Arc of a Bird was not in formal competition but, as I mentioned a couple posts back, was playing in what is called the “Short Film Corner”. The Corner is almost literally that – a corner of the massive basement of the Grand Palais, below the larger tradeshow of cinema. It isn’t exactly a “shadow market” since there’s really no market – or at least, pretty slim one, but like every corner of Cannes takes some navigating to figure out.
Two days into the festival, it is clear that if you get in early enough and pay the fee, you too have a shot at getting in this corner! (I watched a one-minute film of a bird building a nest on a river which, given the shaky camera work, sounds more interesting than it was.) More than a thousand films are loaded onto what turns out to be a pretty cool database. Viewers are then allowed to sit at private booths and call up any film by number of search by a keyword in the title. (I’ll spare you the story of the larger “screening room” which proved as disorganized as the French transit system.)
Now, the folks at Cannes promote all of this as a great networking opportunity to meet distributors of short films. This is sort of like saying you can have a great opportunity to meet film distributors from the fairy kingdom. They may exist but good luck spotting one.
It takes the Producer and me a couple critical days to figure out the whole “distributor” thing and figure out a way to get them to watch the films. With a list of 30 distributors in hand, we spend time in a café putting handmade packages together that contain a DVD of our film and a handwritten card. (The young guy at the counter said it was pointless to include a DVD in the personalized package since all of the films are in the database, but I figured it was far more likely that one of the distributors would pickup our package than pick up our package AND sit down to review the film in one of the viewing booths there.)
Because nature abhors a vacuum and human beings are the creative folks they are, what happens is that you have a system of short filmmakers getting other short filmmakers to watch THEIR film. Each morning in the café area dozens of filmmakers start pasting up posters, postcards, handbills, just about anything to grab attention. One guy who looked like Harpo Marx on a bender bravely stood at the center of the hallway handing his “screening” card to everyone who walked by – and so ended up approaching me at least three times.
Contrary to that example, it more or less works, if you’re interested in the short film form and what’s being done in different countries. At one point, while standing in line to get my seat in one of the screening booths, a twenty-something from the UK walked along the line and handed out 3” x 5” photocopied fliers promoting his short (which was a literal hommage to the films of George Méliès – a five minute, black and white silent with various rudimentary special effects of people disappearing and reappearing in different places.) But, heck, I checked out his film.
My favorite was a short by a Welsh writer/director Hefin Rees; it’s a beautifully shot and smartly written love story. Another film, about circus troupe that has its bus break down in the desert, features a continuous 360 pan which has the story unfold in the space of six minutes until one of the trapeze artists rides the the bus down the road as part of the closing pan. I felt like I could have used a Dramamine when it was done, but the choreography of the storytelling with no dialog was impressive.
As I write this, Cannes is just half over. We’ll have to see if the phone rings and any of those distributors call… but, as it turned out, I found myself scheduling an hour a day to sit down and watch other people’s short film and that in and of itself made it a bit of an education as well.
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