From housing crisis, LGBTQIA+-community to mental health: Curators address current issues
Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen (1-10 April 2022) challenges its visitors by showcasing a diverse program that forces people to go outside their bubble. Go Short doesn’t shy away to bring intense social themes to the big screen and offers these themes a spot in its programming.
Short films are the perfect way to address these big issues, because one film program with multiple short films offers the viewer a more complete image than one single film could do. That’s why Go Short initiated the program Current Issues, a program that offers new talented curators a chance to compose a program themselves. Get your tickets here.
The curators applied through an open call. Out of all the reactions, three young, talented film lovers were selected to create programs that cover an activating, contemporary, social themes. These three programs will definitely lure people to come out of their bubbles.
Anto Astudillo & Guadelupe Campos from the United States created a program around LGBTQIA+-people of color. Thomas Swinkels from Berlin composed a program about the housing bubble and focuses on squatting. Bo Alfaro Decreton from Belgium focuses in her program on the subject mental health.
Children of the Moon
A common phenomenon within the trans/queer community of color (TQPOC) is that they do not fit within the traditional norms and values of their conservative environment. This exclusion often leads to traumatic childhood experiences and a motivation to flee the narrow-minded world. Many of these people find each other when they are older in larger cities. Here they get together and find solace in each other’s familiar experiences.
Children of the Moon is a program of selected works by queer/trans People of Color artists from Latin America and Latin-American descent. The nine short films showcase a variety of genres, including experimental, essay films, narrative and documentary approaches. Children of the Moon explores the organic nature of gender, identity and spirituality within the collective queer voice as a unified community.
Squatting
“Ideals cannot be vacated, squatting will continue”. Slogans like these rang out at demonstrations against the Law on Squatting and Vacancy, that put an end to legal squatting in the Netherlands in 2010. Due to an overheated real estate market, squatting culture is on the rise again. Squatting explores fore-mentioned theme and shows us what this new wave of squatting culture is all about.
This program is curated by artist Thomas Swinkels. With his background in cultural anthropology, Swinkels researches and observes both natural and man-made structures and how to manipulate them.
Mental health
Mental health problems are often swept under the carpet where they are doomed to collect dust forever. This program tries to lift the carpet by giving them a place on the big screen. This section moves mental health out of the corner, right to the center stage by taking coping skills as an accessible approach.
This program was curated by the Belgian film critic Bo Alfaro Decreton who was born in Spain. She writes for Talking Short and Kortfilm.be. Her interest in mental health comes from an inner drive to interpret the human psyche. Decreton thinks it’s of utmost importance to start a dialogue about mental health. She wants to make sure that people won’t try to solve everything on their own by addressing this theme in her curated program.