This week I watched the first episode of Thessaloniki International Film Festival’s space project which includes eight selected short films in response to the days of quarantine. I was amazed by those short films, and they also inspired me with some interesting points for drafting the call of submission for NNIFF. First of all, I noticed that most of the films are shot by mobile phones, which means most of the filmmakers are not specializing in filmmaking, they are just passionate about the film festival and want to be parts of it. From my perspective, one of the most important aims for holding an online film festival is to have more people get involved with the festival culture even though they are not professional, the atmosphere among people is the driving force for embracing the development of film festival culture. Therefore, we should not have any requirements for shooting equipment, so that people can fully participate in the festival without any pressures, the idea of sharing experiences should be applied throughout the online film festival.
Secondly, all of those narratives are really straightforward which do not have complex plots or scripts, they are all about expressing the true feelings during this severe period of time. I was really interested in the film “Incredible thoughts of a woman on a tier” which illustrates the differences between normal life and life in quarantine from a woman’s perspective. The idea of a woman stuck in the middle of the road symbolises the feeling of hopeless when people do not really know what to do during the days of quarantine. Also, it has a montage which includes a lot of footage from daily life and the variety of sound from daily makes an obvious contrast with the silent man staring at the outside, which empathizes the fears and helpless of people when they became dislocated from the normal life.
