Red Sea Film Festival Selects Short Films That Test the Boundaries: ‘A Lot of Them Are About the Gray Area’

variety.com:

Nick Holdsworth Kaleem Aftab, director of international programming at the Red Sea Film Festival, has cast his net wide in selecting the 14 films in the festival’s International Short Film Competition program.

Aimed at attracting emerging talent from across Africa, Asia and the Islamic world, the section includes fiction, animation and documentary in films that average 15-20 minutes long, but may be as short as a couple of minutes, or as long as an hour.

With films ranging from Iranian director Farnoosh Samadi’s Iran-French co-production, “Titanic” – which takes a darkly comic look at Iranian film censors confused by how to interpret new regulations – to Kazakh filmmaker Shugyla Serzhan’s “The Late Wind,” about a young pregnant woman suddenly abandoned by her boyfriend, the section pushes boundaries of subjects that are already part of the public conversation in the countries from which it selects. “One of the biggest things about these films is that a lot of them are about the gray area – what is right and wrong and where we are today and how capitalism has changed everything,” Aftab says. “In ‘Titanic’ – shot in one room – the director plays with ideas that may challenge censors: What is the nature of a kiss?

Is this kiss a friendship kiss? Is it romantic? How do we tell the difference? How do we draw boundaries?” The edginess of some of the films in selection reflect the broadness of both the members of the selection committee and the geographical reach of the program, which accepts films from directors who qualified as being African, Asian or Islamic filmmakers – even if they live in Europe or the U.S., he adds.