Slamdance Film Festival features a strong shorts program, as is befitting a festival that is very much filmmaker focused. Here is a sampling of some of the short documentaries being shown at the festival.
Adidas Owns the Reality (22 minutes, directed by Keil Orion Troisi and Igor Vamos) is an issue-oriented film dealing with worker mistreatment in the sportswear industry, especially workers in Adidas’s Cambodian factories. But rather that showing us all the problems, per se, the film lets us in on an elaborate prank staged by The Yes Men in cooperation with the Clean Clothes Campaign.
Through realistic press releases, it is claimed that Adidas has named a Cambodian woman as Co-CEO to deal with workplace issues. It then takes us to Berlin fashion week for the unveiling of a new line of workplace inspired clothing. The faux fashion is very stark and bold in what life in Adidas’s factory is like. The Yes Men have taken on many corporate giants before. There is a humor in all this, but also a great deal of suffering behind the humor.
Coywolf (12 minutes, directed by Lucy Adams) is a brief introduction to the life of urban coyotes in New York City. Some of the images are from cell phone captures, or from wildlife cameras. There is no narrative to go with the imagery. Many of us who live in cities are well aware that coyotes have adapted to city life fairly well.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Waiting (17 minutes, directed by Theo Pangopoulos) uses discovered home movie footage to make a poetic visit to a lost homeland. The footage was made by a Scottish missionary to Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. He set out to record the wildflowers of the area. There are also scenes of what I assume are his family’s picnics among the beauty.
For Pangopoulos, these are images of the land where his grandparents were born and raised, but were forced to leave. He notes that in 45 minutes of footage, only 2 minutes 13 seconds include Arab Palestinians. This surely represents the reality of colonialism and occupation in Palestine—then and now. He notes that “These images of flowers led us to today, a land currently being dehumanised.” He also uses the plants as a metaphor of resilience.
Your Harvest May Be Delayed (15 minutes, directed by Ahmed Al-Zu’bi) is the director’s look back at family history after his mother gives him a bunch of his childhood school papers, drawings, etc. For him, it harkens back to a time when he doesn’t remember and to a home that he doesn’t remember.
