Having decided that Oscar and BAFTA winners weren't strictly festival winners (though to be nominated you have to have been shown in at least one several specified festivals) I felt it beholden upon me that I add another festival page, on top of the two Cannes Film Festival pages I already have.
So I have added a new page for the Sundance Film Festival at filmsshort.com This had an unexpected benefit of allowing me to upload High Maintenance to the website, as I had admired the subtlety of this science fiction film (when compared to other science fiction films) but had decided to add Alive In Joburg instead to the sci-fi page.
The Sundance Film Festival has a habit of rewarding unusual films, and historically far more documentaries than most short film festivals. Thus I have uploaded two of the best documentaries to have won at the festival in the last decade: Terminal Bar and Undressing My Mother. Documentaries are hard to pull off in a short time period, for it can be difficult to adequately address the subject (both literally and thematically). It's not up to me to decide how successful these two film are, but I feel that each attempts it in two very different but very effective ways. They are certainly worth watching for any aspiring documentary makers out there.
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Festival Winning Shorts
In order to research what films I should put on my short film website I had a good trawl of the major short film festival winners, both by going to their websites and by looking on the imdb, the trusted source for film.
One of the strangest consequences was that I realised that there was often no correlation between how good a film is considered by those who vote on the imdb and whether it won an award at this or that festival. Of course, the best films do tend to rise to the top like the proverbial cream but consider a film such as Megatron, which one the Palm d'Or for Best Short Film in 2008 at Cannes. It has averaged only 5.9/10 after 63 votes. That's simply not that great. And many directors fail to secure a career on the basis of such an award.
Thus I had to pay heed to these votes and watch as many of the films as I could myself to decide whether they deserved to go on my website - rather than just adding festival winners no matter what.This created some major problems because Megatron is by no means unique. The Cannes Film Festival throws up other problems: I began by researching Cannes, the Oscars and BAFTA. But unlike the latter two, which hand out awards for live-action and animated short films separately, Cannes has decided to judge both types of film together. One might argue that comparing different short film of the same type is difficult enough (consider how the brilliant Father & Daughter, and Rejected, were both nominated in 2000), but the Cannes Film Festival has decided to make matters that much more tricky by failing to distinguish between the two. Having said that, some of the animations the Oscars and BAFTA have rewarded have been rather poor!
One of the strangest consequences was that I realised that there was often no correlation between how good a film is considered by those who vote on the imdb and whether it won an award at this or that festival. Of course, the best films do tend to rise to the top like the proverbial cream but consider a film such as Megatron, which one the Palm d'Or for Best Short Film in 2008 at Cannes. It has averaged only 5.9/10 after 63 votes. That's simply not that great. And many directors fail to secure a career on the basis of such an award.
Thus I had to pay heed to these votes and watch as many of the films as I could myself to decide whether they deserved to go on my website - rather than just adding festival winners no matter what.This created some major problems because Megatron is by no means unique. The Cannes Film Festival throws up other problems: I began by researching Cannes, the Oscars and BAFTA. But unlike the latter two, which hand out awards for live-action and animated short films separately, Cannes has decided to judge both types of film together. One might argue that comparing different short film of the same type is difficult enough (consider how the brilliant Father & Daughter, and Rejected, were both nominated in 2000), but the Cannes Film Festival has decided to make matters that much more tricky by failing to distinguish between the two. Having said that, some of the animations the Oscars and BAFTA have rewarded have been rather poor!
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