Films to watch in the festival: Speaking of AI, there are two pretty relevant films in the festival, and again I placed them right next to each other.
I know there will probably be a wide variety of reactions to this, but yes, this year we are showing our very first AI-generated film. Written and directed by Arthur Machado with the assistance of Midjourney, Solace is a perfect platform for its surreal, colorful effects. In its sparse runtime of a few minutes it documents the confused, delusional, but often surreal and colorful dreams and visions of an elderly man in the hospital who seems to be slipping further and further away from reality. What I love about this short, other than the powerful emotional impression it makes in such a short amount of time, is that it somehow finds the unexpected beauty in the decline and confusion in our memories later in life. Unlike some gloomier submissions, it suggests that the natural process of mental deterioration can also be a dreamlike exploration of your life’s meaning.
Another, more critical but fascinating look at AI, can be seen in the Brazilian grounded sci-fi film Instructions For Crying. I guess AI therapy has already been in development so it’s not too much of a stretch that a middle-aged man experiencing a mental health crisis would choose an artificial-intelligence analyst. However, the writer-director-producer Matheus Parizi taps into some rich imaginative details of what this might look like in the future, including having to re-up your time by adding credit, and, just possibly, the AI assistant getting to know you well enough to gain some sort of sentience. The ending montage of this film is haunting and revealing, complementing some of the things we have heard the main character say in his sessions, and it is the perfect way to end Shorts Block No. 3.
Watch both Solace & Instructions For Crying in Shorts Block No. 3 of the virtual festival, live until November 3rd!
https://watch.eventive.org/…/play/67020c7b64a67e00480d87a3
