Encounters Film Festival, normally based in Bristol, is the UK’s biggest short film festival, showcasing the best of short films from both the UK and the wider world. This year, as with so many other festivals, it’s entirely digital. With approximately 250 films playing, it would be a disservice to the films to give a brief run-down of what’s good and what’s not, as so many festival reports do. Instead, these reports will be covering just one film a week, aiming to give each film the critical time and space it deserves.

What happens to faith if or when we make contact with extra-terrestrial life? That is the central question posed in Sofia Alaoui’s So What If the Goats Die? Science fiction has long grappled with the big questions of human existence — and in doing so, it has found itself coalescing with deeply religious or spiritual ideas most obviously in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris or Stalker. But rarer is the depiction of how ordinary people of faith and the societies we live in might respond to the realisation that we are not alone in the universe.

So What If the Goats Die? centres on Abdellah (Fouad Oughaou), a goat-herder high up in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, toiling the land with his father (Moha Oughaou). With grain low and the goats going hungry, Abdellah is sent to the village on a two-day donkey trip to buy supplies. What begins as seemingly another neorealist tale of hardship quickly switches gears into something more celestial. On Abdellah’s entrance into the village, he finds it deserted, with one old man left behind, sitting in a café marvelling at the sky. 

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Such empty streets are now instantly reminiscent of lockdown, and although So What If the Goats Die? and many other films of the Encounters programme were made before the pandemic struck, it is remarkable how many shorts at this year’s festival play on the recurring themes of an incoming, world-shifting event. Prelude by Encounters regular Simon Ellis captures a London just prior to lockdown, That Which Is to Come Is Just a Promise by Flatform uses an audacious, digitally-aided single tracking shot to depict rising sea levels on the Pacific island of Funafuti, whilst Arka by Natko Stipaničev and Sad Beauty by Arjan Brentjes are two animations that deal frankly with impending ecological disaster. 

More broadly, In the Company of Insects by Duncan Cowles muses on the possible extinction of insects (and with it our planet), with the filmmaker coming to terms with the passing of his grandfather in his back garden, mixing the transcendental and the sardonic. And where to put The Bite? A film by Brazilian filmmaker Pablo Neves Marques, it imagines a near-future in which a pandemic caused by mosquitos has collapsed the social order and led to military intervention, whilst a small group of scientists are working to introduce genetically-modified mosquitos into the population to kill the group. That one of the scientists goes home to a polyamorous, transgender romantic situation at home proposes a juxtaposition with the continuing suppression of democracy enacted by Bolsonaro and his fascist gangs, unleashing the worst in Brazilian society. How much did the events of this year impact on the decision to include these films in the programme? How much is our response conditioned by our willingness to see causality in correlation, regardless of the original artistic intention?

In So What If the Goats Die?, when Abdellah begins to piece together what is happening from the old man’s ramblings and a TV showing news reports of the population seeking refuge in mosques, he begins to have a crisis of faith. The sky that the old man was admiring is full of strange, new stars, even in full day time. The certainty and inevitability of his life — the necessity of feeding goats, of eating and of eventually marrying — is suddenly gone. Why, you might ask, did Abdellah not notice the lights in the sky from his remote location in the Atlas Mountains, where light pollution is surely not an issue? Perhaps he and his father were too busy tending to the ground at their feet and to their own survival to look up.

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The response of the society around Abdellah has been to read the presence of extra-terrestrial life as a threat to God — imams preach their presence as a sign of the devil. For the world’s monotheistic religions, the presence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life poses significant questions about the supposedly unique relationship of humans to God, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim. Interestingly enough (and I say this as someone with next to no theological knowledge about any of these religions), Islam appears more conducive and prepared for extra-terrestrial life than Christianity — as suggested here, here and here. While viewing So What If the Goats Die?, I recalled a fundamentalist Christian boy I went to school with, convinced that there was no extra-terrestrial life, and convinced above all of the absolute certainty of his beliefs.

Yet, So What If the Goats Die? is not so much about theology that is unable to grasp extra-terrestrial life, but certainty. It is doubt that allows faith to grow, adapt and adjust. It is certainty which breeds conservatism. When you are certain of the future, why try to change it? It is the certainty of Abdellah’s existence that is thrown into disbelief, and here the film touches on more existential themes, surveying his gaze — lonely, scared, questioning. As Abdellah searches the town, he finds a woman, Itto (Oumaïma Oughaou), determined to use this as an opportunity to escape from the patriarchal grip of the surrounding society. Her faith in Allah is not shaken in the slightest — the visitation of alien life suggests to her that there is a more evolved life form than the base simplicity of patriarchal norms that so defines the life of women the world over. To Itto, the destruction of certainty is also the destruction of patriarchal conservatism, and therefore liberation. When Abdellah returns to his father, he is initially branded an unbeliever, his news aggressively rejected. But the thundering green lights make their presence known.

Alaoui’s direction of So What If the Goats Die? is vital to the film’s subject matter. She mixes both intimate close-ups with wide-scale, awe-inducing visions of the possibilities inherent in the night sky, whilst the colour scheme shifts from earthy browns and blue nights to ethereal, night-vision greens. There is a beauty and mystery to the film reminiscent of Mati Diop’s feature debut Atlantics, which also ruminates on the divide between the physical limitations of our present world, and that which goes beyond. 

Questions as big as this can and have sustained feature films, but their qualities lie in resisting a temptation to find answers to these questions. Here, then, is one of the benefits of the short film form: the opportunity to leave more questions than answers, and to allow audiences to engage more openly with certain ideas. This is what I find myself doing with So What If the Goats Die?

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specialising in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.