Clever, bite-size gems from around the world
Netflix’s collection of short films, all created during the global pandemic, is a tribute to human ingenuity, sensitivity and wit Homemade
Dirs Ladj Ly, Paolo Sorrentino, Rachel Morrison, Pablo Larraín, Rungano Nyoni, Natalia Beristáin, Naomi Kawase, David Mackenzie, Gurinder Chadha
Lockdown has, very famously, been kryptonite for ordinary film production, with countless works-in-progress grinding to a halt. But with this extraordinary project, built from scratch over the past three months, Netflix has wriggled its way around the rules with aplomb.
Homemade is a suite of short films between four and 11 minutes in length, all produced during the coronavirus pandemic by 17 world cinema names at loose ends. There was no creative brief, except that each should be made in accordance with local lockdown regulations – which, of course, vary wildly from country to country.
But one of the great pleasures of the collection is watching human ingenuity at work almost in real time, as each filmmaker in turn fathoms what’s possible, then keeps pushing, to regularly thrilling effect. It is presented as a series of browsable stand-alone episodes, but absolutely flies as a single-sitting binge. The cascade of ideas and images from talents familiar and new feels so much like the experience of a great film festival – albeit compressed into a single evening – that I had to pause halfway through to mix myself a bicyclette.
It starts particularly strongly, giving the whole enterprise the kind of shove off the hilltop that a great opening night film can confer on Cannes or Venice. Courtesy of France’s Ladj Ly, we’re in the block-like Paris banlieues, where a restless teenager played by Ly’s son Al-hassan uses a radio-controlled camera drone to escape the bounds of his family’s flat. Weaving around the tower blocks of Montfermeil, the camera shows us snatches of life behind locked doors – a father home schooling his children, women queuing for food, an illicit rooftop conclave of surly teens. From there, it’s on to Rome, where Paolo Sorrentino imagines the Queen quarantining with Pope Francis, after lockdown bites during a diplomatic visit.
The lead roles are played by two souvenir figurines, while voices are supplied by Olivia Williams and Javier Cámara. “Confinement is a condition of the spirit,” Liz opines: later the two skinny dip together, and squabble over whether to watch The Crown or The Two Popes. It’s The Great Beauty on a pound-shop budget, and a total hoot.
Then it’s on to Los Angeles where Rachel Morrison reads a piercingly beautiful letter to her five-year-old son Wiley, contrasting his time in lockdown with her own experience at the same age of losing her mother to cancer. Understandably, a running theme in the collection is the vulnerability and resilience of children, and Britain’s Gurinder Chadha and David Mackenzie also explore their (slightly older) offspring’s reactions to the pandemic with enormous sensitivity and wit.
Many of the films are spur-of-themoment doodles – or at least began life as them. But others are impressively rigorous, with visual effects, camera trickery and even dance numbers.
The collection concludes with a road movie of sorts: “Ride it out”, advises an on-screen caption. Sound advice – and this is just the kind of thing that helps.
Available on Netflix from next Tuesday, June 30