POP 953 Monday 16 July 2012

Today’s POP is Rachel, starting a bed-in on St Martins Lane.

This summer the Sanderson and St Martins Lane hotels present the perfect opportunity to hole up indoors – exclusively streaming the Future Shorts Festival Summer programme on demand from their luxurious bedrooms. With room service and a hotel robe, this takes a DVD and duvet date to the next level.

As the largest short film network in the world, Future Shorts is quickly expanding its territory – screening in 60 countries and 160 cities worldwide, with destinations everywhere from a local youth centre in Bosnia to a palace in Bucharest.

We took to bed to watch the movies at the St Martins Lane hotel, its shaded wall-to-wall windows and white linen offering a cloud like treatment of the London skyline. Room service delivered meaty tuna served rare with slithers of avocado, triple layered club sandwiches and an array of chocolate-OD desserts, washed down with muddled triple berry mojitos and Santiago de daiquiris with cardamom pod and pineapple.

Settled and satiated we began with SXSW Best Short winner Notes on Biology (2011) directed by Will Madden. Bored at the back of the class, a student unleashes his imagination with an empty pad of lined paper and a ball point pen in sketchy stop-motion.

After we follow this kid’s fade out from his teacher’s mundane narration we are quickly transported to the busiest shopping street of Brazil. Clarissa Knoll’s Street Vendor Cinema (2011) shows a hustler selling filmmaking on demand, directing street-priced classics with crazy plot lines. We see samurais fight in woodlands with tracksuited rivals, all cheered on by the on-screen audience stopping to watch the scenes unfold. The director doesn’t hesitate in taking the centre stage of these films either, acting as the heart throb in one old lady’s black and white melodrama.
 

On a more serious note, We’ll Become Oil (2011) is an experimental documentary from Mihai Grecu inspired by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It is a marvel of sprawling landscapes which we experience flying through these barren scenes; the film’s subtext thudded into us through cyclical chops of the helicopter’s wing span, sparking against the desert air.

The longest by far is Guest (2011) from South Korea at 20 minutes of blissful teen angst. It opens with a girl on a rampage, cussing and swearing through the streets, still in her school uniform. She storms into a house, but it’s not her parents who she is about to offload on to, it’s the home of her father’s recently discovered mistress.

After she has finished spitting in their tomato plants, the relationship she develops with the two children who greet her at the door is heart-warming, simple and a promising piece of acting on all parts from the Korean National University of Art’s film program.

With the rest of the line-up including BAFTA winning A Morning Stroll (UK, 2012) and black and white 35mm beauty Je T’Aime John Wayne, a classic love letter to London, the wide selection proves this summer at the Sanderson to be a perfect opportunity for film lovers to indulge in a different cinematic experience.

futureshorts.com/festival

Images: Jonathan Flanders

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