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It is the second year since Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival restored its international section of short films after a long pause, so such a welcome addition to the Official Competition depicts the current state of this less (re)viewed cinema. The 2017 selection consisted of 16 works coming from a wide diversity of countries, continents, and authors, also displaying a pro-feminist curation by including no less than 50% titles directed and co-directed by women. In terms of genres, styles, and working formats, the approach was a diversified one – fiction, documentary, experimental, and animation, even if the preference inclined towards a contemplative cinema that offers unique perspectives on the world. To me, the most appealing proposals were the short films that went beyond our immediate reality to distillate meaning about ourselves as observing subjects of the world.

One of the possible perspectives or strategies to navigate this selection is through the meditative take of Chris Marker’s SUNLESS / SANS SOLEIL (1983) on the trivialities of daily life and how personal memories affect the perception of history and politics. In this respect, Ico Costa's NYO VWETA NAFTA (2017), shot on 16mm, begins from a personal, almost documentary point of view that is blended into fiction. The director started shooting in Mozambique without a predetermined purpose, searching for a friend called Nafta – an episode that serves as a fictionalized search for a girl in the crowded market of Maputo. This search, giving name of the film, develops into a sharp exploration of society through a bunch of funny and unexpected stories told by young men. Just like Marker depicts Guinea Bissau, Ico Costa shows the contemporary face of another Portuguese colony, Mozambique. Instead of an idealistic view on post-colonialism, Ico Costa lets his characters voice their political views on the world, views that are surprisingly more universal than one expects.

The youth of Inhambane, where part of the shooting takes place, dreams of the capitalist goods. Baobab fruit pickers court girls by promising commodities such as houses, cars, clothes, or pursue amateur singing while others discuss on the lack of freedom of rich people who cannot genuinely drink in an ordinary tavern. Apart from funny moments born out of the discovery of Snake, the cult mobile game and a technology that the West already looks down to, NYO VWETA NAFTA intertwines these shots with a contrasting poetry of the youth's curiosity in the face of modernity. In a memorable scene, one of the characters recites pretentious terms that supposedly relate to the baobab fruits they are picking. The camera pans vertically as if climbing the enormous tree while the boy naively brags how this wonder fruit with superpowers, trendy in the West, would change his life. The contrast between those who collect the raw material and those who exploit the posh market of organic foods is disheartening, yet the boy’s innocence reveals a vibrant image of humanity.

Case in point, an even more distinguishable social commentary is being exemplified in NIGHTFALL (2016), co-directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Tulapop Saenjaroen. Again, like Chris Marker, the filmmakers resort to the tool of exchange as a voice-over to accompany the fictionalized images. The cinematography focuses on a nameless woman that crosses impersonal modern spaces versus her aimlessly wandering in luxurious parks. However, she does not gain enough weight to be a protagonist, the camera showing undistinguished people walking pedestrian tunnels that seem to lead nowhere. The vocal exchange plays out between two legendary figures in the Southeast Asian politics, Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore (responsible for the country’s miraculous transition from a third-world economy to one of the Four Asian Tigers) and Thanom Kittikachorn, a notorious military dictator of Thailand's past ruling over a military coup. The two share diplomatic cordialities that are in fact empty words, general statements about each other’s politics.

Both politicians praise each other’s historical achievements, like Thailand being the only nation that Western powers could not colonize, or Singapore’s augmented financial growth. Apart from a sculpture of an elephant, symbolic animal of the Siam culture to remind of this political encounter, the image focuses on the extreme contrasts of Singapore today. The directors resort to dream-like imagery, like a door opening to a lush vegetation only to swap to skyscrapers and cable railways overlooking to the modern city landscape. Like in her highly praised feature BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK / DAO KHANONG (2016), Anocha Suwichakornpong uses the historical facts as a means to explore memory, blur the lines between time and space, and confer a subtle social critique. The confrontation with urban spaces is being examined as a part of past decisions' consequence that produces contemporary realities.

Once more, following the SANS SOLEIL first-person heritage, the festival screened some works that highlighted the power of the self in constructing our actuality, like Jacqueline Lentzou’s Berlinale selected HIWA (2017) based on the architecture of remembering. The Greek director, awarded last year in Locarno for FOX / ALEPOU (2016), continues to explore family constructs, yet this time she employs the means of dreaming. In HIWA, a Filipino man called Jay tells his wife as an off voice about a dream he had about their daughters. The dream soon turns into a nightmare set in a fictionalized Athens he had never visited before. The director depicts familiar places in an enigmatic manner, with a floating image that contributes to the feeling of evanescence. Avoiding the postcard scenery of the city, the dad (re)constructs Athens as a venue of suffering and decay, where his daughters are innocent victims without knowing it.

Similar to Konstantina Kotzamani’s depiction of Athens in her 2015 short YELLOW FIEBER, Lentzou renders an exotic apocalyptic setting that has little to do with reality. However, in HIWA the city is a traumatic place due to the personal experience of feeling rootless and lost in a foreign country. To recall the fuzziness of dreams, the short has a grainy image that reminds of found-footage video essays. For Jay, ordinary places like the meat market become the perished hospital, and the girls' turtle-shelled backpacks remind of being trapped under one’s own home. This sensitive story is portrayed with a directorial aesthetics close to documentary, although there are a few artificial reactions from the mother’s side that let slip this feeling. Meaning “wound” in Tagalog, HIWA is indeed the consequence of an open wound, a subconscious father’s worry for his daughters supported by an ambiguous depiction of time and space that are suppressed like in a vacuum. While this psychoanalytical approach reminds of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s transformation of realistic images into an esoteric reflection about our usual surroundings, Jacqueline Lentzou chose the dream-like imagery to depict a fleeting manifestation of trauma.

An interesting addition to the competition, NO'I (2016), directed by Aline Magrez, explores an exotic place like Vietnam, precisely a crowded little street of Hanoi, through surprising links based on the protagonist's personal interaction with the space. The author avoids a Westerner superior perspective about a place she is not familiar with, yet she embraces her condition of a visitor trying to connect, to discover this small community. The film is built around slow-paced travelings along the rails that cut through an impoverished neighborhood. It is a very peculiar space, with the rails almost glued to the damaged improvised houses. At the end of this maze, curling continuously from the outskirts of the city to more inhabited areas, the viewer gets a glimpse of a contrasting cleaner and more modern version of the city. Like with Jacqueline Lentzou, the camera of Aline Magrez focuses on a dream-like sensation set in a single space.

Still, NO'I accomplishes this feeling with a clever editing that connects the city’s wires with the railway lines and imaginary threads which the camera dolly draws through movement. Avoiding dialogue and direct sounds, the ties between the inhabitants of this atypical street are almost impressionistic. The editing is intuitive, associating surprising interior with the routine along the exterior of the houses. Like the people who build their little habits around the passing of the train, the camera organically waits for it to pass and keeps rolling. Appealing even to multiple exposure, NO'I relies on an inner perception of the surroundings. In a scene where the neighborhood’s children express curiosity and look directly into the camera, while the dolly passes by, the camera blends with the landscape like a pulsating vertebrae.

Furthermore, THE I MINE (2017) by Emilio Moreno questions memory through a complex archaeological digging not only in personal experiences, but also in the context of history itself. The short is the closest to a film essay, lending the first-person POV to a biographer, John P. Roquentin, who intends to write a novel about a deaf-blind auctioneer, Valerie Louise Ellis. The director mixes real-life historical characters with his own stance in a multi-layered experience of writing and discovering the personal self. These biographical stories blend with images of digging either in mines or with palaeontologists looking for human relicts in a sort of searching for the narrator’s real self in the past, being it historical or personal. Emilio Moreno’s interest seems to revolve around the idea of language as the mankind’s attempt to define the world. In this respect, the presence of Ellis is almost like a ghostly figure, like a myth, her image being superposed and identified with archival images of the deaf-blind American activist Helen Keller. In some of them, Ellis is depicted caressing the throat of another person, trying to decipher the vibrations of the sounds. The film shows images of Helen Keller with First Lady Grace Coolidge or President Eisenhower, thus fictionalizing her past and attributing her a constructed identity of the auctioneer Valerie Louise Ellis.

This false diary guides the viewer through Roquentin’s own struggle to separate his experience from Valerie’s, while questioning her experience with communication due to her mediated form of knowledge (by touching somebody else’s mouth). We do not know if the inspiration for Roquentin is not the fictional historian with the same name that is the leading character of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, or an alter-ego of the the director himself as a narrator of somebody else’s experience, neither if the book Ellis wrote is Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life. The similarities are striking, and Emilio Moreno manages to build a faux documentary only to question how identity is shaped. Similar to Chris Marker’s practice, he turns to tracing biographies that are supposed to reveal how history is made.

Moreover, this experimental documentary showcases images taken in a South African archaeological site in contrast with showcasing them in museums. In an attempt to find our ancestors, the past justifies the present. With the help of the auctioneer and images of displayed objects, either contemporary art or palaeolithic exhibits, questions of value arise over our culture and accumulation of knowledge. These objects are not just things to be marketed, yet they carry the value of the stories they contain. It is astounding how through this filtered information and (de)constructed narration dispersing in various interests, the footage becomes auto-referential, questioning how stories themselves are developed. Ultimately, THE I MINE brings to attention a provocative debate in the philosophy of language, wondering if Wittgenstein’s assumption that our words describe reality is true or not. The layers of coding and decoding the spoken language must be different for someone who perceives reality through foreign bodies, as well as for historians who investigate the past through the perception of the other. How can one find his/her own voice and trust history as a gathered experience of others?