Review: Future Shorts Festival

There are many, many terrible short films. If anyone has ever had the misfortune of channel-flicking onto ‘Shorts TV’, they’ll know the mind-numbing predictability that infects the genre.

A great short however is a treasure beyond gold. And the good people at Future Shorts have done the hard work for you in collecting together the most riveting shorts from across the globe.

Owen Donovan and Edd Elliott of Hacked Off Films brought the Future Shorts vision to a room above the Turl Street Kitchen last night, and fulfilled their aim of shaking up the usual film-watching experience.

Far more innovative and provocative than even the most daring feature film, and so much less needlessly time consuming, a Future Shorts screening brings you a handful of the best short cinema from around the globe for a very reasonable price (tickets were £4).

A Brief History of John Baldessari is a tongue-in-cheek biography of one of America’s greatest living artists narrated in the silky tones of actor and songwriter Tom Waits. And it’s under six minutes long.

Brevity is an underrated virtue and this offering from the directors of Catfish is a masterclass in one of Baldessari’s rules: do not make boring art.

The other films shown last night ranged from an insight into the life of a German store detective whose crush on a fellow worker treads a thin line between infatuation and romance and Rite, a BAFTA-nominated foray into the heartbreak of an estranged father visiting his son on his birthday. All the films shown managed to display an ingenuity and freshness that shows that they deserve a far larger audience.

Okay, so none of them could match the production values of Skyfall but they sure beat watching the tenth re-hash of Paranormal Activity (which incidentally the Baldessari short-makers headed up in its third incarnation –  but everyone has bills to pay).

With comedy and live music acts also in attendance the evening offered diversity as well as quality film-making to the sell-out audience. Hacked Off Films is just one of many initiatives in Oxford – such as the Illyria Film Fund and the Oxford University Film Foundation – who are revolutionizing the film watching and making scene in Oxford.

Later this term they are planning an immersive, ‘Secret Cinema’-inspired take on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. If they can pull of if it’ll be one of the events of the term, and judging from last night I’d put my cards on betting they can.

For more information on Future Shorts and Hacked Off Films read Owen Donovan’s article here.