A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words is a short film which was directed by Ted Chung in 2008. It was featured as a Vimeo Official Festival Selection as well as a part of Pangea Day Films.

A Thousand Words is a short film about a man who finds a woman’s camera on a bus and uses the pictures inside of it to get it back to her. This short film was shot in black and white and tt has no spoken dialogue.

Additionally there is no really background audio track either, all of the audio in the first half is natural sounds like the camera clicking. After the man figured out that Nasim is not going to be on the train and coming back for her camera the background music, light as it is, picks up as the man goes biking down the highway looking for the building in her pictures. The sound is cut that way as to connect the audience to the adrenaline the character is feeling having gone from a normal pace of life into a more determined, worried panic that the camera has to get back to her, and soon.

This type of music plays very well off of the black and white color, which as it is a deliberate choice in modern film making, indicates a level of emotional nostalgia. If this was television shows it would be a kind of affective economics. This film has a kind of mystical air about it from the music and the coloring, but the pacing is key as well as if any of the scenes occurred too fast than the audience would not be able to feed into the emotion of the piece without feeling forced into it. Being that the first half of the short is the man’s acquiring and messing around with the camera, it also pushes that emotional rush since time is literally running out on the film tape.

This short film can be watched below:

Dancing Queen

Dancing Queen is a short film by the Indian-based filmmaker Sumit Roy, which was shot on a Nokia mobile phone in 2008. It was selected to be featured at Pangea Day, a film event that showcased notable films from around the world.

This is very much an experimental film in the way in which it was shot, as well as with how the subject of dancing was approached. The subject of dancing in focused on through the movement of hand motions. Understanding the context of this short film is very much hinged on the ending, and seeing the girl pull away from the table in a wheel chair.

As such, the music and applause in this short film could be the girl remembering back when she could dance and how much people loved it. However it could also be her dreaming of being able to dance, but knowing that she will never be able to achieve that goal. It is a reminder to the able-bodied viewer that they must be grateful for the condition of their body, because if they do not appreciate it, then they might loose their chance to achieve their dreams.

This short film can be watched below:

10 Minutes

10 Minutes is a short film which was directed by Ahmed Imamovic in 2002 and won an award declaring it the best European Short of that year. It contrasts the 1994 Siege of Sarajevo with a photography store in Italy.

In Italy there is an Italian man and an Asian man who find a common language in English and communicate well about the condition of the Asian man’s photographic. The Sarajevo scenes show how the Serbians are seizing Sarajevo and killing any Bosnians they can find even though they used to all be citizens as the same country during the existence of Yugoslavia.

This is such a brilliant short film because it shows the drastic difference of life between western and eastern European countries. The Western block is more stable because their countries have existed in their current borders (more or less) for much longer than the people in Eastern block, this has given them a more united sense of culture, unity, and nationalism, where as the Sarajevo situation occurred because so many people disagreed on where the borders should go since they all had different visions of what areas of land actually made up their countries.

This situation happens even though the two groups and speak with each other in native tongues, where in Italy neither person was using their own language. In a sense, the understanding of different languages helps makes national identity much stronger as you gain a broader sense of who and what and where the world is made out of. Which is another component of such contrast; western block nations tend to be more wealthy over all with higher standards of living so their people can afford to travel and learn languages and explore, where are the people in the Eastern blocks might not have been given those same fair chances.

And it of course, as the film takes ten minutes to play out, showcases the importance of time and how it is more of a subjected construct than a fluid reality.

This short film can be watched below: