Long live the sofa! And since in these days the sofa is our best friend, here’s the second part of the online shorts to enjoy during these quarantine days, reviewed as usual by AsinoVola’s newsroom.
Brotherhhod – Meryam Joobeur
Seen by Margherita Fontana
What does brotherhood mean? Which is our family? Where do we belong? Which is our religion? These are crucial questions that Brotherhood by Meryam Joobeur asks us. As his elder son Malik comes back home in Tunisia, after the war in Syria, Mohamed’s heart and mind are riddled with
doubts. Brotherhood shows us the contradictions that destroy religious and family bonds during this contemporary war with attention, avoiding sentimentalisms.
Je sors acheter des cigarettes – Osman Cerfon
Seen by Elena Saltarelli
This animated short film, whose director is the French Osman Cerfon, sees as main character a young boy living with his mother and his sister, together with many hidden men. The boy has an ambiguous relationship with them, a relationship built on teasing as well as helping. These men
have many faces and many personalities, and they are not going to leave until he gives a face on that hulking absence which is filling the apartment.
This short film amazingly succeeds in making bittersweet and assimilable a complex and extremely heavy theme such as that of paternal absence. Each character, in his own way, tries to give this a meaning and to live together with this emotional void, replacing it with something different, with waiting, with vain hope. Rich in allusions and suggestions, such as the recurrent references to René Magritte, a great painter of paranoia and dormant suffering, this work is confirmed as one of the most interesting and multifaceted short film in selection.
O Órfão – Carolina Markowicz
Seen by Elena Saltarelli
About rejection and discrimination. These are the main topics of Carolina Markowitz’s short film, a Brazilian director who wanted to tell the real story of Jonathas, a young boy who was rejected by his foster family because of his feminine behavior. Without any rhetoric, this film succeeds in recounting the suffering provoked by the disgusting skittishness wherewith the couple gets rid of a newly adopted boy. The acting skills of the young protagonist are extremely touching as he manages to convey the idea of a dignity which outdoes cowardice and the evils of the world.
“That was meant to be – forget it” is a mantra that brings him back to the orphanages’ world, populated by the many outcasts with whom he’s growing up and moulding himself. This short film proves that a family is where you are loved, no matter where you are.
Sog – Jonatan Schwenk
Seen by Yorgos Kostianis
After a disastrous flood a school of fish drift away and get stuck on old trees. The drier they get, the louder their harrowing screams get, waking up the local cave dwellers who don’t take too kindly to their intrusion.
Directed and animated by Jonathan Schwenk, Sog is a hybrid animation featuring no dialogue but with strong metaphoric undertones alluding to the migrant crisis and on how people deal with strangers.
Feathers – A.V. Rockwell
Seen by Yorgos Kostianis
Award-winning filmmaker and Sundance Institute Feature Film fellow A.V. Rockwell ’s short is a love letter to black boys, the adverse psychological effects of racism, and how to heal those wounds in modern society.
The film focuses on Elizier, an emotionally dejected new enrollee at The Edward R. Mill School for Boys, must overcome memories of a tragic past and the present hazing by his peers in order to tackle larger issues dominating his young life.
The Boogeywoman – Erica Scoggins
Seen by Vanessa Mangiavacca
That of Erica Scoggins is a provocative dark story about adolescence: Sam’s first period merges in fact with a local legend, that of the Boogeywoman. The woman’s development is surrounded by an aura of myths, nourished over the centuries, which always defined this phenomenon “demonic”. The “Boogeyman” we were always told about changes now sex, becoming a sort of XXI century Lilith, who came just to have her revenge. Every woman has her Boogeywoman, a dark side which is both damnation and salvation. This short film is a homage to the power of female seduction, as well as the awareness that is our only the weapon to bend the patriarchy.
Journal Animé – Donato Sansone
Seen by Vanessa Mangiavacca
Journal Animè has a peculiar genesis: after the massacre of January 15, 2015 at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, the French television company Canal + commissioned Sansone a series of animated videos about the freedom of expression. The expanded pen of Sansone draws on the
images of a French newspaper, acting as we all have done at least once. Fiction and reality are the two languages of this work, two opposites with no boundaries, especially if compared with the fast and chaotic magma that is today information. New portraits jump from one page to another, looking for an alternative in the incongruous social daily babel. Nothing is saved in the fresh sansoniana satire.
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