INTERVIEW: Elzbieta Vozbinaitė, Director of ShortScape Festival
2023 Poster from ShortScape Festival in Leith
Cinetopia contributor Clara Strachan interviews ShortScape festival director, Elzbieta Vozbinaitė, about its second edition, NEW SPARKS
Now in its second year, ShortScape festival continues to embody a youthful and independent creative spirit - providing a vital and fertile space for a community of independent Scottish creatives working with small budgets and big ideas.
Taking place at the Leith Arches at the end of September, this year’s festival theme centred around the exceedingly fitting theme of New Sparks. Distinct from other film festivals, ShortScape ran from afternoon till late each day, featuring a multimedia art exhibition, a collaborative opening performance spanning experimental sound, poetry and image, lively and diverse industry panels, and of course a formidable programme of brilliant short films.
Clara Strachan (@clarautomatic) spoke to ShortScape festival director Elzbieta Vozbinaitė (@Elzytew) about how a group of Napier and ECA students came together to create one of the most engaging and dynamic community oriented film and art festivals in the UK.
CLARA: What is ShortScape all about and how did it come to be?
ELZE: I think it formed with time… we sort of had an idea of what we wanted to do, but when it started we just wanted to create a cool festival that we’d want to attend ourselves. We realised what’s missing most is a film festival which is less exclusive and a lot more about the community. Being film students ourselves, we were very oriented towards Scottish students and young people, and this year we opened up to lower budget filmmakers as well. The first year of Shortscapes was all about giving a platform to young people and for people to meet the film-makers themselves, but in a laid back atmosphere. The word I was using all the time was, “let’s be hip” [laughs]... that was important to us.
There are film festivals across Scotland and the UK, but we wanted to create a sort of community feeling which we felt was missing. But now we’re growing - we had over 300 submissions this year. We still want to be ‘hip’, underground and kind of niche - but we are growing and we don’t want to lose our identity so it’s tricky, keeping the festival the way we want it but also evolving. ShortScape is very inspired by festivals I’d been to in Lithuania. The people involved in those festivals have a lot of passion and there’s not much money, as is the case across the worlds of art and culture - but they’re really driven by passion.
CLARA: 300 is a lot - but better than nobody submitting though right?
ELZE: Oh well that was our fear in the first year, but then somehow we did get submissions! We got significantly more this year than last year though [laughs]... People who came to ShortScape this year said “the programme is so much stronger and better!” and of course our programmers are amazing, but that’s going to happen naturally when you have so many films to choose from.
CLARA: So when and how did ShortScape come to exist?
ELZE: When I moved to Scotland for University, in first year, I was very lonely [laughs]... I didn’t have any friends. I come from Vilnius and it’s a super vibrant city with events happening at all times of the year, organised by your peers. I feel like in Vilnius they don’t wait for anyone to do things or for things to happen - if the event doesn’t exist they do it themselves. I really missed that - and obviously there are festivals in Edinburgh like EIFF, and that’s a crazy big deal, but it’s not an everyday sort of event. I just sort of saw a niche gap in Edinburgh for a film festival which is obviously about the films but a lot more about the community. With maybe a European inspired, underground vibe, sort of [laughs]...
But I knew I couldn’t do it myself - so I spoke to my coursemate Jagoda Tłok and she was really for it. We needed a third person, so the third person was our programmer Monica - who is also from Vilnius [laughs]... I just sort of gathered my friends and later the rest of the team joined. We were just telling everyone ‘we’re making a festival without any money!’, working on social media without confirmation that it was even happening - not having a solid venue or anything. Somehow it snowballed! It’s a lot of pretending - a lot of faking it until you make it.
CLARA: So how did you go about funding the festival as students?
ELZE: we applied for funding through different schemes but we didn’t get any! So we had to put our money up front this year and that’s why we had to charge for tickets - I don’t know why we didn’t get funding… Maybe the other applicants are better at filling out the forms or coming up with budgets than us? [laughs] I don’t know! We try our best… and I feel like you can see the success of the festival at the core.
We could keep putting our money up front to fund the festival, but obviously that isn’t secure for us. We can keep trying but there aren’t many grants that we’re eligible for - it was funny because we were all students and we couldn't apply to most of the grants because they aren’t for people in full time education, although the festival had nothing to do with our course.
CLARA: So what does the future of ShortScape festival look like?
ELZE: In a practical, real sense, we did face a lot of challenges this year - most of us graduated from university in May and we’re all going into work in the industry and have a lot less free time than we did in uni. The festival takes a lot of time to bring together - the head team is working on it almost year round. So we need to look at different strategies and see how we might be able to afford to pay our team for their time and input. Our plan is to meet with the whole team and share how we thought it went, and share what we think we can change and what can happen next to make it work. Because we all really want to make it work… we’ve been saying it’s not about us anymore at all, it's bigger than us [laughs]... and we need to do this festival no matter what, because it’s becoming quite important to a specific Scottish scene.
We want to grow and improve but without losing our core values and going too far from how we started. It would be cool to open up and collaborate with some other film festivals in Scotland or from across the UK. For example Glasgow Film Festival and Glasgow Short film festival - they are pretty ‘hip’ as well (not as ‘hip’ as us but quite hip) [laughs]... Or maybe different film festivals across the UK. It was really cool, myself Jagoda and a few others went to Cannes in May and met a lot of different festival curators… every time you meet someone who organises a film festival you’re like best pals and you say “we should totally collaborate!” So we met loads of people like that - so it would be cool to look into different opportunities and ways to expand but still have it be all about the people and the Scottish community. That’s a big part of our identity.
I think it was really cool that this year we had people coming in from the streets, just from seeing posters in person - the funniest thing happened to me, I got into a conversation with a random guy in the courtyard outside and we found out that almost ten years ago he went to university with my sister! Which is insane - but it’s just so nice.
CLARA: I love any in-person cultural event for this reason because it just brings seemingly random disconnected people together…
ELZE: For me it’s like throwing a massive birthday party and inviting all the people that you know from different environments and then having to mingle - I love that.
CLARA: Shortscape festival is more than just film screenings - tell me more about what the festival has going on.
ELZE: We had five submission programmes for films, but we also had two special programmes with panels. We had the Short Circuit x Shortscapes panel - where directors and producers talk about their journeys working in film, and their experience working with Short Circuit and gaining funding. Then we had another panel called Then and Now with quite accomplished Scottish directors who have been developing their first features or had big festival successes. Then we screened either their first film or one of their earlier films alongside their latest and discussed the progress and how things changed for them. Then we had another panel Step On the Bridge which was industry professionals working in high end TV and film, and the different crew members who are not heads of departments in perhaps lesser known roles - for young people who want to get into the industry but might not know about those roles. It was funny - the directors were more negative and the others were more positive generally! Maybe that says something [laughs]...
CLARA: I found it interesting though - I appreciated the honesty and enthusiasm! [laughs]
ELZE: Hopefully it wasn’t too negative! [Laughs]
CLARA: There was also an art exhibition alongside the screenings and panels…
ELZE: Yes, the exhibition itself was named for our theme this year - New Sparks. The Submission was very open - open to any artist wanting to show their work in any form. The exhibition centred around all things neglected, forgotten and unseen which have been given new meaning - a spark. Whether that be abandoned spaces, old forgotten photographs hidden underneath the bed or an apartment turned ashes. The chosen artists have proven that even in times of darkness, one can still choose to find the light. The exhibition featured work by Lewis Bailie (“Thoughts Under the floorboards”), Dominyka Sekonaite (“Urban Poetry”), Dominika Jackowska, (“Interactive Light Box”) and Blair Kemp (“Hanging on A Star”).
Then we had the opening performance which was a collaboration between three artists; Eon, an experimental musician, James Alexander McKenzie who is an experimental poet and artist, and Moventia an experimental visual artist. All these elements are featured in film separately but having them together live was really cool. They didn’t know each other personally at all… I just messaged them and asked them… I’d seen James at an Embassy gallery opening and it was cool and I really loved him! so I thought okay let’s see what happens! The opening performance didn’t have a theme, we just wanted to focus on how much young culture there is in Edinburgh and Scotland and to make something exciting and make the space at Leith Arches into something you can really feel and remember.
CLARA: How did you go about building the themes, strands and programme?
ELZE: With the filmhouse shutting and the industry strikes we thought, okay, well at least there’s a lot of really great talent in Scotland so we’re going to be all about focusing on the light. It makes me think of that Harry Potter quote, what is it? “Happiness can be found in even the darkest times if only one remembers to turn on the light.” [laughs]...
The most important criteria for the films we chose was that one of the main creatives had to be Scottish, and it was either going to be a student or graduate film - not necessarily made in the last few years. For non-student or graduate films, the criteria was that the film had to be lower budget or not financed by a funding scheme like short circuit… which is tricky because we’re not promoting self funding, and we would love for everyone to get funding! But it’s just unfortunate that there aren’t a lot of funding opportunities and we wanted to shed light on these films that might not necessarily go into bigger festivals perhaps because of their budget. Which is silly - because the premises and stories of these films are great.
So much about programming is about curating to a theme - it doesn’t necessarily mean one film is worse than another. There were a lot of strong films we had to leave out.
Last year our strands came from famous Scottish sayings so we were playing into Scottish identity a lot more. This year, the programmers were inspired by the submissions they received and looked at the direction that the films were going to build themes and strands. So for example we had a genre programme called “Occult” because we had quite a lot of horror-ish or comedy horror films and it felt like they deserved it’s own strand because we were seeing those themes repeating themselves. Which is cool because then you see a sort of film language emerging… for example in Lithuania I don’t think it’s not really popular to be making genre horror, or quite dark comedy films, but it’s definitely a big thing in Scotland - it’s cool! And similarly the programmers were watching the films and thought there were a lot of films with a strong fantasy element… and maybe that says something about Scottish culture as well, coming from a strong folklore, witchy background. That seems quite Scottish in itself.
Find out more information about ShortScape Festival at their website:
https://www.shortscapefest.com/
@shortscapefest
