SXSW in the U.S., Hot Docs in Canada, and Sydney Film Festival in Australia are among the many film festivals around the world that have recently been cancelled in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Programmers from the Tallin Black Nights festival, Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Locarno have teamed up to launch a short film festival online — this way, films can be seen from the comfort, and safety, of viewers’ homes.
My Darling Quarantine Short Film Festival went live on the Talking Shorts platform on March 16 and “will continue until the current global crisis is resolved,” Variety reports. “Every week, seven short films focusing on dystopian themes will bow on the platform, and the audience will vote for best film. Half of the donations collected by the festival will go to medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres and the remaining to cultural institutions and workers financially affected by the virus.”
Three of the seven shorts streaming this week are directed by women. Titles include Anna Vasof’s “Hitting My Head On The World,” which sees its director visiting different cities and hitting her head on a variety of surfaces: “Desperate people who do not know what to do next might hit their heads against walls,” Vasof explains. “This is not always literal. It is more often a metaphor for not knowing how to get around a strong sense of frustration.”Guðný Rós Þórhallsdóttir’s “The Day the Beans Ran Out” and Lia Tsalta’s “The Forest” are also among the shorts streaming. The former is a portrait of a man living in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse whose food starts to go missing, and the latter follows a group of people in a dystopian future traveling through the last forest in existence.
“Watching all of this situation unfold while sitting in my forced confinement at home, I came up with the idea to create an online short film festival about what is happening now, in order to fundraise money to help the healthcare system stakeholders dealing with the current problem,” said Enrico Vannucci, short film advisor for the Venice Film Festival and programmer for Torino Short Film Market.
The Glasgow Short Film Festival, Short Waves Festival in Poland, and Canada’s Festival Regard are among the fests dedicated solely to shorts that have been cancelled so far.
Head over to Talking Shorts to learn more about My Darling Quarantine, contribute to the campaign, and watch the shorts.
