Film
Edinburgh's forgotten festival
Published 29 August 2007
From 15-hour Fassbinder epics to IRN-BRU adverts, Edinburgh's film festival is unlike any other
This year’s live festival line-up included everything from opera by the Windsor Group to Kalki the Hula Girl (better than she sounds – a kind of gymnastic/burlesque/slapstick hybrid), but I’ve spent more time at film screenings than anything else, especially shorts.
That might sound like the festive equivalent of taking your own sandwiches to a restaurant, but there are just as many films here that you won’t find outside of the festival circuit as there are stand-up shows and theatre productions.
It’s pretty obvious why some of these films won’t get wider distribution deals: for example, Fassbinder’s 15-and-a-half hour epic Berlin Alexanderplatz may be a masterpiece, but sitting in front of a screen for the equivalent of two working days back-to-back is just not everyone’s cinematic cup of tea.
Likewise, the appetite for IRN-BRU: Phenomenal Advertising, a collection of Irn-Bru advertising campaigns and "exclusive behind-the-scenes material" might be quite limited outside of Edinburgh (where, incidentally, it outsold Tarantino’s Death Proof).
But why don’t short films get wider release? Shown in programmes of six to 10, your ticket is just as good value for money as one for a single feature, but outside of film festivals, and the monthly Future Shorts events shown in London, Edinburgh and a few other European capitals, you don’t often get the chance to see them. The assumption seems to be that shorts will be "arty", either too serious or too weird for mainstream release.
But that’s a catch-22 argument: part of the reason they tend to be leftfield is that they’re only ever screened at festivals and arthouse venues. And even so, shorts are not necessarily inaccessible: the films I’ve watched over the past few days have tackled everything from the familiar – losing a lover, bike theft, the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay – to the, er, less familiar, such as Bolivian female wrestlers and the effect that turning into a samosa can have on your love life.
There have been animations, documentaries, surreal visual art projects and parodies of Japanese infomercials, from all over the world, even the film-industry-deprived wilds of Scotland. The notion that the phrase "short film" tells you anything about what you’re about to see apart from its length is ridiculous, and it’s a real shame there aren’t more opportunities for filmmakers to produce shorts and get them screened. I’m convinced there’s a larger market for some of these films than they’ll ever receive.
By far the best short so far was Dog Altogether, 17 minutes of Ken Loach-like Glaswegian grit written by Paddy Considine and starring Peter Mullan, about a powerless and lonely man inflicting his anger on anyone weaker than himself.
I’d love to write a longer review, but then what would be the point? Unless you go to a festival you’ll probably never get a chance to see it.
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