BANGALORE: Short films are no longer considered just stepping stones to feature films. These films are now a platform to present stylish creative experiments, conveying a message in a short time, a challenge really. This year has been rewarding for the short film festivals that rocked Bangalore. A host of shows, from the third Bangalore Queer Film Festival early this year to the Bitfilm festival in December, showed that today there are several young filmmakers who are taking up this challenge. The third Bangalore Queer Film Festival was organised by Good As You (GAY), a support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Bangalore, along with Swabhava Trust, a non-profit organisation working with LGBT issues. The festival showcased movies on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. Suchitra’s Centre for Film and Drama conducted a short film festival in July that witnessed a phenomenal response from the audience. Anand Bharadwaj, cordinator, said, “We received 55 entries and we finally screened only 30 films. It was a multilangual short film festival, but it did not limit our audience. They enjoyed every piece of work that was displayed.”The response prompted even students to take this genre up. PESIT, an educational institution, organised a short film festival during their techno fest. Genres of movies less than 12 minutes long made by students were accepted. Niranjan, a student of PESIT, said, “ This was the first time we organised a short film festival, so we kept a pretty low expectation. However to our surprise, we received about 20 entries, of these 15 were screened. National award winning director Prakash Belawadi conducted an interactive workshop.” Th is increase can be attributed to the ease at which these films can be made. “In this era of technology, where all tools are available online, we were able to express our thought through movies,” says Subash Gayke, a student and aspiring filmmaker. The Indo-German film festival called the Bitfilm festival, a short film festival on digital arena, showed an almost different genre within short films. The festival screened about 59 films in three categories. Among them, seven films were by Indian filmmakers. Sripathi, a writer of a story for short film said that the low cost allows more people to enter filmmaking. The director of the Bitfilm festival, Aron said, “Bangalore has given us a very warm reception this time and we are planning to come here every year.”
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