One minute, one shot

The ‘film directors’ taking part in the “one minute one shot” film festival were either not taking it seriously, or they are mostly deprived of basic imagination and directing skills. That is the conclusion I arrived at after viewing about 90 films – that were given to me to evaluate as I took participated in the ‘journalistic jury’ for the event.
The festival itself, organized by the Armenian Center for contemporary experimental art, sounds like a great idea. From what I understood, the task is to create a 1 minute video piece without any editing – and in that one shot to try and tell a lot.
It has been going on since 2003 – and very few people have actually heard of it in Yerevan, although today – in the age of citizen journalism and video enhanced mobile phones you’d think everyone should dash out to take part in it.
As part of jury we actually had rather a hard time on deciding on the one film out of 90 that we liked. Most of them weren’t likeable at all. I for one thing, liked only two: “Unforseen” (Narek Safaryan / Armenia) and “Virtuoso break” (Nino De Gleria / Slovak Republic).
The films aren’t online yet – but follow the www.accea.info website – I’m told they’ll be there soon. I can’t upload them myself because of copyright issues.
Anyway – Unzipped has posted a video of the winning film – “Television” (Arevik Avanesyan). Its a badly made 1 minute boring shot/piece of garbage being spilled out of TV, and the viewer at the end picks up a half-full bottle of Coke and drinks it. And although I signed under it – we gave the journalistic jury’s sympathy prize to it as well, I’m saddened, that the quality of the film festival was so low, that we had no other viable choice. Oh, well! What’s done, that’s gone!
I just wish to let people know about this thing and encourage more of you out there with amature cameras and a lot of imagination to put up something and submit it to the jury at next year’s festival.