Review: University film festival

Broken into eight groups comprising of multiple short films and theatrical vignettes, at 6pm on Wednesday it was the turn of Film Group D, opened by Valeria Palayanuskayte’s 'Dinner'.

We find ourselves side on to a table with a fraught woman at the right side end, and her disapprovingly haughty husband at the other. The naturalistic tone breaks down as he drinks through a bottle of alcohol and the camera begins to flick between angles. Her dreams of moving to Paris are shouted out of the equation. The audience ends up alone with the man in an almost blacked-out-enough theatre studio.

The next film, Kelly Sun’s ‘Doppelgänger’, picks up where ‘Dinner’ left off, with two twenty something year-old people eating, and pretending to be middle aged. There is something both hilarious and charming, almost Shakespearean, in the way Group D’s actors in general flung themselves into the roles. They aged without the use of makeup, they became snide marriage wreckers in halls replete with Domino’s boxes and, at the end of ‘Doppelgänger’ at least, they bumped off an erstwhile wife with a fake bloody knife. A triumph for those lacking budgets but with enthusiasm in abundance.

‘Out of Hours’, directed by Reda Juodaugaite, continued along the same lines, climaxing in wonderfully silly fashion when a cuckold-come-adulterer (it’s not completely clear) is murdered with a boot. By a man who is an “Italian shoe maker”.

And then the mood and style shifted dramatically with what was the stand out film of the group. Laura Henson’s ‘Tick Tock’ has a confused woman wake up to a knock on her door. She switches on her bedside lamp and frantically rattles a bottle of pills. Where others stretched out the limits of Whiteknights Campus into big, filmic worlds, ‘Tick Tock’ worked within its confines. Using only three viewpoints, two actors and one tent, we are transported to the inside of someone’s mind in five short, beautifully edited minutes.

Stylistically the next film, Emily Southall's 'Odyssey', was another departure from what had come before. One of two non-fiction pieces, it quickly delved into the world of a fanatical cross-stitcher, who spent her time crafting slogans and skulls into doilies, and reflecting on the nature of art. While thematically less intense than the other films, it was snappy and well cut.

The penultimate piece, Rhonda Cowell's 'Beyond the Silence', briefly brought the evening back to the camp theatrics of ‘Doppelgänger’ when a mystery man - possibly the devil - requests that an unsuspecting student impress him. She does so by taking him to Forbury Gardens.

And then finally Rhonda Cowell's 'Beyond the Silence' played us out. As honest as it was well shot and considered, Cowell filmed three friends and herself getting ready for a night out. As they put on their makeup, they discussed what it was and how it felt to be young, black women. Their sincerity was met by large applause.

In truth there is a near unlimited amount that could be said about the many films showing at Whiteknights Campus. Some are a bit dodgy, some masterful, but all are underscored by an infectious homemade passion.