The opening ceremony of the annual Brussels Short Film Festival’s 28th edition began with presentations typical of its main venue, the Flagey cultural centre, and of Brussels as a whole: with its presenters not only speaking in different languages, but also giving the distinct impression that they weren’t quite saying the same things, nor offering exactly the same pieces of information. Though this might be a confusing or even frustrating practice to outsiders of this town, there is also a refreshing honesty to it. After all there is no such thing as a perfect translation, no way of entirely bridging the gaps between cultures grown distinct over centuries of existence. Different languages will always give access to different things.
A good example of this fact was one of the general and artistic director’s use of the French term n’importe quoi. This is how the man – Pascal Hologne is his name – chose to describe the generally unfortunate state of the world today: in his words, n’importe quoi is currently unfolding in Belgium, in Europe at large, in the United States, really, everywhere you look. The closest English translation would probably be “nonsense”, and the only consolation he could offer to combat it was the fact that we, the audience, had shown up to see the films on display that night, made by people we didn’t know, in countries we had sometimes only heard of.
The first of the films in question, Urban Allegory, was an almost too-perfect introduction to this year’s theme of “Freedoms” – freedom to be ourselves, to move, to think. This short isn’t so much about freedom of thought as it about freeing ourselves from certain thoughts, although these aren’t alluded to exactly. Generally speaking, I found the statement of the film to be unclear, although it seemed very certain of its very vague message. And a preachy film that isn’t clear about what it is criticising (perhaps it was people being on their phones? Or distracted divorced parents?) can make for a toxic mix in this case: we can’t help but project our personal troubles onto the screen, only to have the filmmakers declare that if we would only get rid of our “illusions”, the world would be a better place. It seems particularly offensive, in this climate, to suggest that what individuals are mainly limited by is their own ideas.
That is until the next film, I Died in Irpin. The animated documentary tells the true story of the writer/director Anastasia Falileieva when she was living in a heavily militarised area of Ukraine, with her abusive boyfriend who refused to evacuate. It is a film about someone who is very much trapped by illusions – ones that he has fed her, to keep her chained down by the lie that she is physically imperfect, by the false prison of duty, by the ideal of unconditional romantic love. With this more grounded, and utterly poignant film, it is easier to see how we do build empires out of nefarious ideas, and even the urgency of war is not always strong enough to bring them down.
An Orange from Jaffa, however, did not feel as grounded or emotionally truthful. While its premise of a Palestinian man and his Israeli taxi driver having to navigate their way out of a dangerous encounter with Israeli military seems a promising setting for a complex relationship to unfold, it eventually disappoints with safe platitudes. The underlining message that both the driver and his passenger are equal victims of tyranny somehow feels simultaneously like a crucial point to make and a cop-out, tailored to Western audiences more preoccupied with the ideas the conflict evokes in them, than with the realities of violence and oppression.
My favourite of the films, When Grass Grows, so short and effective it would be a shame to spoil much, arrived as a kind of surprise: an intimate dialogue between two little girls on a hot summer’s day, as they dread the future horrors of womanhood. After the fact, it can seem like a lead-in to the last film of the night, Children of the Birds, a sort of modern mythological retelling of Adam and Eve’s story, but with the couple having the weight of creation on their shoulders rather than merely being one of its products. Eve, here a goddess of effortless, joyful creativity and care for all living things, struggles to maintain a relationship with her Adam, who cannot help but destroy whatever she makes – that is when he isn’t creating airplanes, suburban villages, and other unsightly objects which clash with Eve’s surrealist jungle décor, and break her heart. More faithful, in the end, to pagan myths than to the Bible’s prescriptiveness, this film didn’t seem to have much in the way of answers, offering mostly wackiness and gorgeous poetic imagery in their stead. A welcome conclusion to the evening for this audience member, who was reminded of Hologne’s introductory speech, and thought that, perhaps, one can’t always fight the n’importe quoi in the world with arguments and rational messages. There seems to be a visceral quality to irrational hate, next to which clever and intentional statements can seem hopeless. At their very best, what films can do is make us want to continue to show up, to witness the experiences and visions of strangers – and make up our own ideas about them.
The Brussels Short Film Festival will continue until 3 May. Information about future screenings and events can be found here.