In the second of our guest-blogger reports from the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, producer Rachel Carter recounts her experiences taking digishorts 'Momster' and 'Caterpillar' to the festival and market...
My journey home from Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival 2009 involved, in this order - a tram, a random sweet old French couple’s car, a train, a taxi, a plane, another train, the tube, yet another train, and a coach replacement service! No joke. Despite being quite a mission to get to, Clermont is well worth the trip, being the biggest festival dedicated purely to shorts. You get the opportunity to see a huge variety of shorts from all over the world, and the festival Market Place is populated by the stands of many other international film festivals, and also of the major film councils and funders of different countries. If you have a short embarking on the festival circuit, the Clermont Ferrand Market place is a great way to kick start it, and also learn more about successful shorts and their distribution platforms. The shorts in the Market Place that I was there to represent were Caterpillar, a UKFC Digital PLUS, written and directed by John Maidens and co-produced by Michael Ford, (www.caterpillarfilm.co.uk) and Momster, a Digital Short written, directed and animated by Steven Spencer of Nice Monster Studios (www.nicemonster.co.uk).
The first programme I watched on Sunday 1st was ‘Netherlands 4’. A few shorts in this programme really stood out for me - ‘Als Wij Groot Zijn’ (When We’re Grown Up, 2006) is a brilliantly made extremely dark 6-minute story of a man’s swimming pool visit with a little girl. It’s a great example of the power of very simple ideas and stories executed very well and very shortly. The other that really touched me was animation ‘God on Our Side’ (2005) by Uri Kranot and Michal Pfeffer. Stylistically inspired by Picasso’s Guernica, the film depicts sufferers on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting the abstract absurdity of hatred and violence in the name of God. Again, I thought this was just really well done.
On Monday morning I hooked up with fellow West Midlands festival-goers Lewis Arnold & Tom Knight (Director and Producer of 2008 UKFC Digital Short Spirited), and Dan of Screen WM, and we took our first tour around the market place. This began a series of really useful dialogues with buyers including Future Shorts, Shorts International and Shorts TV. We also met Takashi and Toshi who run the Sapporo Short Film Festival, which seems like a really interesting one for the radar as UK shorts seem to play really well there. Other highlights for me included meeting the Hamburg Short Film Agency who have a really great reputation, and chatting to some of the international animation festivals about Momster.
At 5pm each day the UK Film Council/British Council stand held networking drinks. This is where we met Helen of Left Ltd, a new platform for shorts that works specifically to find the most effective way to get to the audience of that particular film. I also met another key buyer when we ventured to the French party on Tuesday night in the Rat Pack cellar bar. Here we got chatting to Katie of Future Shorts. Future Shorts seem to have a strong reputation for getting the cream of the crop to decent sized audiences – it was interesting to chat about how James Lees’ amazing Digital Short The Apology Line is now doing with Future Shorts after its extremely successful festival run, and how difficult it can be to promote and find the right audiences after the festival circuit, especially for this kind of documentary.
Tuesday also involved a major highlight for me – the Special Programme of New Zealand Short Films – and it wasn’t just because they gave out chocolate (ingenious!). If you only see one more short this year, especially if you’re going to Sundance - then it should be This Is Her (Dir. Katie Wolfe). This is a phenomenal film in every way. Using the central character’s voice-over narration, which is often very hard to pull off, the story of Evie unfolds as she looks back at her younger self in childbirth and the events leading up to the then ‘six year old bitch’ one day stealing her husband. Sounds a risky short film venture – but it’s brilliantly written and acted.
Other gems from this programme include Brave Donkey (Dir. Gaysorn Thavat), and Aphrodite’s Farm (Dir. Adam Strange). Again, well executed, acted, and with moments of laugh out loud comedy. The whole round was brilliantly closed with the 2 minute long Careful With That Powertool (Writer/Dir/Producer Jason Stutter). The synopsis is simply ‘A boy, a ladder, a buzz saw, a nail gun…’. This is a fantastic visual feast shot on RED that becomes almost unwatchable if you’re squeamish, in a hilariously well executed black comedy kinda way.
The New Zealand programme wasn’t just full of great shorts, it was fascinating in terms of the country’s whole model for funded short filmmaking. They only fund about 9 or 10 shorts per year – very much going for quality over quantity with much bigger budgets. Obviously this will inevitably mean fewer opportunities at entry level here, but it results in films that really are the stand-out calling card people hope for in a short, but rarely pull off. All shot on 35mm or Red ONE, they have clearly been through detailed script work and high quality casting. The budget structure is also really interesting in relation to where shorts fit into a sustainable industry in terms of crewing, let alone for the writers, directors and producers who take these projects on for months of their lives, often with other work being juggled alongside. On such low budgets as we have here in the UK, as lucky as we are to even have the schemes compared to elsewhere, it’s quite interesting to see the approach elsewhere.
I’m really grateful for this opportunity to attend Clermont and see the short filmmaking process through right to this stage with Screen WM’s support. It’s been invaluable to learn more about the process beyond the finished film – and really important for fostering producers and writer/directors in this way who will continue to feed the industry by developing new projects.