal space! In what feels like the longest train ride ever, this 6-minute feature creates a mounting sense of dread with every passing second as it pushes a hard truth to the surface: we don’t always recognise sexual assault! Environments and circumstances dictate the nature of a traumatic experience, often wrongly. One would think that a crowded train full of witnesses would prohibit sexual assault, but it doesn’t because of the magnitude of the word. And that becomes the real villain of Wells’ film. To bystanders, the woman is not being assaulted, she’s merely being accidentally pinned and poked by a fellow commuter. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
We know that art imitates life, and the short film is fast replacing the song as the hottest means of spreading messages about where life is screwy. In a Heartbeat and Laps hammer home their lessons by creating the feels of a polished Hollywood drama in a bite-sized space of time. Both films cut out dialogue completely and let the action speak for itself while music and silence is employed to up the sweetness or suspense. In a Heartbeat’s animation beautifully depicts the naturalness and innocence of homosexuality, while Well’s jagged close-ups and out of focus shots foster all the anxieties of a horror movie.
Image credit: Fast Company
While it’s good that we have a powerful means by which to spread these messages, it’s awful that such good examples of talent and art should springboard from horrific societal problems. We can only hope that the film’s messages are being received and acted upon!
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