Monday, October 27, 2008

And the Kaja Goes To…

JoeLast week was this year's Short Film Festival in Uppsala. I had hoped to go to a few screenings, but obviously my week didn't go quite as planned, and by Friday we hadn't made it to a single film. Fortunately for us the festival didn't end until Sunday, so Saturday morning I was at the ticket office when it opened in the morning to buy us tickets. We decided to get the small festival pass for 130 SEK (plus the required 20 SEK membership to the film society), which entitled us to attend 3 screenings, where each screening was a thematic collection running about two hours.



Saturday night we went to the Brick Film Fest, in which every film was shot entirely with Legos. The Lego "Battle of Hastings" was ambitious, if not entirely successful, and "Frankenstein" was certainly ominous, but our personal Little Brick Jackdaw definitely goes to the hilarious"Great Microbiologists".

Sunday we were at Slottsbiografen, a very cool old theater just below the castle, for the last four hours of the whole festival. We saw Norwegian Humor 1, part of this years five part Focus Norway series, which included "Regjeringen Martin", the story of a young man going on a blind date as seen by the bureaucrats living in his head; and "De Beste Går Først", a quintessentially Norwegian tale of a group of old men calmly sinking into a bog. We also saw a five year retrospective of notable entries in the National Competition, which had a really great bit of rotoscoping called "En Nattsaga" (and anyone who has heard me ranting about the evils of rotoscoping knows I would never say such a thing lightly); an interesting and personal animated documentary about progress as a disease especially affecting women, called "Tillväxtsjuken".

This last showing also had a nearly interminable bit of experimental film called "Hur Man Gör" which the program summed up as, "This film gathers a motley crew who shares an intense passion for trees, but they cannot agree on which tree is the best." The tree argument took up maybe two minutes of the half hour film, the rest of which revolved around several more or less successful acts of attempted choreography, a closing cinema, a dying father's bequest, a bunch of aging hippies in search of something to protest, and a man in a dress. It also had nearly as many false endings as the Return of the King. Really, it was a relief to see it, because it just wouldn't have felt like a Swedish film festival without something truly inexplicable; nevertheless, it was also a relief when it finally ended.

The best part? I got a t-shirt half price! (I'm such a tourist.)

1 comment:

  1. The phrase "a quintessentially Norwegian tale of a group of old men calmly sinking into a bog" made my day. Thanks!

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