As someone who programs short films for various festivals, let me give this word of advice to prospective film makers. Don't make a forty minute film. At forty minutes, your film will be about twenty minutes too short to be considered a feature by festival standards and yet so long that it will take up nearly half of a conventional short film program. A forty minute short doesn't have to be better than just one film to be programmed, it has to be better than about five other shorts combined because that's how much space it's going to take up. Make a forty minute short and you've virtually guaranteed that nobody is going to see it, ever.
And so, with that basic reality in mind, when I see a forty minute short that's actually out there on the festival circuit, not just getting programmed but hitting the big fests - Berlin and Tribeca among them - well, then, clearly there's something special happening. Which is the case with Nikias Chryssos' Tower Block (Hochhaus).
Daniel and his older brother Patrick live together in a tower block. Patrick forces Daniel to go around collecting money and plays sadistic games with him. Daniel escapes into fantasy worlds. As he suffers more and more from his brother's tyranny, he believes to have found a friend in Bernd, a heroin junkie from the area.
This is one impressive piece of work and with the festival run now complete, Chryssos has posted the entire thing online. Find it below the break.
Hochhaus (Tower Block) from kavla _ nikias chryssos on Vimeo.