Flaherty Film Festival

The Flaherty Film Festival is a nonprofit organization for film, media and arts, that supports the production of independent documentaries and short films, among other forms of media. It aims at further stimulating the production of independent material, as well as providing a chance for discussion of the same, among the general public. It is currently on its fifth showing on a series of six, at the Anthology Film Theater in New York City.

In its fifth installment, "Waste and Other Forms of Management," the festival showed a series of short documentaries and films regarding issues such as recycling, garbage management and social issues. Among these was the short film "Overseas," by Wichanon Somumjarn and Anocha Suwichakornpong, which tells in a few shots, the story of Wawa Kai, a Burmese woman who works in a seafood processing factory and wants an abortion after being raped. One very interesting instance in this short happened when Wawa Kai descends from a boat, and feels dizzy. At this point the camera becomes unsteady and blurry, expressing the state in which the main character finds herself. It also leaves a clue as to her pregnancy, foreshadowing that which at this point is still unknown to the audience.

"Pigs", by Pawel Wojtasik, showed the process in which pigs are fed the rests from Casino buffets in Las Vegas, at a slaughter farm. Wojtasik did a very good job in shocking the audience. Throughout the short film he shows close-up and extreme close-ups of pigs in a pig-pen, walking on their excrements as they defecate and eat food from the ground. The rests from the restaurants are in plastic bags, which the animals also eat. The combination of the close-up shots of pigs drooling and of their backsides and bottoms as they defecate, as well as shots of the animals rolling around in a mixture of dirt, feces and food, achieve the director's goal of causing disgust and shock. Moreover, the sounds of pigs screaming, which escalate towards the end, as well as the pace that fastens with shorter shots and quicker cuts, work very well as far as building up tension. Despite the appaling nature of the short, it was greatly done.

Another relevant short documentary from Pawl Wojtasik as well as Toby Lee and Ernst Karel, presented in the festival, was a video filmed in a recycling plant. Some shots within it were in fact very artistic and elaborate. One example is when bits of shreded paper and plastic are blown in the air slowly, in a process of waste separation, as well as close-ups of the garbage separation beds as the garbage moves through it.

Overall the festival and the variety of works was very interesting as well as the chance to discuss these works with the directors, after the screenings.