LIDF

The Free Word centre in Farringdon is a creative hive, brimming with arty types and interesting underground events…the perfect setting for an LIDF evening of short films.

The well attended evening kicks off with In Long Forgotten Fields, the first English documentary I’ve seen so far this festival, and a beautifully made film exploring two brothers trying to understand their turbulent relationship to the land in rural Shropshire.

“The area can get you down, there’s not that much to do, sometimes there’s nothing but your thoughts”.

The film sensitively follows the boys as they ruminate upon their lives; from a variety of jobs, to close-knit camaraderie, drugs, partying and the ultimate realisation that the countryside will always be part of them.

The Explorer, from Goldsmiths is quirky and highly original, giving us everything we have come to expect from this prestigious arts university. Made up entirely from old Super 8 film footage of early travellers expeditions around the world, and a narration by a voice that half way through informs us- ingeniously I thought- that “this isn’t even my voice, it is the voice of M whom I met on one of my travels”. The Explorer is a dream-like film, with clever echos of Descartes philosophical musings on reality, and a nod to the surrealist world of Kafka.

The last short of the session, Borderland, revisits the site of the Berlin wall, tracing what is now just a grey mark on the floor. Humorously, the first building to cut across the line of the ‘ghost wall’ is a large Starbucks, causing the audience to chuckle. An interesting short that asks how much of a part the wall still plays in people’s lives, and whether its memory still divides the German people.

A fantastic evening of films addressing landscape and memory, I can’t wait for the next instalment.