Educational Media Reviews Online

On the plus side, urban visions is a collection of eleven experimental, low- or no-budget short films from a variety of film and video artists and musicians working in a variety of countries and using a variety of filmmaking styles, all of which could provide an eye- and mind-opening experience for budding filmmakers. The films are energetic, and taken as a group they share certain themes of urban life, among them drug use, violence, lack of community, and the mind-numbing repetitiveness of city sights and sounds. Any film student watching these films is likely to find something of interest, something that generates a creative spark or prompts a gasp or a giggle. Students interested in more information about particular artists can check out the artists’ biographies and filmographies elsewhere on the DVD.

On the minus side, the technical quality of the DVD as a whole is disappointing. The subtitles, which need to be of high quality for a collection of films in several languages, are quite small and contain occasional inaccuracies and grammatical errors. (To be fair, one of the films needed small subtitles because of the large amount of verbal information it conveyed, but the subtitles for the other films could have been made easier to read.) The viewer must activate the subtitles for each new film, which means navigating to the subtitles menu and then back to the film menu every seven or eight minutes on average. And the subtitle menu is incorrect: to turn on the English subtitles one must select “German,” and vice-versa.

(It occurred to me that the subtitles may be difficult to use in order to increase the probability that the hidden twelfth film will begin to play. If the viewer finishes a film and takes too long to begin navigating the menus, Pablo Altés’s Street Crossing -- the “hidden bonus” promised in the promotional material -- begins to play. No subtitles are needed to watch Street Crossing, although the advertisements on the automobiles are in English.)

The directors’ commentary that appears on the DVD is not especially useful to budding filmmakers and video artists. It’s not a commentary at all but a collection of heavily edited interviews with the directors, in which they talk very briefly about the creative impulses that sparked their films. There is no information on the filmmaking techniques they used.

This is the first DVD produced by lowave, a Paris-based independent film label dedicated to promoting and distributing new low-budget films. Lowave now offers several DVDs. I’d check out some of the others (such as lust, a themed collection of mixed genre films similar to urban visions) before buying this DVD.

The urban visions films and their directors are as follows:

Push, by Gorka Aguado
One Last Thing, by Hilton Earl
Fausse Solitude, by Pierre-Yves Cruaud
Der Letzte Flug, by Lombardi-Clan
Pako, by Nosfe
Hi-Fi, by Sean Baker
Novanta, by GG Tarantola (animated short)
When the Floor Became the Ceiling, by Rudolf Buitendach
Raus aus Seinen Kleidern, by Corinna Schnitt
Promenaux, by Stefano Canapa
The Strip Mall Trilogy, by Roger Beebe
Street Crossing, by Pablo Altés