The 6th day of the BRKLYN Film Festival in Williamsburgh proved to be worthwhile. There were films showing at Windmill Studios NYC but I chose to catch the short film lineup at IndieScreen which consisted of Cosmic Ancestry, The Cave, Baldr, 113 Degrees, Chaos, The Naturalist, and A Better World. My favorite of the evening was A Better World but they were all pretty deep and curated very well.
Synopsis:
Cosmic Ancestry, is an experimental non-narrative digital animation inspired by the theory that life on Earth was seeded with genetic material from space.
The Cave’s writer / director Niclas Gillis relates his experience as an alien in America in this conceptual short film inspired by Plato’s Cave.
Baldr, somewhere in the depths of our universe, an aged spaceman laments the loss of his only friend–an octopus in a specimen jar.
113 Degrees is a fable of love, sacrifice and spaceships. Francesca and Joe are astronauts who’ve become lovers. Bunkered up in their little spaceship, Earth is a distant reality. Everything they want is right here. But now their mission is ending, and Joe’s wife is waiting for him back home. Thinking she’s going to lose him, Francesca makes a catastrophic decision.
Chaos, Marc goes to bed one night and when he wakes up he discovers that all the furniture in the room has switched positions. At work he finds out that this phenomenon has happened globally. The world is in chaos.
The Naturalist follows long-term partners Simon and Oliver who live in a militant future that mandates genetic therapy for all ‘abnormalities,’ including homosexuality. Despite the oppressive state, Simon and Oliver have each other. That is, until a police officer arrives at their door for a routine inspection.
A Better World centers around Henry, a dedicated citizen of a pitiless dictatorship. He has always worked intensely at the Denunciation Ministry. But suddenly, the regime collapses; the cold, technocratic and paranoid world becoming at once an idyllic and caricatured countryside. Henry, panicked without the rules he was addicted to, seems to be the only one to regret the old regime. As if it was going to come back, he continues to follow the rules and clings to his useless work…
If you haven’t purchased tickets to the BRKLYN Film Festival yet, you definitely should. The festival ends on Sunday, June 9th, 2013. Get more information here: http://www.brooklynfilmfestival.org/tickets/