As Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy, his great entwining of the personal and political, does the rounds once again on its 30th anniversary, the first batch from this year’s selection of European shorts gathered by EU cultural umbrella organisation Eunic London is given the subtitle Explore, and focuses on awakenings of the subjective, sexual and identity-shaping kind. Hopefully that doesn’t mean, now that we’re far from the Berlin wall and busy on TikTok, that we have lost sight of collective aspirations. The other In Short, Europe strands (subtitled Grow, Surround and Dream) should deliver more on that front.
The omnipresent ticking clock on the soundtrack of Stefan Langthaler’s chamber piece Fabiu reminds us that awakenings come with an expiry date. A window of opportunity opens up for Austrian pensioner Arthur when he invites Hungarian student Fabiu into his home to help care for his dementia-stricken wife. All careworn closeups and blunt exchanges at first, their brief encounter is quickly snuffed out in a melancholic reflection on the feasibility and limits of responsibility for other people, astutely performed by Günter Toller and Kristóf Gellén.
