The Pundit

Accelerator Programme 2

By Mel Campbell ⋅ August 6, 2006 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, short films can be delicate and discomforting in equal measure’and that’s just what we got.

The atmospheric The Dance follows a teenager’s flirtation with suicide and immersion in music. Its use of light is hauntingly beautiful, but the wobbly camera does little to dispel the stereotype of short films as training grounds for inexperienced directors.

Despite its heroic focus pulling, I felt similarly ambivalent about Look Sharp; although, l did appreciate its punning title. Seemingly inspired by Melbourne photographer Carol Jerrems, it’s a claustrophic character study of a photographer’s sexual manipulation of two teenage sharpie models. Good premise; unnecessarily hammy acting.

For me, the highlight was the agony and ecstasy of fireworks in the Cannes selected Cracker Bag. Its evocation of early ’80s Australian suburbia was humorous’the audience often giggled with recognition’but never nostalgic. Similarly understated was Small Boxes, a gentle tale of a Latino-Australian man’s efforts to change his life that could have been saccharine but was gently uplifting. The boxes of the title refer to the shoe store where he takes his beloved grandmother, and where he later looks for work.

Love This Time was bittersweet, but equally tender. ‘I have so much love to give,’ says an Islamic-Australian girl as she attempts to hold her household together after her mother’s death. Her optimistic relationships with her younger brother and her Anglo-Australian boyfriend are the more piquant for the crippling grief of her bedridden father.

The screening finished with the literally creepy Nature’s Way, set in a perpetually rainy New Zealand suburb. After a man stabs a small girl to death in the rainforest, she creeps back into his life like the vines creeping into his home. It was an unsettling end to a rewarding afternoon of Australian cinema.