BAF­TA Shorts 2016

“Find­ing. That was a word that I had in one of the son­nets. I’d writ­ten ​‘find­ing’ and then I had ​‘search­ing’, ​‘look­ing for’, all these words. It turned out to be ​‘Min­ing’ – what a word. ​‘Min­ing’. Imag­ine going down into the dirt to find a word that you’re going to ele­vate up into poet­ry, that’s ​‘min­ing’ for me.”

Min­ing Poems or Odes, direct­ed by Cal­lum Rice, is one of the sev­en remark­ably high-qual­i­ty shorts in this year’s 75-minute BAF­TA com­pendi­um. The three ani­mat­ed and four live-action shorts all have a rich strain of exis­ten­tial sen­si­tiv­i­ty con­tained with­in clever premis­es. For Pro­logue, Who Framed Roger Rab­bit ani­ma­tor Richard Williams draws scenes from an ancient war, as viewed from a hor­ri­fied child, into life. The audio of his busi­ly scratch­ing pen­cil pro­vides a reminder that this is art­ful inter­pre­ta­tion rather than bloody realism.

Car­o­line Bartleet’s Oper­a­tor, the win­ner at this year’s BAF­TAs, is an exam­ple of a sim­ple idea exe­cut­ed to per­fec­tion. Kate Dick­ie is an emer­gency oper­a­tor for the fire brigade. She takes callers’ infor­ma­tion, sends help and then stays on the line to advise them in the pan­ic-filled min­utes before fire engines arrive at their address. The finale of the film shows the hys­ter­i­cal scream­ing of a caller replaced by the stul­ti­fy­ing qui­et of an office envi­ron­ment, as Dick­ie is dis­con­nect­ed. She takes a breath. The con­trast between high dra­ma and noth­ing­ness is expressed in this shock­ing­ly pow­er­ful tonal discrepancy.

Min­ing Poems or Odes is the rich­est offer­ing in show – at least from the per­spec­tive of one who loves words. Robert Fuller­ton is a bridge between phys­i­cal labour and the human soul. Once he was a ship­yard-welder, now he is a poet. He cred­its the for­mer voca­tion with enabling the lat­ter. (“It’s the per­fect think­ing lab­o­ra­to­ry.”) The film is Fuller­ton talk­ing. It is a feed­back loop of word­play. We watch him look­ing for the right lan­guage to describe look­ing for the right lan­guage; he uses metaphors that lit­er­al­ly describe the job he held from the age of 17.

Glas­gow is where he grew up and his thick but per­fect­ly audi­ble Glaswe­gian accent per­haps informed the filmmaker’s deci­sion to run sub­ti­tles. They don’t harm the film as they empha­sise the pre­ci­sion of all word choic­es. Imagery of steel spark­ing and scenes from the city break up footage of the poet’s won­der­ful worn face.