Just as many of us grasped for connections during lockdown, the pandemic has inspired Eunic London, an umbrella organisation for EU cultural institutions, to dwell on the meaning of relationships for this year’s showcase for European short films, put together by curator Shira Macleod. Not all are – as the strand’s subtitle would have it – loving encounters: break-ups, bureaucratic frustration and unsettling alien fauna crop up, too. And the one explicitly Covid-related work, Romanian director Alina Manolache’s mesmerising I Am Here, features relationships by their absence: the social vacuum on display in CCTV footage from the Trevi Fountain, Chinese pharmacies, a British golf course and other depopulated locations around the world.
Relationships take a politicised shade in Alexandra Matheou’s A Summer Place, a lush dalliance between a Cypriot food artist and the Arab refugee she rescues from the sea. But its Paolo Sorrentino-esque scenes of excess draw the lines between European haves and outsider have-nots somewhat heavy-handedly. More subtle on the immigration beat is the forlorn black-and-white drama Beyond Is the Day, from Poland’s Damian Kocur, which turns an out-of-the-way river barge into an intercontinental metaphor.
Eunic’s selection broadly tries to buoy us up as societies emerge from the pandemic with an upbeat view of relationships, as in the delightful Forest Coal Pit, by Siôn Marshall-Waters, about a pair of elderly Welsh brothers who, despite the rigours of running their farm, are never short on wonder about the world. “Well, they’re in perpetual motion, shrews, aren’t they?” one marvels. But there’s an anxious pulse to Cuckoo!, in which Dutch director Jörgen Scholtens puts his cuckoo clock-dwelling protagonist on a tight schedule, ensuring an elderly lady takes her medication; it plays like an absurdist Werther’s Original advert. An even angstier mother frets about sexual predators on behalf of her gay son in Are You Hungry?, creating a honeytrap profile for him as “Tomi of Finland”. But Teemu Niukkanen’s droll and sharply characterised feature asserts that the kids are alright. “I like rainbows as natural phenomena,” deadpans Tomi about his LGBT-flagging T-shirt.
Most striking are two shorts from Croatia and Scotland. The resplendent Into the Blue is a teenage love triangle unfolding in a relaxed riviera setting, only with intense undercurrents. Gracija Filipovic is darkly seductive as the interloper crashing her childhood friend’s budding romance, while director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović makes the sapphire depths undulate with loneliness and liberation. Josephine Lohoar Self’s animation The Fabric of You sounds cosier, but there’s an unsettling texture to its tryst between a Bronx mouse tailor and his well-spoken client. This rodent Remains of the Day discourses smoothly on the link between fashion and dissimulation, while its frayed, writhing stop-motion hints at agony beneath the breast.
The standard of work is perhaps more consistent than that of last year’s group, but it’s also notable that, with plenty in the 15- to 25-minute range, the selection pushes the definition of short. One final mention then to Maria Fredriksson’s documentary entry Svonni vs the Swedish Tax Agency, which manages to pack in a tale of one women and her dog, her struggle to get it recognised as tax-deductible, and the broader context of Sami reindeer herding, in a succinct and springy five minutes. Brief encounters can be the most intense.
• In Short, Europe: Loving Encounters is at Ciné Lumière, London, on 7 May.
