CINEUROPA SHORTS TOP 5 EUROPEAN SHORTS 2015 PART 1 – THE FESTIVALS

Read the introduction to the Cineuropa Top 5 European Shorts of 2015 HERE and Part 2HERE

(Reminder: participants were allowed to choose 5 films from Europe and 1 from outside of Europe)

MATT LLOYD (Director, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Scotland)

Peter (Dir. Jane Topping, UK)
The one that got away. I’m ashamed to admit that we failed to screen this film, made by a Glasgow filmmaker no less. I finally had the opportunity to see it at Hamburg. It’s a spectacular weaving together of archive footage, personal biography and downright lies, a philosophical meditation on visual truth, inspired by and drawing heavily on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

The Joy of Everyday Life [Onni] (Dir. Sanna Liljander, Finland)

Parenthood captured and defined in one seven minute static single shot. A study in off-screen action, a brilliantly judged and wickedly funny documentary. Has that sense of effortlessness that requires either incredible luck or total mastery of the form.

Machine (Dir. Sunit Parekh-Gaihede, Denmark)

A stop-frame animation depicting the upheaval of a town and the concurrent transformation of a family. Edited like a reoccurring nightmare, yet deftly maintaining narrative coherence, this is a miniature epic in form, scope and ambition.

Kung Fury (Dir. David Sandberg, Sweden)
I tried so hard not to include this. It’s total trash from start to finish. And yet something which can maintain this level of utterly bonkers invention, at breakneck pace, for thirty minutes, cannot be dismissed so easily. Easily the most fun I’ve had in a cinema this year.

Exquisite Corpus (Dir. Peter Tscherkassky, Austria)
…because when the King enters the room, you stand up.

World of Tomorrow (Dir. Don Hertzfeldt, USA)
Don Hertzfeldt’s films are packed with more ideas than most features. He is a vital ambassador for short form filmmaking – whether he likes it or not. World of Tomorrow is hilarious, moving, profound, shocking and visually gorgeous, an assault on the senses and brain. Hands down the best film of the year.

20 December 2015, by Laurence Boyce