Revolving around the Eight Millennial Development Goals established at the United Nations Summit in 2000, 8 is one of the most high-profile programs of the Worldwide Short Film Festival. With acclaimed directors like Gus van Sant and Mira Nair contributing, alongside missing-in-action auteurs like Jane Campion (The Piano), the program has a built-in sense of importance, which unfortunately results in the films plodding along with inflated self-seriousness.
The program starts brightly with the France/Ethiopia co-production "Tiya's Dream." Director Abderrahmane Sissako stages a heartbreakingly real scenario of a girl living in extreme poverty with no faith that relief will ever come to her. The natural grace of the non-actor cast fills the ten-minute film with warmth, where other filmmakers usually settle for saccharine.
Gaspar Noé's "AIDS (SIDA)" explicitly makes clear the grim humanity Noe has been trying to express in such volatile controversy pieces like Irréversible. Noé's queasy but unflinching camera captures the true-life story of AIDS-sufferer Dieudonné Ilboudo. Slowly dying in a hospital, Ilboudo presents a natural strength Noé films with such harshness that the man appears almost a pillar of endurance by the film's end.
This intensity makes Mira Nair's "How Can It Be" especially disappointing. One can tell Nair's message is one of female empowerment and gender equality, one of the MDGs. However, her story of a woman leaving her arranged marriage (and son) is an uneven matching of overheated spousal drama and half-baked sentimentality.
Jane Campion's tackling of environmental instability recovers from Nair's misstep with a slow build towards a dreamy, towering finale in "The Water Diary." Following a young Australian girl's diary notes concerning the drought crippling her community, the arresting imagery Campion displayed in the stunning An Angel At My Table almost 20 years ago has made its way into the 21st century.
Viewers can do themselves a favour by skipping the last short, Wim Wenders' schlocky TV news parody "Person to Person," and end with Jan Kounen's "The Story of Panshin Beka." A simple story of pregnancy in a village on the Amazon becomes a heart-rending struggle for human life and how the simplest of solutions can still be worlds away.
The program starts brightly with the France/Ethiopia co-production "Tiya's Dream." Director Abderrahmane Sissako stages a heartbreakingly real scenario of a girl living in extreme poverty with no faith that relief will ever come to her. The natural grace of the non-actor cast fills the ten-minute film with warmth, where other filmmakers usually settle for saccharine.
Gaspar Noé's "AIDS (SIDA)" explicitly makes clear the grim humanity Noe has been trying to express in such volatile controversy pieces like Irréversible. Noé's queasy but unflinching camera captures the true-life story of AIDS-sufferer Dieudonné Ilboudo. Slowly dying in a hospital, Ilboudo presents a natural strength Noé films with such harshness that the man appears almost a pillar of endurance by the film's end.
This intensity makes Mira Nair's "How Can It Be" especially disappointing. One can tell Nair's message is one of female empowerment and gender equality, one of the MDGs. However, her story of a woman leaving her arranged marriage (and son) is an uneven matching of overheated spousal drama and half-baked sentimentality.
Jane Campion's tackling of environmental instability recovers from Nair's misstep with a slow build towards a dreamy, towering finale in "The Water Diary." Following a young Australian girl's diary notes concerning the drought crippling her community, the arresting imagery Campion displayed in the stunning An Angel At My Table almost 20 years ago has made its way into the 21st century.
Viewers can do themselves a favour by skipping the last short, Wim Wenders' schlocky TV news parody "Person to Person," and end with Jan Kounen's "The Story of Panshin Beka." A simple story of pregnancy in a village on the Amazon becomes a heart-rending struggle for human life and how the simplest of solutions can still be worlds away.
