Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024 – Competition Shorts

I always find the live action and the animated short film section of the festival to be a fascinating one. The short work is often where you find new or different talent, starting to spread their wings, and that’s something any art form needs to encourage (I also find it heartening that that film festival has a number of these mostly-new film-makers present to talk about their works, which are often very personal). All of the works in this strand were in competition for The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence, named for the acclaimed, Oscar and BAFTA winning editor, renowned for her collaborations with Martin Scorsese. As with any collection of short works, it’s a varied mixture. Some will connect more with one viewer, others with a different viewer, but regardless of who wins, hopefully exposure at this sort of festival event helps boost the creator’s signal and get them noticed in the wider media sphere (and perhaps even help in opening other doors further down the line, always a constant struggle for any artist in any artform).

There was a pleasing diversity on offer here – one audience member who stood at the end of the Q&A with the creators summed it up nicely when he thanked them for making us cry and laugh. We moved from friends creating music and celebrating a birthday (Argentinian entry Shoal) to a special anniversary for an elderly couple, the wife in the grips of dementia, her erratic memories bursting forth in the form of animation created using napkins (Wilma Smith’s The Jubilee), to a monochrome homage to the golden age of silver screen monster movies in a world where werewolves are real (Manny Wolfe), to exploring family memories and exploding houses (Liberty Smith’s My Exploding House), father and son relationships (My Dad and the Volcano by Scottish creator Gavin Reid, who, it turned out, once worked in the Cameo Cinema where the films were being shown, and Lisa Clarkson’s Paternal Advice, adapted from a story by noted Scots author Janice Galloway), mother and daughter relationships and living on the breadline (Jamie Di Spirito’s Homework), and gender identity (Max Olson’s Nico). It really was a satisfying and diverse selection, from home and abroad. There isn’t time or space to cover each entry – I thought they were all strong in their own ways, but I can’t cover everything, so here are just a few thoughts on some that particularly touched me:

Trevor Neuhof’s Manny Wolfe tickled me in all the right ways – as you may guess from the title, this was the werewolf short film. Lovingly shot in black and white, with that silvery sheen characteristic of those 1940s and 50s horror films, it is also poking gentle fun at Tinsel Town (Manny works as a waiter, but explains he is an actor – a director dining in his restaurant just nods wearily, you and every other waiter in this town, kid). In this world werewolves are real, but they are just people, not bloodthirsty monsters, and while the horror flicks may seem made for him, Manny keeps losing out at auditions because he wants to be a serious actor, not just a howling wolfman. It’s funny and touching, both to fans of classic horror, and also to the struggle everyone who has worked in Hollywood has gone through to make it, that anyone who loves the film medium will be aware of.

Max Olson’s Nico was a beautifully crafted piece, following a young trans man (Rene Leech); we see them shaving off their longer hair to a buzz cut, breasts bound, a gentleman’s overcoat, but the disappointment on their face when a nightclub doorman refers to them as a woman, and realising that these changes haven’t altered the way many others see them. The actor plays this with such vulnerability and quietness, head always down, not making eye contact, usually on their own in a dark city, alone even in the crowd of the dance floor of the club.

There’s such a fragile beauty to it and vulnerability of someone trying to be who they want to be that you almost want to hug them and tell them if will be alright. The elderly widow in the next apartment sees them in the man’s coat and tells them they look like her late husband, leading to an incredibly touching shared moment between two souls struggling with where life has taken them; ultimately this beautiful short film is about the fact each of us has our own pains and needs, and it is only those precious connections to one another than can really anchor us.

Nico

Wilma Smith’s The Jubilee was a mix of live-action and animation, most of the latter created, hand-drawn on table napkins and tissues (the objects themselves, rather cleverly, can become animated too, moving, rolling up to evoke emotions of loss, grief, anger and fear). On those napkins we see a woman, then a dashing man in a suit, who she at first thinks is her father, before realising it is her beloved husband. A cacophony of voices can be heard in the background, commenting about her condition, about her not having one of her good days, and to any of us (far too damned many of us) who have had loved ones slowly consumed by it, we will recognise this quickly as someone with dementia.

The Jubilee (2024) Trailer from Wilma Smith – Film Director on Vimeo.

Smith uses this simple animation medium (all done in her garden shed, cold in winter, roasting in summer) to great emotional effect; the feelings of disorientation, of knowing something is wrong, something is missing, but not knowing what or why, and the panic it brings, then the sudden bursts of memories that do remain, suddenly vivid for a brief spell. The final moments are live action, a family gathering for a special wedding anniversary, the live footage the real world we see, the animation the interior life of a mind and memory failing itself and trying to find the thread through an impossible labyrinth.

I think the thing that struck me with all of the works here isn’t just how well-crafted they were, it is also how wonderfully personal they clearly are to the filmmakers. Yes, of course, you can have a lot of personal elements in a feature film as a writer, director, actor, but I think perhaps with the short form it is more concentrated, you can feel the emotion in it, and that always enriches your viewing experience. From the short Q&A with the creators after the screening in the Cameo Cinema, it seemed even clearer that each of them had indeed brought a project that was very dear to them emotionally, and for my money that’s a good thing – any artistic endeavour that doesn’t elicit an empathic or sympathetic emotional response isn’t working for me, and these all touched me in different ways.

UPDATE: It has just been announced that Manny Wolfe won the Thelma Schoonmaker award