EFA: Short films on tour

How should we evaluate the two selections? With ESFAA, the jury serves as the first ‘filter’, entering the shorts into a festival where the public votes for their favourite. With EFA, in contrast, the jury makes the ultimate decision about the selection of the winner. Both selections aim to reach as large an audience as possible and provide a taste of European short film production. It’s the selectors that distinguish them. Does that reflect in the actual selection? Do the films selected by juries radiate ‘elevated’ art, while the ones selected by the audience tend to be slightly more crowd-pleasing? Or does the short film’s format and the audience it attracts eliminate such dichotomies?

The nine ESFAA films, with their varying techniques, tackle concrete personal experiences, with each film emphasising specific issues. Both documentaries (Storks Always Come Home and To Live in a Wild Sea) and the majority of fiction films (Motherless Child, The Mysterious Adventures of Claude Conseil, Human Nature, and Balkan, Baby) rely on a traditional storyline that follows an individual’s daily routine. With its content and form, Thank You for Your Patience! stands out the most since it features a long shot captured by a camera mounted inside a Brussels city bus. It shows a Congolese immigrant, who expresses his dissatisfaction with Europeans by cursing at them. During the tense ride, the passengers’ passive discomfort, juxtaposed with the loud litany on injustice, speaks volumes. The silent animation Nun or Never! with its stylised hand drawings and minimal colour palette illustrates the peace of communal life in a nunnery broken by a man underground. Meanwhile, the experimental film Edge depicts a route that a stigmatised protagonist must traverse in order to eventually transform into a pearl. The audience has picked films that address complex and difficult issues, such as migration, death, relationships, and LGBTQI+ experiences, and are narrated by individuals, allowing the viewer to relate with the characters and empathetically enter the stories. This is typically one of the primary components that make a film more accessible and appealing to a larger audience.

The thread among films in the EFA selection is less apparent. The jury selected those with a more intrepid form but little or no narrative arch (otherwise evident in the ESFAA selection). The animation 27 and the fiction films Flowers from Another Garden and Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays fragment their narratives, fill them with dreams, and, as in the last film, fall into magical realism. The narrativity in both documentaries is minimal—Aqueronte depicts scenes of a ferry crossing a river, during which we hear bits of conversation between passengers and observe the foggy landscape. All its shots are well-planned and beautifully executed. Hardly Working takes a very different approach. The winning short follows the NPCs and their repetitive routine in the game Red Dead Redemption 2, in which the filmmakers raise the issue of work and construed normality as a result of capitalism.
Although the EFA selection may appear more ‘demanding’ for regular viewers, its films are thematically similar to those of ESFAA, where the audience demonstrated that, regardless of form, they are drawn to personal stories. Although these are partially concealed in the EFA selection due to formal playfulness, diligent viewers may find themselves even more addressed by films that put community and life within it in the forefront. The key to the viewers’ hearts resides precisely in the interactions between the individual and the community—but let them have the final say.