Showing
California is a Place
World PremiereDrea Cooper | United States | 26 mins
CALIFORNIA IS A PLACE is an ongoing short film series about curious subjects and interesting people from the golden state. The stories cover a range of themes - from the economy, to immigration, to urban youth and the arts - and are meant to be intimate portraits of a diverse range of Californians. For example, Cannonball follows a group of skaters who have turned Fresno’s foreclosure crisis into an opportunity; Big Vinny features a small town local celebrity used-car salesman as he ponders the lessons learned in his now lost lot; Borderland presents the complicated reality of drug smuggling along the San Diego County side of the U.S.-Mexico border; Scraptertown provides a voice for Oakland's Baybe Champ, whose scraper bike movement has become a bicycle art gang for good; El Rey is an intimate portrait of a Mexican immigrant trumpeter who, for the past twenty years, has been seeking work every afternoon in Los Angeles' Mariachi Plaza; Honey Pie is a portrait of the artist behind the Real Doll, the most realistic sex doll on the market; and Uppercut profiles a few Silicon Valley programmers who code by day and then gather at night for full contact garage fight club.
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Fragments of a Different Everyday Life
UK PremiereLab. A Mundzuku Ka Hina | Mozambique | 64 mins
A remarkable film made by the young people, children, that live amongst the massive refuse tip of Maputo. With brutal realism, and without commentary, their everyday struggle for survival is revealed..
The images are those of the post-apocalypse so often depicted in Hollywood sci-fi films and dystopias. But this is today, and this is here. Children perched on rubbish trucks, the delivery of fresh refuse, a lethal cocktail of food that putrefies and ferments in tin cans. Nothing is left to the imagination and everything seems shockingly normal. At the end, in front of the cameras, the kids launch themselves into an excited dance expressing a mocking, indomitable vitality.
A film that must pierce the heart and conscience of anyone who consumes and discards without thought. A film that highlights the terrible differences between rich and poor, and makes a mockery of the notion of a trickle-down state, and emphasises even more brutally the slack waters of globalisation. It is a scene that Virgil would surely have found time to show Dante. A film about what we prefer not to see, but must.
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