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International One-Minute Film
Festival
review written for Revelation, January 2008
Done in sixty seconds.
Filminute, a film festival-cum-competition is essentially a website where directors can submit a sixty second short to be judged by an international panel, who nominate one submission as the "Best Filminute" and also award five commendations. The panel is drawn from diverse but related disciplines, from Booker Prize-winning novelist Michael Ondaatje to the video art curator Kenichi Kondo, A worldwide audience participates by virtue of the internet, rating the twenty-five films shortlisted by the panel and choosing the winner of the People's Choice award from this. An annual event, this yearÕs votes were polled from over ninety countries, there were more than eight hundred entries from forty-five countries, fourteen of which were represented in the final list of selected shorts. This truly is the worldwide web.
The overall winner for 2007 is Game by Bulgarian director Kristina Grozeva. I donÕt wish to give the Game away, but suffice to say that it is a heartwarming tale of football, passion and childish innocence. Siddartha JatlaÕs Missing, which deals poignantly with the issue of child marriage in India, was the PeopleÕs Choice.
Ō[Sixty] seconds, no more, no less, make every moment countÕ, reads the slogan. Many of the works have issues at their core, and the time constraints do seem to encourage this approach, in much the way that advertising deals with one simple message and uses all of its resources to convey this in the time allotted. It is probably no coincidence that Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of advertisers Saatchi & Saatchi is amongst the panel. Apart from the closeness in length to adverts, the short sharp clips are ideally suited to the web browser in all of us. In this MyTube / YouSpace age of user-generated content, this is not an unusual presentation format or forum for these shorts.
But does it serve the work well to view it in this way? The site itself is not overly usable. I managed to find an archive of entries from 2006 and the shortlist for 2007 quite easily, but there is nowhere obvious to view the entries that made the cut this time around. The yearÕs winners are tucked away at the bottom of the main page. Once they are located, they do seem to load quickly and are easy to view and control - if not to watch, in some cases. The jury-commended About Time uses no commentary at all, director Catalin Leescu relying solely on the visuals to tell the one minute tale, although I have to admit that I found this the most difficult piece to decipher, despite more than one viewing. By contrast, in Egg Love, Zach Math and Jonah Bekhor fill their sixty seconds with playful humour. Some of the chosen pieces feature English subtitles alongside the commentary, and the text is easy to follow in the fairly small window, even with my strained eyes.
There is no facility on the site to download the films and view them at a larger size (again, much like YouTube). However, the quality and production values of the chosen minutes are spot-on, so perhaps the download option and attendant distribution issues is irrelevant.
Filminute may well be one of the futures of the small screen, and possibly a future for film distribution, now that television output is both so thinly spread and struggling for market (and advertising budget) share. But it remains to be seen how and whether this web-based festival will help budding directors scale up their productions, beyond the obvious promotion garnered from the film-making and Šviewing community. The fact that viewers from so many countries voted this year suggests that there is an audience interested in seeing films in this way. I just wonder how such arenas will sustain themselves if this method of promoting shorts ceases to be unique and becomes the norm? To find out, and see the diverse array of styles and talent for yourself, take a few minutes to visit filminute.com.
review written for Revelation, January 2008
Done in sixty seconds.
Filminute, a film festival-cum-competition is essentially a website where directors can submit a sixty second short to be judged by an international panel, who nominate one submission as the "Best Filminute" and also award five commendations. The panel is drawn from diverse but related disciplines, from Booker Prize-winning novelist Michael Ondaatje to the video art curator Kenichi Kondo, A worldwide audience participates by virtue of the internet, rating the twenty-five films shortlisted by the panel and choosing the winner of the People's Choice award from this. An annual event, this yearÕs votes were polled from over ninety countries, there were more than eight hundred entries from forty-five countries, fourteen of which were represented in the final list of selected shorts. This truly is the worldwide web.
The overall winner for 2007 is Game by Bulgarian director Kristina Grozeva. I donÕt wish to give the Game away, but suffice to say that it is a heartwarming tale of football, passion and childish innocence. Siddartha JatlaÕs Missing, which deals poignantly with the issue of child marriage in India, was the PeopleÕs Choice.
Ō[Sixty] seconds, no more, no less, make every moment countÕ, reads the slogan. Many of the works have issues at their core, and the time constraints do seem to encourage this approach, in much the way that advertising deals with one simple message and uses all of its resources to convey this in the time allotted. It is probably no coincidence that Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of advertisers Saatchi & Saatchi is amongst the panel. Apart from the closeness in length to adverts, the short sharp clips are ideally suited to the web browser in all of us. In this MyTube / YouSpace age of user-generated content, this is not an unusual presentation format or forum for these shorts.
But does it serve the work well to view it in this way? The site itself is not overly usable. I managed to find an archive of entries from 2006 and the shortlist for 2007 quite easily, but there is nowhere obvious to view the entries that made the cut this time around. The yearÕs winners are tucked away at the bottom of the main page. Once they are located, they do seem to load quickly and are easy to view and control - if not to watch, in some cases. The jury-commended About Time uses no commentary at all, director Catalin Leescu relying solely on the visuals to tell the one minute tale, although I have to admit that I found this the most difficult piece to decipher, despite more than one viewing. By contrast, in Egg Love, Zach Math and Jonah Bekhor fill their sixty seconds with playful humour. Some of the chosen pieces feature English subtitles alongside the commentary, and the text is easy to follow in the fairly small window, even with my strained eyes.
There is no facility on the site to download the films and view them at a larger size (again, much like YouTube). However, the quality and production values of the chosen minutes are spot-on, so perhaps the download option and attendant distribution issues is irrelevant.
Filminute may well be one of the futures of the small screen, and possibly a future for film distribution, now that television output is both so thinly spread and struggling for market (and advertising budget) share. But it remains to be seen how and whether this web-based festival will help budding directors scale up their productions, beyond the obvious promotion garnered from the film-making and Šviewing community. The fact that viewers from so many countries voted this year suggests that there is an audience interested in seeing films in this way. I just wonder how such arenas will sustain themselves if this method of promoting shorts ceases to be unique and becomes the norm? To find out, and see the diverse array of styles and talent for yourself, take a few minutes to visit filminute.com.
photo: Richard Gallon
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