Creating from (extended) crisis
Written by Taylor Mitchell
A choice to engage with a film's own conditions of emergence is often a stylistic choice of the filmmaker and sometimes a point of necessity—such as a lo-fi aesthetic born out of budgetary constraints. During the pandemic, the material worlds that shape filmmaking feel increasingly important. A theme I noticed emerging from this year's shorts is a conversation with the social, material and emotional environment shaped by extended crisis.
POVs and WFH: 13th Street Films' Socially Distant
Written and directed by Sian Laycock and Joel Stephen Fleming, the web series follows two new roommates with contrasting personalities navigate a sudden an extended lockdown. With stilted humour that feels specific to living through crisis, Socially Distant traces through the intensified relations shaping sharehouses of the pandemic (AKA "government-enforced besties"). The series' point-of-View (POV) format captures the claustrophobic mood of the last few years, feeling through the subjective iterations of a shared isolation.
On corporate dystopia: Ada's Safe Spaces
Ella hides under a desk at the office in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. Caroline arrives and, loudly, casually, proceeds to introduce herself. Director Ada writes, "When you're the only trans person in a room and all the cis people decide to go around the room so everyone can announce their pronouns, it can make you feel a certain kind of way.
This movie wonders how that might feel if there are also zombies in the room." In exposing such contrasting reactions to crisis unfolding against the bland office backdrop, the film also reminds me of the corporate-led response to covid, where a "new normal" was rolled out as a sort of PR campaign for increased personal responsibility. Safe Spaces locates the mood of extended precarity often ignored, if not exasperated, by an HR-infused approach to structural and social subordination.
Fantasy X reality: Tali Polichtuk, Kitty Chrystal's Are You Still Watching?
When so much of our worlds are mediated by the internet, the space between reality and fantasy grows smaller. Are You Still Watching? is an urgent interrogation of these merging worlds, coloured by the shifting moods of 20 something Jamie's isolation—from frenzied to horny to magic—as recounted to a stern-looking therapist. Rather than denouncing escapism, the film foregrounds the sensual possibilities of fantasy as a mode of endurance during extended crisis, underscoring the importance of art for imagining different realities.
