Saturday 25 February 2017 – 17:45
105 mins
Certificate: DFF 18
Venue: Dorking Halls
The Dorking Film Festival asked filmmakers in Surrey, the South-East and the rest of the UK to send us their short films. Here are ten of the best by adult filmmakers aged nineteen years or more. Play Cowboys and Indians with three Wild West obsessed boys, watch an interview with an ageing rock star, enter a future world without emotions and much more. A prize will be awarded to the best film in this group at the first prize-giving session at 19:30.
Adult Short Films programme
A Fistful of Candy
Director: Ali Hughes, UK 2016, 7 mins.
Three boys obsessed with the Wild West make a break for the sweets their parents have hoarded. However, as the loot divides them, issues of corruption, betrayal and friendship must be settled the ‘Colorado way’ in the home counties.
Bliss Juice
Director: Max Tobin, UK 2016, 10 mins.
In a perfect future where war and poverty have been eradicated, everybody’s high. Except for one person. One person who wants to find out what ‘normal’ feels like. Filmmaker Max Tobin asks the big questions in this sharp science-fiction parable.
Body
Director: Bartosz Dzidowski, UK 2016, 2 mins.
A man gestures in the darkness to increasing levels of frenzy. Experimental audio-visual piece about the demon hidden within human nature.
Echoes
Director: Josh Merritt, UK 2016, 11 mins.
An ageing rock star recluse gives an interview to a young journalist. Yet however soft the questions may be at first, old wounds lurk ready to be exposed in this film by Horsham filmmaker Josh Merritt.
Emotional Motor Unit
Director: Adam Nelson, UK 2016, 22 mins.
Today, but not quite. Workers at the company are given pills to suppress their emotions. One lonely writer is gifted a machine known as the Emotional Motor Unit to help him write fiction. Much more than words emerge. Director Adam Nelson won the Best Independent Feature award at the Dorking Film Festival in 2015 for his feature Little Pieces.
Heartbox
Director: Richard Anthony Dunford, UK 2016, 7 mins.
Couple actually exchange their hearts as a sign of their love in Richard Anthony Dunford’s dramatic take on Christopher Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’.
Nicola’s Shedim
Director: Lawrence Mallinson, UK 2015, 2 mins.
Bedtime can be a scary proposition for a child about to be locked away in the twilight. Director Lawrence Mallinson has found a way to make it scary for adults too.
Paradis
Director: Neilson Black, UK 2016, 17 mins.
Sex addition requires specialist help when your next novel is due and all you can think about is your next navel. Writer Dominique tempts therapy before revealing himself to religion in this comedy drama.
The Double Cross
Director: Matt Brocking, UK 2015, 17 mins.
They don’t make silent black and white comedies like this any more… Hang on, they do! A young waiter gets caught up with a damsel in distress and a murder plot during a cocktail party. Gags abound, slapstick looms and intertitles tell you what’s happening. Watch out for the near-seamless merging of modern and archive footage at the start.
The Middleman
Director: Gabriel Kellett, UK 2016, 8 mins.
A manipulative insurance woman and her weak-willed lover plot to kill her sales agent husband. But once the two men meet at dinner, the sense of who the real middleman in this triangle is begins to change.
Image from Emotional Motor Unit
