Aesthetica Short Film Festival York

This month saw Aesthetica magazine’s first short film festival take place in some of York’s historic venues. Steve Williams reviews two of his favourite films from the arts, experimental and documentary categories.

Sam Meech’s extraordinary NOAH’S ARK was the first film from ASFF screened in According to McGee – an art gallery stationed just opposite York’s Clifford’s Tower, the remnants of the castle keep, now patrolled by a column of geese assembled in sevens, as if preparing for the flood in the Good Book. The sight prepares you for the world to which we are transported in Meech’s film, his use of thoughtfully chosen and edited footage from the North West Film Archive mapping traces of nostalgia and memory.

NOAH’S ARK stretches existing ideas of time and space to lose you in a deluged world which explores the impermanence of memory and heritage in the digital age. It imagines the tale of Noah, a preacher from Hulme, who seeks to escape a flood by taking his congregation to the magic isle of Fleetwood. As the flood approaches, they must decide what to preserve, and do so by abandoning the ballast of memories.

Meech’s film carries the weight of these memories to us, through archived images whose eventual decay and degradation capture the opposing natures of preservation of memory and the act of remembrance. While the created story of Noah works well with the archive footage, the real strength of the film lies in the power of the images used.

A stuffed dodo’s speared head, dusty relics of a museum and film of leviathan-like, shadowy terraced houses drip with nostalgia for a world that continues to fade from view and hope for a utopian future. The footage is set to the mesmeric poetry of Nathan Jones, read in a subdued, hypnotic northern voice, and the music of Wave Machine’s Carl Brown; eschewing sentimentality in order to embrace its subject with humour, fascination and a touching regard.

Simon Smith’s WELCOME TO ROMFORD – screened in the documentary category of ASFF – takes an idea so simple and familiar that I almost neglected to watch the film, and produces one of the best films on show at the festival in York.

Using split-screen to film the reactions and interactions of cab drivers from A1 taxis and their customers, Simon Smith’s 20 minute film manages to present a more incisive and touching portrait of human behaviour than many filmmakers who would dedicate hours to performing the same task.

The split screen opens the cab interior out to the viewer and makes for a compelling tableau of the subtleties –and of course un-subtleties of communication and social interaction. Smith is blessed on occasion by good fortune as the characters that enter the back of the cabs first play up to their stereotypes, then confound them with touching, unsettling or funny displays of humanity. Although the film takes us through various situations that are to be expected within the setting of a taxi ride on a Friday night, it does so in a way that manages to be genuine and interesting, bringing us through the experience of a number of emotions.

WELCOME TO ROMFORD would be simply a nice film, full of humour and charm and staying with the viewer about as long as a cab journey from Elm Park to Cotton Park, were it not for its end sequence, when a drunken group of men get caught stealing traffic cones by the police and it escalates into a confrontation.  This scene gives the film depth and makes it stand out not just from other similar documentaries dealing with decadent modern Britain, but also from most of the films screening at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival.