Asheville Fringe Arts Festival: Fringe short films
Despite living in Western North Carolina my entire life, I’ve yet to make it to an Asheville Fringe Arts Festival event. (Blame weird work schedules.) But the 2023 Fringe kicked off with so many fun events that I felt compelled to make my Festival debut with the short film showcase at Grail Moviehouse on March 20.
The seven featured shorts fit neatly into a one-hour slot, with each film providing plenty to unpack. Honestly, I was still thinking about their respective themes 24 hours later.
Cook With the Heart, from New York-based production team Evening Squire Productions, examines sustainable eating and how we source and treat food through the lens of “ethical cannibalism.” Told in a comedic mini mockumentary, the film’s lead takes the audience through her process of “shopping” for food in a local park before things go off the rails in the best way. After reading Tender is the Flesh last year, the concept of ethical consumption has been at the forefront of my mind for a while, and this short seared it in.
Voyager Birdman by West Virginia University art professor Gerald Harbath is more in line with what I expected from Fringe. It's an experimental animated film, sketched and rotoscoped over videos lensed while riding around Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The audio — from podcasts, old radio shows, and recordings from the Voyager probes — helps the film feel more like, in the words of the Fringe program, the “attempt to capture the fleeting dynamics of thoughts, memories, and dreams experienced on a long night’s drive.” It’s visually interesting while still feeling like an approachable entry to experimental filmmaking.
Canadian filmmaker Marco Joubert’s L’impasse primordiale is a shorter short, clocking in at a little over three minutes, and features a narrator (Jean Marchand) discussing ideas presented by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran in podcast form. We see three (or four, if you count the brief glimpse of a fetus) listeners at different ages nodding along while they tune in. It’s beautifully shot, but one I didn’t quite get.
Kate Weare’s and Jack Flame Sorokin’s short, Moth, is a beautifully shot and lit dance performance by Nicole Vaughan-Diaz and Kendall Teague (funnily enough, my middle school band director’s son) with Vaughan-Diaz singing Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” as the backing music. Originally, I thought, “This is so well made and well done, but why couldn’t it have just been a live performance as part of the festival?” The more I think about it, however, the more it makes sense as a short because we can truly appreciate the expressions on the dancers’ faces, and the editing allows us to focus on the small gestures.
Local company Mouse House Productions’ short Opprobrium (defined as “harsh criticism or censure,” which is the most fitting title I’ve seen for a film) explores the societal pressures of fitting into a specific “beauty” or “aesthetic” mold. It‘s haunting and hits home, and the makeup effects are particularly impressive.
The final short, A Flame in Our Midst by Filipino filmmaker Elvert Bañares, comes with a flashing images warning, and is such a striking art film. Exploring themes of colonialism and sacrifice, this selection was the one that stuck with me the most. I spent hours trying to figure out which language the dialogue was in, only to discover, of course, it’s in Filipino.
I was partially expecting that every film featured would have a connecting theme, a thread that ties everything together. It didn’t necessarily feel like that to me, but I do think that each one had layers of depth that could be explored with another viewing.
(Photos courtesy of Asheville Fringe Arts Festival)
