A portion of the St. Louis International Film Festival, or SLIFF, focuses each year on the "Global Lens," which consists of features and shorts from around the world.
While the features are spread throughout the entire festival Nov. 8-18, the Global Lens Shorts were lumped together for two showings, one held Friday, Nov. 9 and the other to be held Tuesday, Nov. 13, at Plaza Frontenac Cinema.
The shorts series features seven films from South and Central America, Africa and the Middle East. Unlike the other shorts categories, the Global Lens Shorts all managed to be between ten and fifteen minutes.
Each looked at a part of the human experience to which an audience could relate regardless of setting.
The most controversial short film of the series was "Broad Day (Üks Päev)," an 11-minute film from director Rajeev Ahuja of India.
It is an uncomfortable ride on a rickety old train that opens with close-ups of strained faces. There is precious little background music or dialogue but there is a constant sound of a weeping woman.
Eventually, the audience is let in on the secret that a woman is being raped in broad daylight and not a single passenger will even pull the chain to stop the train or help her after her attacker leaves.
While handling an incredible traumatic topic, the film does not glorify the rape or even blame the other passengers as much as it includes the audience in their discomfort and hopelessness.
Lucia Cedron of Argentina presented the 15-minute "Absent (En Ausencia)." The moving film cuts between a woman taking a pregnancy test and her flashbacks of the recent past.
Through the emotionally charged flashbacks, we learn the woman has a daughter, but has lost her husband in a brutal intrusion.
The film is incredibly well paced and honestly feels more like the required three minutes, waiting for the results of the test, rather than the full 15.
All the hope and tragedy of another child is conveyed without words and the film ends with a bit of mystery as the woman's crying response to the pregnancy test results could mean anything in the face of her memories.
"A Little Bit Higher (Kami Balatar)," a 12-minute film from director Mehdi Jafari of Iran, focuses on two crane operators. One is filling in for his friend and his increasing dismay at the job he's doing is a tip to the audience that something is not quite right.
The other simply answers incessant phone calls from his fiancé and his boss. There is no soundtrack until the ominous ending music begins and we see in a rear view mirror that the cranes were a part of an execution.
The series opened with a darkly comedic short, "The Perfect Day (El Día Perfecto)," a 13-minute film by Bernardo Loyola of Mexico.
In the style of "Memento," moving backwards in time to clarify bits of the story, we witness a man's gloriously planned death be interrupted by a wrong number and a blind date. The film ends and begins with his anonymous, inglorious car crash fatality.
From Tala Hadid of Morrocco, the 14-minute film "Your Dark Hair Ihsan (Tes Cheveux Noirs Ihsan)" tells parallel stories of a mother abandoning her child and the child searching for his mother as an adult.
Despite being one of the longer shorts, this film did not fully capture both stories, focusing more on the former and leaving the audience confused as to who the adult man was.
The short took on a dream feel, but was not quite complete ending with loose ends the audience could barely string together.
"Riding with Sugar," a 10-minute film from Sunu Gonera of South Africa, depicts a poor man who steals a bike as a final effort to fulfill his BMX championship dreams.
The man he steals from has a lovely daughter who believes in the protagonist, so the crime is overlooked after the bike is reclaimed. The film delivers a blatant message to all desperate people: taking things will result in the government taking your future. In a hopeful ending, the bike owner offers a future to the rider.
The Global Lens Shorts series ends on a dramatic, "Kids" like note following a gang member and his pregnant girlfriend in the 15 minute Brazilian film "Girl of Faith (Mina De Fé)" by Luciana Bezerra.
The gritty film is not as gruesome as "Broad Day" or the final image of "A Little Bit Higher" but shows slums in a realistic light. The audience does not really have time to establish strong connections with the characters, but we are grateful for the happy ending in the face of harsh reality.
The Global Lens Shorts series will play again Tuesday, Nov. 13 at Plaza Frontenac at 2:15 p.m.
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