Short film fest, long line-up
ASTRANGE man is obsessed with conchology – the collection and study of shells. One day he stumbles on a beached mermaid and instead of putting her back in the water, he decides to take her back to his house. There he keeps her in the bathtub and tries to make her feel at home.
The quirky film, Sea Bones, all of one minute in duration, is just one of 156 short movies that will will screened in the upcoming shnit Worldwide Short Film Festival, which kicks off on October 18 and runs until October 22. Now in its eighth year in South Africa, shnit, founded in Bern, Switzerland in 2003, has become one of the world’s biggest short film festivals and takes place in eight cities, on five continents over the same weekend.
With films ranging in length from one to 40 minutes, this trendy fest has garnered a reputation for offering viewers some of the finest short film fare on the global short film scene. This year there are 13 South African film-makers competing for the Jury Prize in the Made in South Africa Competition, the winners of which will be announced on the final night, October 22 in Cape Town.
Aside from the latter, all films will compete in the global shnit International Competition for the prestigious Flaming Faun Award, to be handed over in New York on October 29. Kaapse Bobotie is the staple South African out-of-competition showcase, where 19 local films will be shown.
Audiences can also see documentaries in shnit Documents, animation in shnit Animates, short films of the adult variety in Peeping shnit, Feelgood shnit and Heavy shnit. In total, 156 films are on offer this year.
For the local competition, an impressive threemember jury panel includes Jerry Mofokeng, Thabang Moleya and Sara Blecher.
Mofokeng is a stage and screen actor whose extensive portfolio of work includes Cry The Beloved Country, Lord of War and the 2005 Academy Awardwinning film Tsotsi. Moleya is a director, film-maker, presenter and actor who first rose to fame as a presenter on M-Net and who has directed award-winning television shows, including the International Emmy nominated Sokhulu and
Partners and has smashed box office records with his most recent film, Happiness is a Four Letter Word. Blecher is an award-winning filmmaker and co-founder of Cinga Productions, a South African-based production company which has made a number of innovative television programmes and drama series, including the International Emmy nominated Zero Tolerance. Her debut feature in Otelo Burning won over 17 international awards and was named by CNN as one of the top 10 African films of the decade.
The opening night of shnit Cape Town was hosted last week at the revamped Labia Theatre in Cape Town where members of the audience were treated to some sneak previews. Included was the 15-minute local drama Fihla, in which Selina and Lereko devise a plan to leave Lesotho and enter South Africa without passports. There’s also the sevenminute visual poem Overberg, which tells the story of life and death and the connection between a man’s physical body and the land that made him. In the three minute German doccie
Überleben, Ellen Vakily, 84, tells us about her life adventures and her ways to survive. “Über Leben” means “about life” in German but if put together, “überleben” also means “to survive”. It’s about the life of a survivor who, even at a late age, has learned how to trick death.
From the UK, the eight-minute animated Alan Dimension shows how Alan Brown uses the divine powers of precognition to foresee the fate of mankind… and breakfast; and
Cold Storage, a nine-minute Finnish comedy told through dance, pays homage to the virtuoso physical performances and melancholic comedy of the classic silent screen. As a lonely ice fisherman discovers his frozen prehistoric soul brother in the ice, multiple levels of time and reality blend together into a cinematic and kinetic exploration of alienation, dependency and friendship.
Besides the Labia Theatre, other shnit venues are the Alexander Bar and there will be free screenings at Bertha Movie House at Isivivana in Khayelitsha and at Pulp Cinema at the Neelsie in Stellenbosch. Tickets start at R50 for a “package” of movies. For information about events, master classes, films and filmmakers, venues and bookings, visit http://shnit.org/intro-capetown/. For further details about all the films on the line-up, visit http://shnit.org/sections and for updates follow the festival on Facebook at https:// www.facebook.com/shnitorg.