Individually, the short films in Open City Documentary Festival’s Absent Collaborators programme might have slipped by without pause for remark. These tentative, tangential films each act like a pause for reflection, a moment of reprieve from life itself as the makers each summon a voice from their past to explore their present. In practical terms, this means filmmakers using verbatim testimony, reconstructions or searching through their own memories to create something new in collaboration with someone who is no longer with us. 

This begins perhaps with the most fully realised vision of this practice. Spit on the Broom, directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, opens with a remarkable shot. From inside a veil, it looks out at an 1800s wooden box camera as the sound of insects fly around the subject, whose brown hands poke through the covering holding a milk white baby. Using newspaper excerpts, Spit on the Broom explores the secret women’s society The United Order of Tents, a mutual aid organization founded during The Underground Railroad operation. Wide angle lenses and lucid steadicam make the viewer feel miniscule next to nameless giants from history. 

Hunt-Ehrlich retains the Order’s secrecy by combining her collaborative research with fictional depictions of the organisation. Truth and fiction’s combination takes on a larger resonance, a political essentialism. The ease with which Spit on the Broom flashes around the South, condensing time and space, recalls Dreaming Rivers, the 1988 film by Martine Attille of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. In that film, a dying woman recalls her migration from the Caribbean as the links to her children’s comfortable English lives are translated without words. Spit on the Broom’s layered sound design and sumptuous visuals collates its research into an overwhelming experience. 

In Eliane Esther Bots’ Cloud Forest,  the research is up front (just like Spit on the Broom).

Dutch filmmaker Bots takes a few women into a room to recount memories told by their parents of the former Yugoslav Wars, told in present tense and combined with free associative imagery of the participants’ artworks. Through some alchemy, Bots pushes the viewer into a liminal space between the experience of the unseen parents and their children. It kind of neuters the pain of war, but perhaps that is the point. When conflict is experienced a generaiton removed, what comes of its pain? In some respects, that makes Cloud Forest  feel like a speculative work. Different participants, different results. Rinse and repeat. 

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Once Removed crosses into some of the same territory. This is a five-channel video installation that one assumes would have been a physical exhibit had the festival proceeded in its usual incarnation. Like the festival’s incarnation into an online affair, Hamdan projects himself into reincarnation by walking viewers through his exhibition, a collage of his comprehensive collection of interviews, photographs and other objects from PLA and PSP socialist militia led by Walid Jumblatt during the Lebanese civil war. This way of experiencing the work, having two men walk and talk in front of a projection, is far from the ideal way of experiencing Once Removed. I see no cinema here. Perhaps in that very absence, though, the experience of the PLA/PSP is translated first through historical documents, then by Hamdan in his research and exhibit, and then manipulated once more in reaching Open City Docs viewers at home. A strange way to experience the past. 

Alice’s Four Stories, by Canadian artist Myriam Jacob-Allard, comes next, and feels like a reprieve after the 40-minute Once Removed. At six minutes, it initially feels slight in comparison, but Jacob-Allard quite perfectly translates a story her grandmother told her again and again into a split-screen slice of story time. Speaking directly into the camera in one channel, the second is more like a powerpoint presentation that complements the various beats and lifts it to somewhere else entirely, like the gust of wind from The Wizard of Oz that she uses to illustrate her grandmother’s tale. This frivolous tale is merely a palate cleanser for the final film in the programme, Good Ended Happily by Pakistani artist Basir Mahmood. One might glibly describe it as Night and Fog for the Osama Bin Laden execution. Using the Lahore-based film industry Lollywood, Mahmood himself isn’t present for the filming, but rather gives filmmakers the challenge of depicting his concept, a little like The Five Obstructions. Unlike the other collaborations, Mahmood is the one who’s removed. This breaks from Auteurist notions of the artist and maker that are upheld even by the film’s presentation on the programme. In one take, Good Ended Happily takes in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. military operation, as though a witness arriving just too late to see the action. The viewer is forced to question their notions of sympathy and humanism.

We are often encouraged to see short films as a trial run for a longer feature. Big success stories like Whiplash and The Babadook have encouraged viewers and critics to look at shorts as something akin to the television pilot, as something less than. It is a shame that a film with a condensed length cannot be seen as a feature instead of a bug. One wouldn’t want the shorts of Absent Collaborators to be a minute longer. Their strict cut-off points increases the haunting omission of the film’s subjects, and gives viewers more space to let their impact fully hit. 

Ben Flanagan (@manlikeflan) is a film critic and programmer based in London.