Steel White Table

I saw two hours of short films at the Atlantic Film Festival last night for $8.50, and it was money well-spent, much better than most full-length movies I’ve seen in the theatre this year. It’s a shame that the movie-going public won’t ever see, or even have the chance to see, such excellent movies.

I saw Amul, about a rickshaw driver in India who has to deal with a difficult passenger. (The actor who plays the driver was sitting next to me, which I didn’t realize until someone began taking pictures of him in his seat. I’m glad it was a good movie so I didn’t have to pretend to like it for his benefit.) But Milo 55160, about a bureaucrat who checks people into heaven ("Please sign here and initial there"), was the best movie of the night. It was entertaining and compelling right to the last frame.

I love the reflective quality of short films, how they can immediately draw me into their world and give me something to think about, leave me feeling a little more than I did when I walked in. Not all the movies were like this, but most of them in ten minutes did more than the average blockbuster garbage movie does in a hundred. Here they are from best to worst: Milo 55160; Amul; The Internal Clock, a non-fiction film about a guy who repairs clocks and has a disease that ages him half as fast as a normal person; White Out, a touching portrait of a guy who brings his best friend back from the dead; two aboriginal-themed movies, From Cherry English and Suckerfish; My Old Man, about a 16-year-old Charles Bukowski; and The Mall Man, a well-financed short comedy, and the only film of the night that didn’t really do anything for me.

Before the lights went down, the director of Amul, Richie Mehta, went up to introduce his movie. At one point he thanked Empire Theatres for their support (for providing a venue to show the films). But if commercial movie theatre chains like Empire Theatres want to support the film community, why don’t they give the filmmakers some real exposure and show some of these short films before feature presentations throughout the year? Why is that so hard?

The only time anyone will ever see these movies is at a film festival, and that’s sad.

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