Author: Lauren Turner

GAME GIRLS (Alina Skrzeszewska) follows Teri Rogers, a woman on a mission for a better life. With a non-judgmental camera lens and a frank portrayal of life on Skid Row, GAME GIRLS shows dreams, dissolution and desire. 

It opens a window in to the systemic problem of life on the streets – this is where these people, Teri and her fiancé Tiahna Vince, have learned their lifestyle, trades, behaviours. A fly on the wall style appraisal follows as she contemplates her relationship, her life, her goals. Teri wants more, but everyone around her seems to think it could never happen.

It’s a demonstration of the yearning we all feel for a better life – to leave behind one set of problems for another, as Teri puts it; her particular situation of being a black, poor, mentally ill American woman in downtown Los Angeles does come with it’s particular set of historical constraints, touched on throughout the portrayal of her personal experience. 

The microcosm of her finance’s therapy sessions, expressing deeply personal stories, flow out in to the macro scenes of the doc showing life on the streets and real time observation of interactions between black, poor, American people. The personal becomes the collective – the stories don’t necessarily blend but they hold up together a greater narrative of the communal issues within this society. 

Skid Row seems like a harsh place – there are constraints that seem impossible to get out of. Teri’s vigilant rigour to go by the system is a sometimes painfully frustrating watch – the city workers couldn’t be nicer, but they can’t help her. She’s not poor enough, or sick enough, or homeless enough. It’s an endless cycle of qualification and bureaucracy, a country’s attempt to handle the problem and the people on the front lines dealing with it.

There’s rays of hope due to Terri’s tenacity – she goes through all the tribulations of normal adult life such as marrying, finding a place to live, and her perseverance is so admirable. When she puts a fresh paint of coat on her home and looks out to the street, it’s as beautiful a sunset you’ll ever see complete with abandoned shopping trolleys and all. 

In the end, it’s not clean cut. It’s messy escaping from previous problems, a previous life. The passion to succeed wills out and runs deep in within all of us – Teri is trying, and sometimes succeeding; in her eyes that beats not t

Murder Suicide: An upbeat buddy comedy 

The beats are odd, the characters a little flat, but the quirky silliness of this film makes you smirk and grin. A woman kills her ass hole boyfriend because he let her dog run loose – she concocts a poisonous beer knowing he’ll ask her for the rest of her own drink, and therefore orchestrates his own demise through his rude predictability.

A mysterious hotline plays a third character which provides the smirks and funniness of the story. The absurd deus ex machina allows the woman to walk away from her crime with little to no guilt, thanks to a quick google search of non extradition countries. The hotline gains a new customer, and she and her dog both get lost.

Safe Bet 

This short is charming in a very vulnerable way – the playful sadness of dating and the risky game of romantic gambling give one woman a really bad night. The inversion of the tropes are legitimately cool. The nice guy at the beginning is still nice, but more going for him than we thought, the coy pixie girl is lonely and desperate, and the ass hole is nothing more than that because we all know how they are.

In the end, the only safe bet is the one you make on yourself. As this woman makes not one but two mistakes in one night, turning away a great date to go sleep with a loser, then coming crawling back to another bad surprise, it makes you realise how your first impressions can be criminally unfair and sometimes the safest bets have the lowest reward – you gotta risk it to get the biscuit. 

Craning

This movie has been in development for a while, and has since been recognised for the effort. With good reason – the short is emotional, neatly done and a great watch. Two people on an uncomfortable date are left wondering whether a meaningful connection is even possible. It takes some honest confessions and a few twists to get the two from A to B – awkward banter to a real place of empathy. 

The two actors together don’t seem to have much chemistry, but their performances are both still good. The camerawork is sophisticated, and moves from static and stationary to carefree and fluid. It’s linked well with the dialogue and the story, and the performance at the end really brings it home. I take my hat off to this film, I was invested and surprised, and left feeling a little raw, in the best possible way.

In the midnight hour of British politics, with the current quagmire of Brexit, corruption of power and awful uncertainty, one man’s prison sentence feels eerily, creepily like a dystopian future not too far away. Figuratively speaking, of course… 

One man (Michael Shon, rising to the non-verbal role supremely) is kept in a dingy cell, teetering on a stool with a noose around his neck, with his eyes trained on a constant feed of images coming from a TV. His jailor (James Hyland, superb) appears to be more of a doctor, giving him meals (that disappear and provide no nourishment) and checking his clipboard (showing the man’s extensive crimes). 

Transmission seems to be about the cyclical nature of our entrapment within politics. Just when we think things are getting better, shown by our leading man wandering through a beautiful forest, we get sucked back in the same cell we started off with, with no change and even things getting worse.

The 35MM format gives a really nice touch to the film – the grainy visuals giving a realness to the surreal struggle. The cinematography is great, disorienting us between freedom and prison, until we are confused which is which. 

The questions raised in the film relate to us as active members in the political sphere – how much of the prison we are in have we constructed, signed off on, ourselves? How much are we able to change it, if at all? The corporate attire of the protagonist doesn’t go unnoticed – a regular worker with a serious list of crimes, is it to show what the average Joe is capable of, or what he will be condemned for? Interesting questions from a very creepy, but enjoyable short.