Disposable Film Festival 10th Anniversary Retrospective

Description

It might be a coincidence that the tenth anniversary of the Disposable Film Festival (DFF) is also shared with the first generation of the iPhone, but in all of cinema history, there have never been more people telling stories with personal technology. DFF founder Carlton Evans recognized the importance of handheld recording devices and the DIY movement in creating a new kind of artist, the disposable filmmaker. The festival has served as a showcase for their resourcefully smart shorts made from everyday equipment. This conversation with Evans, interspersed with selections from a decade of DFF’s top shorts—12 titles in all—exemplifies the burgeoning impact of ubiquitous technology on the next wave of cinema. Among the highlights in this walk down Handycam lane is Throws (2008) and its aspirational heights where the filmmaker literally throws his camera for one single shot. It stands in scrappy contrast to the advanced social soundscape of Can You Read My Lips (2016), where viewers are initiated into the experience of deafness and lip-reading.  Within the mix of technological improvements, we see a recurring theme of “today’s” narratives on human connectivity: From Russian Roulette (2015) that tells of a video chat site that leads a lonely woman to an equally solitary astronaut to How You Doin, Boy? Voicemails from Gran’pa (2015) which replays voicemails from the filmmaker’s grandfather against animated keepsake figurines. This celebration of the next generation of film not only makes evident the impact made by smartphones and their digital siblings—providing many with accessible and global means to storytelling—but also that filmmaking at its most “disposable” is often fascinatingly at its most creative. —Joslyn Thoresen