DU Film’s much anticipated annual 48-hour filmmaking challenge was back this year, culminating in 16 innovative student productions. The challenge was launched on Tuesday, September 23rd, at Mary’s Bar with a Thursday deadline. All films were screened on Friday, September 26th at 6pm in the Arts Block’s Robert Emmett Theatre to a fuller-than-full house (latecomers had to sit on the floor or stand at the very back). The theme for this edition of the challenge was “Nostalgia”, the same as Trinity Film Review’s September print magazine. Interpretations were diverse to the point of being surprising. From photographs triggering memories of someone beloved (Moving on) and the echoes of home in food (Skabenu Zupa), to the love life of the vampire Count Bartholomew the second (Vampire Counsel(ling)) and the sadness of a tiny rubber duck (Hiraeth), the films covered an unbelievable range of styles, themes, characters and storylines. Visually, the setting of Dublin was a familiar equaliser; Grafton Street, St Stephen’s Green, St Patrick’s Park and several locations on campus were veiled in the sometimes sad, sometimes funny lenses of nostalgia. The screening of the films was followed by an award ceremony. These were the winners:
Best Representation of Theme: Rose Tinted Glasses (Marina Beretta Frigo, Zach Moloney, Bill Brennan, Oscar Stewart, Harry McMahon)
Rose Tinted Glasses opens with two friends sitting on a bench having a very serious debate: which Dune film is better, Denis Villeneuve’s or David Lynch’s? When the ex-partner of one of them walks by, he takes a trip down memory lane, and in the process of reminiscing over the relationship, creates a new one in his head, a “this-is-not-quite-what-actually-happened” one. Through the rose-tinted glasses of retrospection, everything problematic in the relationship (the girlfriend writing “I hate my boyfriend” on a blackboard, the girlfriend pushing and tripping him, the girlfriend complaining in Spanish about not getting flowers, etc) gets translated into something positive (a prank, love language of physical touch, good communication, etc). Past and present run parallel in a fairly typical employment of this recycled trope. The joy comes from the humour and actors’ suitably ridiculous performances. Rose Tinted Glasses not only bases its story on nostalgia, but, in recycling a well-worn trope, becomes nostalgia itself.
Best Cinematography: Petals (Holly O’Connor, Hugh Andrews, James Bryan, Maia Kelly Murphy, Na Nguyen, Therese Askarbek, Linette Espinoza Verastegu, Ian Morley)
Petals is a film that shows immense restraint in all its aspects. There is not a single dialogue anywhere, and other sounds are also kept minimal, which means that the images do the storytelling. The colour palette is generally plain, but the eponymous petals come from a bright red flower, allowing them to stand out. Absence and presence are cleverly played with through slow pans of the camera. Even when it tracks the protagonist through busy streets, the camera remains calm, giving the narrative a neat-and-clean look. Petals is ultimately about a girl who has lost someone or about that someone who has lost her. The film doesn’t give all the answers, but then it doesn’t ask too many questions either.
Best Editing: Lunch Break (Adam Clinton, Shahzab Ali, Michelangelo Butjiarawang, Thomas Callan, Jack Dolan, Guy Chopper)
This is a very simple film, and like all very simple films, it is very complicated. John and Harry go to work. John and Harry realise it’s lunch break. John and Harry fight over the last biscuit. John and Harry have to give up the biscuit to Mr Mann, the boss. John and Harry meet at the tram stop and share some biscuits. Lunch Break is something Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy or Buster Keaton – the greats of American silent cinema – might have made. It is sophisticated and playful, meaningful and silly, innovative and historical. The film is shot and edited with a careful roughness that adds to its charm, and the highlight of the production is the handwritten title-cards and credits. Lunch Break was the most delightful and technically memorable film of the evening. It was also my favourite.
Best Screenplay: Jenkem Blues (Ronan Flood, Eleanor Kropke, Shaffer Kropke, Lara Dumanli, Adam O’Brien, Daniel O’Malley)
Jenkem is a hallucinogen created from fermented human waste, and this is a story of one man’s eventful youth. But this is not just any story; it is a bedtime story that the old man shares with his granddaughter. This is Jenkem Blues. The only way to describe this film is to use its own words: “there’s a fair amount of shit in there, but goddammit was it a good time”. One evening, the young version of the protagonist sets out to meet up with his (ex?) girlfriend at Dicey’s. What starts with him in his best joggers and a bottleful of Jenkem ends with him in his boxers, Jenkem-less. Props to the actor for wandering around late at night like that for the sake of art. It is clear that watching the film is as much fun as making it was: characters break left, right and centre, and there is tequila, because why not! Five stars to the make-up and costume department- that was the best tape, facemask and cotton beard I have ever seen.
Best Irish Language Film: Anois (Cèlía Arnan Angás, Simon Lewis, Eoin Murphy, Nicole Saluck, Ann-Kathrin Viktoria Brämer)
If you like to watch films about lonely people in neon cities, this one is for you. Anois is about two people, who in the present are walking in a Dublin lit by traffic signals, but in the past, shared something indescribable. What will become of them in the future, we don’t know, and the film doesn’t either. The undercurrent to this story is a poem (as voiceover) in the Irish language written by the film’s cinematographer, Eoin Murphy. Murphy’s camera work is a beautiful complement to his words; he breathes life into the nocturnality of the city by gracefully washing the darkness in the softest of lights. Close-ups of the actors not only capture the subtleties of their expressions but also create intimacy between the characters and the audience. Anois is a very elegant film wherein nostalgia becomes present in that which is absent.
Best Picture: Heavy Focus (Katherine Alabama, Eva O’Donnell, Ella Carley, Daniel Cassidy, Leo Hughes, Heidi Bowe)
If you are using a quote from Dostoyevsky’s White Nights as a prologue, your film better be an intimate and poignant exploration of love and loss. Heavy Focus manages that well. It is an essay on what love loves best: loss, and the desire to hold on to that loss. The protagonist is a lonely man accompanied by a handy-cam. Through the lens of this handy-cam, he sees a girl whom he follows all over Dublin, but she remains nothing more than a phantom. The central sequence is set in the National Gallery, where the phantom stands in front of sculptures and paintings, mimicking the postures of the people in them. A commentary on memorialising and monumentalising is to be found here. Like the art, the man’s camera is also a means (a modern one) of fixing. But statues and videos are only records of people, not real people. Heavy Focus is a gentle nudge away from the dangers of obsessing over the nostalgic.
