This year’s edition of the festival, Best of Best, will show a collection of 28 award-winning short films across five strands offering dystopian visions and ideological bite
With the EU recently passing the world’s first artificial intelligence law, this year’s trawl of European shorts from cultural organisation Eunic London doesn’t miss a trick by dwelling on matters algorithmic in much of its first section, Smile You’re on Camera – most prominently the ongoing wrangle between tech and labour in the workplace. It’s the one overtly topical strand alongside four others (Hard Decisions; People on the Precipice; Psychodrama; and the kids’ animation section Why’s the Sky Blue?) that stick to the more abstract themes into which Eunic typically packages up Europe’s film-making grassroots.
The longest work here, the 23-minute I’m Not a Robot, by the Netherlands’ Victoria Warmerdam, doesn’t quite live up to a canny premise: the music-company worker whose inability to pass a Captcha test means that she is, in fact, a robot. Ellen Parren, in a sharp performance, twitches with affront at the suggestion in this sitcom-y spin on Blade Runner’s existential riddle. But, as her boyfriend weighs in and mansplains her newfound dronedom, it devolves into a talky slog that adds little beyond MeToo frills to the black box of the sentience question. And – through no fault of the film-makers – it’s also the one most tenuously related to the theme of being watched.
