The Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival is widely regarded as the Cannes of short film. Saad Hendawy attended this year's round The Clermont-Ferrand Festival for Short Film (31 Jan-8 Feb) was a model of effective organisation and curatorial discernment. The week-long event featured too much remarkable fare to cover in the space of a single report. A rich and varied programme afforded two Egyptian entries: Tamer Mohsen's An Tanam Behudou' Hatta Al-Sabe'a (To Sleep Peacefully Until Seven) and Ahmed Mekki's Yabani Asli (Japanese Original), both Cinema Institute graduation projects. They proved palpably successful with the audience even if they failed to glean any prizes. Suffice it to say, in the context of what the festival had to offer, that it demonstrated the much underrated power of a genre whose magic relies on a visual economy of means. Compared to the full-length feature, the short film compresses and intensifies the dramatic aspects of filmmaking. And it invades the realm of visual art rather more forcefully than its longer counterpart. In its austerely aesthetic orientation and the drive to reach beyond its own boundaries, a short film tends to favour description over narrative; yet insofar as it remains a primarily dramatic form (unlike an art video, for example), it is never entirely free of the compulsion to tell a story. In this sense it recalls the short story, a literary predecessor that utilises tip-of-the-iceberg techniques of evocation in the attempt to cover a far greater expanse of territory than it actually occupies, the short film condenses a life, a concept, a dilemma into a few telling moments, meticulously engineered to give both aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. Such was the unique power of Clermont-Ferrand. Dutch filmmaker Sytsk Kok's film Wall of China, winner of the festival's grand prix this year, encapsulates these tendencies very clearly. A solitary woman in her seventh decade enters a Chinese restaurant to celebrate her birthday. She is pointedly alone, and as she notices the many groups of people sitting together at various tables, her envy for the their cheerful company is made evident through the device of interior monologue. Soon the waitress has found out that she is there to celebrate her birthday, however; she informs all present and happily, nonchalantly they join the woman, turning the table at which she sits by herself into a huge surface made up of all their tables. The woman sheds her loneliness, and festivity rules. Towards the end of the film, in a remarkably intelligent cinematic gesture, a young man enters the restaurant by himself. As he notices the huge table, he too envies the gathering; again, the device of interior monologue is employed to highlight the parallel thus proposed; the fact that he pronounces the same lines invests the Wall of China with a cyclical shape that makes it all the more articulate. Only 10 minutes long, the film is ingeniously executed in that, despite having only one, relatively unassuming setting, it manages to grip the viewer through its duration. The film is admirably simple, varying angles of view and light arrangements frequently enough to avoid tedium yet subtly enough to retain a sense of wholeness. Intellectually it reflects on the predicament of solitude in the individually oriented societies of the West, of which the present writer had but a brief glimpse while on the train from Paris to the venue of the festival. Hundreds of neatly lined small houses on either side of the tracks, a snow-covered prospect and intense cold combined to give an impression of harrowing solitude. Even before seeing the film, one could imagine thousands of similarly lonely elderly women, emotionally disinherited in the ever more ruthless search for individual, primarily economic self-realisation. But such reflections come with a twist: anyone, anywhere, even a young man with his life ahead of him, can experience this sense of isolation momentarily. And it remains up to the individual to test people's capacity for integration -- a capacity, Kok implies, that will always exist against the odds. Norwegian filmmaker Hanz Petter Moland's Strength in Unity, winner of the special jury prize, is a rather more disturbing meditation on existence, with a similar, single setting and cyclical framework to match. A group of eight elderly loggers, merrily singing the benefits of unity as they enter the forest on an overcast day, encounter a lone woman who is half submerged in mud, about to drown, calling for help. The loggers form an instant rescue mission and pull her out to safety. The woman waves her thanks and disappears. Yet no sooner have they congratulated themselves on the success of the mission than the loggers realise they too have been submerged. They call out, but nobody is there to respond. Gradually, they begin to disappear in the mud; before too long they have given up hope, so they hold hands and once again begin to sing their song. The viewer realises that in all likelihood they are going to die. Old-guard values are all very well, the director seems to be saying, but in the end those who maintain them are likely to wither away, unaided.
