Boston Science FictionFestival 3

The Boston Science Fiction Festival is in full swing providing a steady stream of features and shorts to New England audiences, festival passes and passes to the Movie marathon can be found at the their website. Individual tickets to screenings can be purchased at the Somerville Theatre up until time of show.

Day 3 and I only went in for the shorts program. I already saw the film pig which was after this program and decided that staying for the third feature Neader-Jin so the apologies to the makers of that film in not giving it a look.
The program consisted of four longer shorts all may have been longer than 10 minutes. Here are the thoughts on those.

Geners (2011) from Sweden and by Tumpum Peters was a futuristic look at society where gene modification is a privilege only the wealthy have. Those who have been change and are not rich must take inhibitors so that their benefits can not be used. The film explaining this is really the look at two characters, Gener Girl (Mai Yamamoto) and the Gener Cop (Billy May) who wants to arrest her for not going to "relaxed controls" to inhibit her illegal modification. A chase and and long fight sequence was very cool to look at with extended underwater effects and at times freedom from gravity. The little twist in the end was okay but really it was the action that made this interesting. So hats off to Tumpum Peters on making a decent entry.

Mistaken (2011) - Story about a music star Nick mayers (Andreas Wilson) who on the night of his big concert gets the idea that he is the only real person in the world and everyone around him, only exist because he does. So he decides to skip the concert since no one is real but in the process of trying to escape the situation freaks out. Taking a reporter as a hostage (Jenni Banarjee) he tries to get away, he ends up in a hotel room in a standoff with police. There is a twist but it sort of was expected because it is sci-fi and we have seen a lot of these. The effects in this film are very good and the direction by Arsen Sarkisiants is tight and effective.

Breakaway / Backdown (2010) Director Ralph Morang from Maine was present at this screening and certainly his love of the subject of space came through in this almost monologue. When I say space I mean off the earth and the main character, Cleo (Scarlett Ridgeway Savage) in the film is talking to the girl fixing her shoe, Jane (Katie Fitzpatrick) on the video phone about her time off the planet. Wrapped in the story is a personal story about her relationship while away, her motivations to go and her decision to come back to earth. Although well received at the showing I found the extensive expository monologue a bit tedious but to each their own.

The shortest and also the one I like the most was called Mobius (2011) excellently filmed story about a photographer whop wants to report on the killings on the US border. Unfortunately for him he ends up in an infinate cycle of thing going horribly wrong for him.