All individual challenge participants must take three challenges below:.Students can participate in different Owlypia Globals but they cannot use the same project for each one.Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.īy becoming a member you can support our independent journalism and receive exclusive essays, prints, monthly film recommendations and more.The categories below are open to individual participants however, up to three individuals may participate in Short Film Challenge as a group. All entries must be received by the deadlines given on each Owlypia Global page. Though Town of Strangers is disconcerting in its construction, experimental and certainly not smooth, it feels like a film made with such determination that it is hard to question its integrity as it evolves into a thoughtful and manifold musing on versions of home, and on filmmaking itself. But the journey is undoubtedly homewards. “They say there are two stories,” says our interlocutor to the camera, sitting in the doorway of her van and eating out of a saucepan, “A stranger comes to a town, or a person goes on a journey.” The question as to which one this is hovers – it’s both. Town of Strangers, for all that it concerns real people and their sometimes terribly real stories of seeking refuge, has an eerie, folkloric quality largely thanks to the cinematography: shots pan upwards unexpectedly children amble unexplained between trees in the woods teenagers sneak into abandoned houses to play imaginary instruments and O’Brien’s bright red van – also her home – drifts through the grey town, a constant metaphor for the alien. Her process and the purpose of the project appears to be developing in real time, which is strange and mesmerising to witness. There are moments in which the director seems exhausted, sometimes caught in an air of fazed abandon while leaning against a laundrette washing machine. The mutual antagonism at play between those in front of and those behind the camera is intriguing to observe. The film is referred to throughout, and the process of filming, such as setting up backdrops, people preening ready for the camera to roll and snapping into action, is itself filmed. The filmmaker treats them all with equal dignity, as their testimonies shape the documentary. They describe people they miss, things they’ve left behind, their dreams. All the while those filmed reveal intimate stories of their families, loves and journeys. ‘Home’ in this sense consists of a series of actions as much as it does of a physical space. People who have come from elsewhere – Syrian refugees, Traveller teenagers, Brazilian meat factory workers, hippies from England, or people from just down the road – are interviewed in neutral spaces and in their houses, making coffee, tending to their gardens, cooking, doing their makeup. Town of Strangers deals with this amorphous Celtic feeling as writer, director and principal cinematographer Treasa O’Brien asks people in the town of Gort, one of the most diverse towns in Ireland, what home means to them and how they came to be in this unlikely place. There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, which describes a longing for home – particularly one that is hard to return to, often because it exists in memory. An intrepid filmmaker travels to the Irish nowherestown of Gort to explore the expansive concept of home among its diverse residents.
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