As Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy, his great entwining of the personal and political, does the rounds once again on its 30th anniversary, the first batch from this year’s selection of European shorts gathered by EU cultural umbrella organisation Eunic London is given the subtitle Explore, and focuses on awakenings of the subjective, sexual and identity-shaping kind. Hopefully that doesn’t mean, now that we’re far from the Berlin wall and busy on TikTok, that we have lost sight of collective aspirations. The other In Short, Europe strands (subtitled Grow, Surround and Dream) should deliver more on that front.
The omnipresent ticking clock on the soundtrack of Stefan Langthaler’s chamber piece Fabiu reminds us that awakenings come with an expiry date. A window of opportunity opens up for Austrian pensioner Arthur when he invites Hungarian student Fabiu into his home to help care for his dementia-stricken wife. All careworn closeups and blunt exchanges at first, their brief encounter is quickly snuffed out in a melancholic reflection on the feasibility and limits of responsibility for other people, astutely performed by Günter Toller and Kristóf Gellén.
If only emotional connection came as easy as quaffing magic herbs, as in Anna Dudko’s delightful six-minute aquatic animation Deep Water, from Ukraine. That’s is how a vermillion-tinted naiad gets her kicks, allowing her to psychically travel down water pipes and up toilet bowls to spy on humans. Nothing to do with the war, thank God – though this could be a viable route for Zelenskiy to spy inside the Kremlin.
Belgium’s Emily Worms splices the rigour of verité with free’n’easy pastel-tinted fantasia in Amours Libres, a short transcription of a conversation about throuples. It feels a bit baldly advocatory at this brief length, with little time to personalise the thri-curious interlocutors or let heteronormativity speak for itself. But as this airy taster for unconventional relationships has it, it’s “interesting to be interested in it”.
Body positivity comedy-drama Candy is directed by and stars Scotland’s Sarah Grant as a plus-size burlesque performer psyching herself up for her first striptease. It struggles for dramatic definition but Grant handles both nadir and climax with lived-in authority: a jittery on-stage panic attack, and a reprisal on top of a car bonnet that cascades music-video triumphalism.
More vehement still on the female solidarity front is Slovenia’s Sisters, in which three tomboy refuseniks pick fights with the misogynists on their estate and uphold a celibacy-centric rulebook – “Love is an illness” – that goes two further than Fight Club’s eight famous stipulations. As this trio of hoodied teen Amazons barricade themselves from the outside world and to fend off nightclub creeps, they meet an unlikely ally from the opposite side of the forecourt of femininity. Though it’s obtuse and unchannelled at points, director Katarina Rešek Kukla likes busting out a punchy neon expressionism as startling as the black eye on lead actor Mila Milovanović.
The premise of the strongest offering here, Rory Fleck Byrne’s Dash, isn’t especially fresh: horny-handed son of toil – in this case an Irish stablehand – harbours transgender longings. But Bryne evokes the transformation in a seductive way, in a flurry of jump-cut snapshots, in near-square aspect ratio, of rural life, beautifully shot in liminal light. A horse’s rippling flanks, a furtive glimpse of a navy-blue dressage shirt, a binbag full of women’s clothes dumped in a stream; it’s never clear quite whether we’re witnessing memory, desire or augury. But the masculine and the feminine, the animal and the human all potently intermingle here. If politics is too much to hope for these days, aesthetic twists like this might provide the best awakening available.
• In Short, Europe: Explore is part of the In Short, Europe: Awakening festival at Cine Lumière, London, on 12 and 13 May.
