Educational Media Reviews Online

Movieside Film Festival compiles 20 short, mostly student, films from 1999 to 2003. The length of each film is between 1 minute and 16 minutes with the vast majority in the 3 to 5 minute range. DVDs are a fairly inexpensive and relatively easy way for young filmmakers to reach a wider audience in addition to making their work available online. This compilation is curated in the sense that similar styles or themes are grouped together and are easily accessed by title or as a nearly hour and a half screening. Anyone who has attended college-level student film screenings at year-end understands that there are peaks and valleys to the experience of watching student films. Because of the selection process for this DVD, the truly awful student films are not represented although there are a few rather mediocre ones, which in effect make the others look quite accomplished and professional.

Even though the films are short, in some cases their ideas simply cannot sustain the length, and even some 3-minute films could have been edited down by 50%. There is a manipulation/re-editing of GI Joe cartoons that simply could have been done once rather than several times. The same applies to a fake preview for an “A&E” documentary about a monkey that represents the actor Christopher Walken: one preview would have been funny, while 3 are complete overkill. Students often don’t want to throw away footage that they shot as in the fake 5-minute movie trailer for a 1970s inspired action movie that consists of fights in different areas of Ottawa. A one minute film would have been much more effective. On the other hand, in one particular film, the credits ran about half the screen time of the entire film.

The compilation does include a few little gems. Todd Rohal’s 16 minute Knuckleface Jones is a quixotic tale where a nerdy young man encounters progressively more and more bizarre individuals as he seeks to get back with his sadistic girlfriend. The acting is superb and features some professional actors including Piper Perabo, early in her career. Bryan Lefler’s 2000 Warplay fuses children’s games with action military figures and the real thing. The camera work and special effects are of a professional level and the idea of play and reality or well developed and directed. The 5 minute A Primer for Dental Extraction, a 1999 Carl Weidemann is an extraordinarily atmospheric film that cleverly crosses Guy Maddin’s flickering silent film aesthetic with the anxiety of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Weidemann pays homage to these two filmmakers while infusing his own ideas rather than copying theirs. Grain is an architectural animation by Eric Medine. Bob Hurst’s A Moment (2002) uses stop motion video and plays with color saturation to construct a narrative that is comprised of incongruous sound and image. Christine Hart’s 2001 Construction: One ponders romantic break-up through a graphically broken up visual of written and spoken word and image.

This group of films on DVD is recommended for teaching purposes. Classes of filmmaking students can look, critique and be inspired by the work of others. They can learn from the good, the bad, and the somewhat irrelevant works of other film students that came before them.