MWFF 2021 FESTIVAL DIARY: PART 3

by Sarah Jasem

I sit and write this article, watch these films and experience this art on Gadigal land, to which sovereignty never ceded. This is and will always be, Aboriginal land, and I pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging. 

Best of Next Gen Shorts

 ‘The future is not so much to be predicted, as it is to be selected.’- Donella Meadows. 

This quote, plucked out of one of the selected Best Next Gen shorts, I Am Awake, Always, directed by Nyssa Mitchell, is evocative of this selection of films. Gorgeously shot, animated, written and directed by women, each film is unique and unpredictable in its tone, aesthetics and story. This selection is filled with a spectrum of directors who identify as women, and by being selected for their wonderful work, it is with both anticipation and hope, that the directors of these structurally, thematically and aesthetically diverse films are the future. 

Most of all, they encapsulate the effect that all good art does, which is create a world so honest and open that they feel like our own, from Jessica Li’s potently nuanced direction of Mother Tongue’s Chinese-Australian immigrant story to Pete’s Valve, set in a pink pastiche world about new relationships. 

To try and encapsulate the connecting themes of these films would be difficult. Perhaps a brilliant encapsulation would be the shortest at 1 minute and 48 seconds, Petrichor, animated by Shirin Shakhesi in 2019. It features lucid, bright hallucinogenic animated nature, all existing within a television screen.  Petrichor, is itself named after the earthy smell of rain, encapsulating the intangible. Within media, making the tangible intangible has become, out of necessity, an eighth wonder of the world as we know it now, existing within the four walls which contain us.  

Each film winds through the themes of love, loss, and the communication of both between characters and to the audience, in dark, cerebral, tragic or comic ways. It is a wonderful achievement to witness. The longest film I am Awake, Always, directed by Nyssa Mitchell is still a mere twelve minutes and thirty one seconds, yet encapsulating a dystopian world of both loss and hope in this brief runtime. Pete’s Valve, directed by Katy May Hudson, does this through a crush of pink. Unwilted, directed by Nicola Macindoe, through a witchy 24/7 floristry store. But again, this is a generalisation, for each film is stunningly different. 

Jessica Russel’s Hy_Life, utilises special effects in a slick, sterile world where technology blurs the boundaries between real relationships and the hyperreal. Contrastingly, Nahyeon Lee’s Sixteen navigates the neon world of lovers in the free loving Instagram age, to ties of more conservative cultural tradition and the family. 

The Best Next Gen shorts selected burst with promise. If this is the future we are selecting, it is to be one I am, despite everything, excited for. 

Creating drama: the anatomy of TV-post production.  

‘That’s all of postproduction in a nutshell’- Carol Johnston

‘... That’s a really big nut’- Cindy Clarkson 

This panel was conducted over Zoom, by director Nina Buxton, post-production audio artist Tania Vlassova, post production supervisor Carol Johnston, and Cindy Clarkson, editor and chair of Power of Pop and moderator of the talk. 

They sat on a cluttered desk, watched by me with an Icey pole, pyjamas, and the feeling of inadequacy and imposter syndrome that sometimes colours the experience of even hearing about experiences within the film industry. Despite being the sum of overwhelming matter, it was reassuring, informative and inundated with a call to action. The fact that this can be expressed by people over Zoom, towards an invisible audience is always quite a feat. 

Tania, whose audio quality was understandably the most streamlined of the speakers, gave valuable insight into the interplay between directors, editors, writers, boom operators and post production supervisors like Carol. The audio editing process, often one overshadowed by visuals, was demonstrated to be one which starts when the script is first read, despite Tania working in the post production process of audio. If characters are having a conversation that may turn sour, Tania explains that the role of the sound artist would be to perhaps place the sound of an airplane in the background, a humming warning of what is to ensue. If it was set in space, a tense UFO over the character’s heads. Nothing is done without purpose, and we, the audience fall for the spell of audio magicians. With smaller devices and laptops, the extent of layering painted within the soundscape is often actually lost on us. 

Carol’s role was also fascinating, as she explains that there is such a thing as pre pre-production, where shows get ready for funding, budgeting and shape depending on multiple factors like special effects, locations, the distributor. Post is actually pre pre production, as they start thinking about the end at the beginning. Notably, her recommended post-production houses included Blue Post, City Post, Sound Firm,The Post Lounge, Lab Sonics and Audio Alchemy. 

Thinking about the end at the beginning is also a notion repurposed by Nina, a director who despite directing episodes for Netflix just a few years out of the VCA, reassuringly claims that there are roles that she didn’t even know about. One of these include EPK directing, which consists of directing behind the scenes videos of TV shows, a potential first film job without the pressure of being within the film set hierarchy. Just talking to production companies by emailing them directly, getting in contact with editors and production companies who have made work you resonated with, and explaining why, is a good way to communicate and get your name in. 

Everyone stressed the necessity of communication. Communication with a film-enthusiastic community happy to put time and effort in your story, over getting into debt. Communication with the audience with whom you want to tell a story you are passionate about, over ‘high quality, expensive,’ cameras. Open, honest communication over pretending you have the answers when you don’t just yet. Communication over drowning other collaborators out. 

While watching the Zoom where participants could listen to the advice concerning ‘communication, communication, communication,’ it made sense that it seems to be at the crux of everything in the art industry. It also made it feel slightly more possible. 

A Special Alchemy, Experimental Shorts Panel. 

‘What is dancing? Are you breathing? Do you have a heartbeat? Then you’re dancing.’- Victoria Hunt

The anticipation, suspense and opportunity present in the blank buffering screen of this live event felt like a continuation of the experimentalism present in each of these short experimental short films. The jilted dance of voices, some more muffled, some breathy, some cutting in and out as their internet connection played up. A tableau of different women in one virtual space, Victoria Hunt, director of TAKE, sat grounded in a spacious, light filled room, whilst Niharika Senapati, dancing artist of ‘This Weight is Not Mine,’ and Erin McCuskey, director of Twirl de Lux and Yearning (the latter of which was collaboratively created purely over zoom and lockdown) sat surrounded by easels and framed photographs. Despite the physical distance, moderator Felicity Ford weaved the conversation about each artist’s endeavor into the way they make women dance.

Victoria and Niharika are both professional dancers, and Erin, an apparently ‘unprofessional’ dancer, has, however, participated in a zoom dance once every evening in lockdown for the past 12 months, which I am sure more than qualifies. 

Each artist uncurls the way that the body has been expressed as an articulation of the self. The body is described as a vessel, as containing your ancestry, as being a muse. Hunt’s debut film TAKE, uses dance as a way to visualise rebellion, articulating the voice of silenced, colonised Maori women who were silenced by anthropologists and missionaries who spoke only to the men. Her skeleton entwines with the skeleton of the ancestral meeting house, Hinemihi, the ceremonial place of belonging, intertwining ancestry with the body and the future. 

The body is a container, a question. Erin states that we dance even for the women who don't believe it in their rights to twirl, or who are embarrassed. Within the crowded, male dominated streets of India, Niharika dances for the generations of women from which she is formed, as she wades through the crowd at an otherworldly speed, as if containing spirits from a different plane.

To end, Erin, a lover of flowers, uses the twirl as her chosen fixated dance move. She says she likes the way it makes women unfurl, bloom, take up space. After the livestream ends, the screen is filled with an image of the Capitol Building’s interior. I remember how, together, the women took up that space.