While we’ve preferred to leave the Homegrown programme untouched and to the imagination in the past – mainly due to the local short film selection standing as a compact film festival in itself, and better left experienced in the moment, on-the-fly, and amongst the pockets of excited audience members whose films are about to be immortalised for the first time on the big screen – several preview screeners turned up in our mailbox last month that we couldn’t say no to. From what we’ve seen, the standard is indelibly high and confidently assured.

Loose Ends, Chris White’s absurdist hotel noir, pits an inept femme fatale in a convoluted murder scenario: a one-armed man and his mistress, whacked by what appears to be his disgruntled wife, are in need of disposal. The farcical strain of proceedings ultimately coils into a spring-loaded karma – after attempting to feign several bad-luck death scenarios, said fatale opts to dump the bodies instead, albeit the impediment of a nosey hotel guest, a horny bell boy, and other forces of nature. Needless to say, what goes around comes around (or down).

Also part of Homegrown’s miniature programme Love and Other Catastrophes, Embers is the most lavish short we’ve seen so far, with a budget generous enough to furnish its evocative production design, name actors, and glacial cinematography. In framing the post-war anxiety of a wife awaiting the return of her husband from the Pacific in chilly textures and somewhat austere interiors, her torturous visions of Japanese atrocities seem all the more likely to surface. Meanwhile, in Works on Video, Adam Luxton and Jeremy Dumble’s Ninety Percent weaves a network of bright young things pondering the pros, cons, widths, breadths and lengths of life. The directors clearly have a knack for coaxing performances from actors who, appropriately, come across as their authentic selves, while the “ehs” and “nahs” of teen boyhood conversation are captured in all their obnoxious, Nu Zilind-accented glory throughout the film’s bus commuting scenes. Coolly shot in 35mm widescreen, too.

The three aforementioned shorts hail from The University of Auckland’s Film, Television and Media Studies course – a record year for the department so we’re told, with six films in total making the Homegrown cut. No doubting these students have shed blood, sweat and tears to finish their films; creatively spent, they’ll surely find solace (and renewed inspiration) in Mitsuo Yanahigamchi’s zany and nimble comedy-of-filmmaking, Who’s Camus Anyway? Here, Yanahigamchi shrewdly unravels a student film production over the course of a week, opening playfully with a six-minute long tracking shot of film-quoting cine-dorks (quoting long tracking shots), J-pop styled crew members and freestyling Harajuku girls. Overseeing the film is a glum university professor, whose increasingly bizarre infatuation with an attractive young girl mirrors the precarious balance of his students’ slippery grasp on production. In more absurd interplay, an obsessed girlfriend and a myriad of crew-related crushes threaten to undermine the completion of the film; nor does it help the director looks like a Japanese boyband member, or that the professor is convinced he’s Aschenbach from Death in Venice. It all gels on a pitch-perfect note of elation, recalling that giddy, natural high anyone who’s ever collaborated on a film production will have felt upon hearing the words “That’s a Wrap”.—Tim Wong