Until It Turns Black dir. Anastasiia Falileieva

Still trawling through all the submissions, the programming/submissions team as a whole- well, I think we all feel somewhat defeated in many senses. Getting through these 400+ films and seeing *bad* film after bad (and while all ‘art’ is subjective, some of these films truly are just terrible (and I’d apologise for saying that but at this point, I’m really just over people not even having the courtesy to read the submission guidelines)) is making it hard for us to distinguish between what is mediocre and what is genuinely a good piece of work.

Surprisingly, a lot of the shortlisted films that we have landed on have ended up being animations. My hypothesis for this is that a lot more time and effort (reshooting something tends to be easier than animating from scratch) has to go into creating these animations, rather than just ‘pointing’ a camera at something and filming (for example, one submission was just someone zooming in and out on a beanie, calling it ‘avant-garde’).

Something interesting we learnt in class and through the reading this week was what exactly a ‘cinephile’ is. A cinephile is someone who is passionate about film, film theory and basically everything surrounding film. Personally, I hadn’t heard of this term before (as a media student, shame on me) and I think there is a marked difference between a simple film lover and a cinephile- namely, that a humble film enthusiast wouldn’t call themselves a ‘cinephile’.