Review: Future Shorts Festival, Winter Season

The notion of ‘short film’ seems to appeal to few beyond those with little time or little patience. The phrase conjures up either the art-house and inaccessible or amateur efforts with second-rate acting and a non-existent plot.

As it becomes easier to make professional looking films on the cheap, and the internet allows for easy distribution, most ‘shorts’ we come across have not been put through the creative paces of a production studio.

Therefore it is no wonder they end up a bit like Solange Knowles’s ‘Losing You’ video – looks good and sounds great but ultimately just because you’ve shot something with Instagram in Africa doesn’t make it insightful, provocative or innovative.

A comment on the legacy of colonialism perhaps, Solange?

But do not fret: the Future Shorts Festival proves that the huge boom in filmmaking that such technological progress has enabled is not something to be lamented, and there is still a way to make an entertaining short film.

Describing themselves as a ‘network’ for filmmakers operating in order to promote the ‘social experience of film’, the Future Shorts team collate some of the best short films they can find four times a year and distribute them to anyone happy to host the festival.

In Oxford the hosts were Hacked Off Films, who also treated us in the course of the evening to a stand up set perhaps in need of a little practice from Lewis Evans, a series of pleasantly surreal sketches courtesy of The Awkward Silence, and an acoustic set from Jake Jacobs whose original songs far surpassed his covers.

The films, however, were uncontroversially the highlight. Though they don’t watch like anything you’d find at the Odeon, they all told a story and injected a quick shot of emotion or information into the audience.

Take my personal favourite of the evening, Lovebirds. I was sceptical when the film began, as for a few seconds it seemed as if it was going to be the archetypal short: self-indulgently meaningless and just plain weird.

But, eventually I realised that three naked actors strutting around as birds on a hillside were able to make me feel and understand more about the filmmaker’s vision of ‘love’ than multiple (theoretical) sittings of the much larger budget film Valentine’s Day or any other of its profit-driven companions.

If you now regret not snapping up a ticket, here’s a short film that debuted at this year’s Sundance Festival that is not too catastrophic:

Follow Hacked Off Films to keep up to date with news of the next festival and their other film events in Oxford.