Rowan Sullivan

11

Tears of Joy (Saint Kitts & Nevis) – Bullying Isn’t a Game

Tears of Joy

Tears of Joy Film Difficulty Ranking: 1

Tears of Joy is a 15 minute reminder that bullying isn’t a game. It is designed to trigger those who have experienced being bullied and to scare anyone related to the victims. However, its scare tactic methods prioritize melodrama over a real exploration of the subtleties of bullying.

From: Saint Kitts & Nevis, North America
Watch: YouTube, Mubi
Next: Where I Come From, Shaina, Hulhudhaan

Tears of Joy – The Breakdown

Similar to Where I Come From and Shaina, Tears of Joy feels like a throw-back public service announcement. Its message is very clear (bullying is bad) and it uses intense examples to convey it. These examples take up the entire short film and are designed to evoke anger/horror in those who view the bullying, and sympathy and sadness for the victim. However, the intensity of the examples, and obviousness of the bullying, out-shouts what is often subtle and concealed. The bullying is so clear to us that it’s hard to believe that the adults choose to overlook it, especially as it appears to be every student against Joy. There’s no attempts on the school kids to hide it, so it feels unrealistic that they’re not caught and reprimanded. Meanwhile, Tears of Joy also infers that bullying is brutal and obvious, ignoring its more subtle guises.

Joy and the lead bully do get brief scenes with their parents for brief moments of character development, but this isn’t enough to justify the direction each character takes. Almost every scene of this short film is taken up by footage of school kids bullying Joy, or Joy crying alone (which she does very well, kudos to the young actor). This makes the film appear more exploitative – focused on shocking the viewers rather than building on the dialogue around bullying. Less focus on showing traumatic bullying and more focus on the characters and their motivations and feelings would have been helpful to justify the conclusion of the film. Spending more time building the characters would have also helped convey the complexities of bullying and its many forms.

Ultimately, if you’re a sucker for traumatic films designed to trigger emotions with a low budget, here’s Tears of Joy. It manipulates emotion by focusing on shocks and some intense crying scenes, carried out well by Neila Jones.

What to Watch Next

Whilst these exploitative, PSA style ‘message films’ aren’t my cup of tea, there are plenty of them from around the world. For more check out any of the following:

12

HollyShorts 2023 – A Brief Recap of the Festival

HollyShorts 2023, the 19th edition of the HollyShorts Film Festival, was the first one I’ve ‘attended’ thanks to its continued dual format – screening both in-person in Hollywood and virtually. The festival offers a huge range of short films from all corners of the globe of all lengths (from a couple minutes to just under the 40 minute Oscar qualifying mark).

The Experience

HollyShorts offers films for every short film fan. However, navigating the huge range of short films on offer is difficult. Unlike other online film festivals, Hollyshorts’ catalogue was separate from the online viewing platform. So, while you could use the catalogue to find films you wanted to watch, there was no way to correlate this with the search function on the Bitpix virtual platform. This was partly because all the shorts were packaged into groups of 5-8 films on the Bitpix platform with no tags as to which films the package contained. So instead of being able to search for and locate a film on the Bitpix site, it forced you to click into each film package to see what films it contained. With over 400 films in the HollyShorts 2023 edition, it took a lot of time to find what you wanted to see. The best solve for this would be to experience HollyShorts ‘blind’ by going into the festival without having anything noted as a must watch.

The Films

Going into the HollyShorts festival without knowing what you’re watching isn’t a bad thing as the quality of the films is strong. Unlike festivals that focus on feature-length films and have a few short films thrown in, HollyShorts focuses on short films, which helps drive the quality of their short film slate. It’s not surprising that this festival is a short-film qualifier for the Academy Award Short prizes (no matter how much credibility you give to the ultimate nominations). Here’s our top 10 from the festival:

  1. Please Hold the Line (Malaysia)
  2. Random Check (Kuwait)
  3. You’re Happy, It’s OK (Malaysia)
  4. Europe by Bidon (France)
  5. Broken (Denmark/Iran)
  6. Ciela (Mexico)
  7. Yellow (Afghanistan)
  8. Every Day After (Philippines)
  9. Iwayo Mi (Nigeria)
  10. The Sons of God (Mexico)

It was great to see two very good shorts from Malaysia, a country that doesn’t always get the film-making recognition it should. Please Hold the Line mixes gangster themes with abortion whilst You’re Happy it’s OK depicts a really heart-warming inter-generational relationship. Random Check, Europe by Bidon, and Broken all depict different immigrant experiences, with the latter two employing some unique animated styles worth checking out. The rest of the top 10 feature a magic octopus (Ciela), delusional colonists (The Sons of God), and waiting for war (Yellow). I wouldn’t be surprised to see any of these on the Oscar shortlists for the 2024 nominations.

Conclusion

HollyShorts is a film festival worth your time for two reasons. Firstly, the quality; even our least favorite films were well produced, setting the festival aside from its feature-film focused competitors. Secondly, you don’t have to be in Los Angeles to enjoy it; HollyShorts is available wherever in the World you are. Look out for it’s 20th edition in August 2024.

13

Clashing Differences – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

Clashing Differences

In Clashing Differences an international women’s rights group based in Germany changes its original white-women led panel to avoid being ‘cancelled’. The updated panel however sees through their attempts to fulfill the diversity checklist in this satirical comedy.

It’s hard to get a satire right, especially when you’re satirizing topics that you can easily get wrong (such as racism), whilst keeping the tone light enough to maintain the comedy. Clashing Differences doesn’t get everything ‘right,’ but it is a pretty good attempt. The fourth-wall-breaking monologues from each character all pack a punch whilst conveying a wide range of experiences. It also always feels like the film is told from a multi-cultural perspective, by centering the non-White characters (bar-one) over white characters. That being said, the film does feel like it falls into its own trap. In trying to expose the tokenization of the multicultural characters it almost tokenizes the same characters. Each one of the characters covers a different multicultural reaction to their own tokenization.

However, the larger problem with Clashing Differences is the relationships between the characters. None of them get along through the majority of the film’s run time, clashing because of past relationships, and not just their ideas for confronting the international women’s group they’re there for. The only thing that ultimately brings them together are literal Nazis which gives viewers an out for thinking about all of the more subtle racism that the characters talk about beforehand (as Nazis always surpasses more subtle racism). It also feels like a tool to help end the film too.

Despite the convenient ending, Clashing Differences is still worth a watch. You’ll likely get some enjoyment from the satire of well-wishing white-led feminist groups and the drama fired up by conflicting views.

14

The Fabulous Ones – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

The Fabulous Ones is a warm home-made story featuring real friends reuniting to relive their memories from 30 years ago. The drama comes from a fictionalized will of one of their old friends, but the personal, real stories provide the substance for this docufiction.

From the tone of the film, it feels like most of this film is a documentary. The characters all get along too closely for it to feel fictionalized. However, the director uses different film types to blur the past and present, and also reality and fiction. Sepia-tinted film makes some shots feel old – as if shot 30 years ago in the character’s past – and these are edited alongside clearer shots to indicate the present. Some scenes also alternate between these two types of film to make it unclear what is fictionalized and true to reality, such as the seance and re-enactment of their ‘dead’ friend. The blurring of reality and fiction and past and present through the type of film also fictionalizes their pre-transition lives. Home footage and photos of the characters pre-transition, look like the scenes of the seance, making their pasts feel less real than the present.

Whilst their pre-transition lives are made to feel like the fictionalized parts of this documentary, The Fabulous Ones doesn’t shy away from sharing the characters’ real experiences as Trans-women. Throughout their reunion, the camera focuses on each character to hear their queer coming of age experience and how their individual families and the society around them reacted. These scenes draws you closer to the characters by sharing their more intimate experiences, and in doing so, holds the film back from going full happy-dream with the fictionalized elements of the film. These moments ground the film in the unfortunate reality that not everyone is able to be who they are without prejudice.

If you’re looking for a quirky docufiction that lightly explores some heavy personal experiences through a fictionalized will left by a ‘dead’ friend, this film is for you.

15

Pornomelancholia – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

Pornomelancholia

Pornomelancholia is a slow paced character study of a up-and-coming porn star navigating the Mexican porn industry. It has plenty of dry humor and an underlying commentary on social media culture.

The film starts with a mid-range shot of Lalo standing alone by a busy street in the city. People walk past him and cars pass behind him as we watch him peer around. It seems like he’s waiting for someone or taking a breather in a chaotic day. However, before the shot lingers further, Lalo breaks down into a soft sob as the title credits pop up: Pornomelancholia. It’s a prelude for the critique of superficial influencer-culture that Lalo uses to make his way into the porn industry.

Lalo is portrayed as a lonely man parading as a popular sex icon. His Instagram videos hide the fact that he works in a small factory with two other people that he hardly talks to. His confidence in his sexuality online contradicts his inability to come out to his family – shown in the rehearsed voice messages he can’t bring himself to send to his mother. It follows films such as Sweat in showing that the digital lives promoted by influencers don’t always reflect reality.

Despite the underlying commentary, there is dry humor in Pornomelancholia. This is probably the only film that you can watch that is built around a Zapata led Mexican revolution porn film. It also probably runs on for too much of the film, but the pornographic shots, which linger for more than expected are designed to make you awkwardly uncomfortable (like Lalo himself). The sex scenes are provocative, but not as outrightly as another Mexican festival film – Battle in Heaven.

Overall, if you’re looking for a slow-paced festival film that follows a gay man working his way into the porn industry, Pornomelancholia is worth a watch. Whilst the culture fostered by the industry and Lalo is portrayed as fake, his journey feels unique, real and believable.