For the 10th year running, the Prague Short Film Festival, organized by the Karlovy Vary IFF team, has sought to present the past year’s most interesting offerings in this highly original and ever more diverse segment of film production. The fest’s International Competition screened 16 short feature films chosen from among more than 1,600 submitted works, with almost 70 movies presented in the eight other noncompetitive sections. The diversity of narrative styles and the choice of topics well illustrate what filmmakers and audiences find unique about them. In contrast to feature film projects, slightly different rules are in play here, a different narrative rhythm, with story ideas that would be inappropriate for the feature format for a variety of reasons. At the same time, because these films come from nascent filmmakers they generally betray a certain level of seeking and experimentation – and in some cases quite a bit of nerve. This combination of youthful enthusiasm, creative freedom, and a condensed format engenders a unique amalgamation that results in films that can provide a somewhat different viewer experience than one normally expects at the movies. And the five films in this year’s Karlovy Vary selection are a model illustration of this. Each of the movies draws on a different genre and each has its own sometimes markedly individual poetic. The Moldavian-Romanian picture The Flavors Collection makes do with an absolute minimum as it blends a precise mix of unostentatious humor, deep emotion, and social edge. In a wild concoction of the elevated and the base, the beautiful and the disgusting, Castratus, the Boar extends a metaphoric image suggesting the purity of the medieval mystery. The visually elegant and, in many ways, typical Icelandic film Chum is at once a tender and bitterly ironic anecdote about an unusual love triangle. Set against the backdrop of an altercation between random customers at a convenience store, the confined space and wonderfully riveting staging of the Swiss film Discipline enable it to expose the challenges facing contemporary multicultural Europe. And the American short pic A Million Miles Away employs pure cinematic devices in short fragments to observe and describe the cruel and fragile world of teenage girls.

Karel Spěšný

Program Director

Prague Short Film Festival