Film of the Month Winners: June
Artist filmmaker turned feature director Omer Fast provides some insightful feedback to this month’s winning Film of the Month entries.
Speaking of Anu Valia’s Drifters, an experimental, fluid portrait of an actress and her sense for sense and purpose, Omer said this of his favourite film in the competition. “I like the use of short format for portraiture and appreciate the open-ended structure. Also liked the casting sequence at the beginning and returning to it at the end. Wasn’t sure about the sequence of the actress goofing around alone at home as it felt more contrived than observed.” “I’d vote this as my favorite because it gave me the most to chew on.”
On Ross Hogg’s Scribbledub, a playful experiment on the interaction between image and sound, Omer said that “contrasting analog film to digital music is a brilliant idea and I kept watching and wanting more to happen. In the end, the relationship of the animation to the beat could have been less lockstep and the imagery could have expanded.”
For Diana Olifirova’s Mirror he had the following criticism. “There’s a great mood at the beginning and I’m all for voyeurism and the psychodrama of watching someone watching him or herself on screen. But I kept wanting to dive a bit more into the psychologies of the figures I was seeing in the cinema. Who are they? Why are they there? This doesn’t necessarily mean pushing in a narrative direction but exploring all the seedy, perverse things that can happen in an old-school cinema.”