Embarras Valley Film Festival Accepting Submissions for its Student Film Festival!

Embarras Valley Film Festival 

Short Student Film Festival

Eastern Illinois University

Submit through Film Freeway: Film Freeway Submission Site

Embarras Valley Film Festival Call for Student Submissions

Deadline: November 18, 2018 
Festival: October 28, 2017

We are looking for short films of high artistic quality made by student filmmakers. Preference will be made for filmmakers from the Central Illinois area and high school students.

The EVFF is a yearly event honoring a person or theme relevant to the Embarras Valley, which encompasses much of East Central Illinois. This year’s festival highlights the horror and thriller film in Illinois.

Submission Guidelines: 
• Films should be short: no more than 10 minutes in length. 
• Entries should be labeled with: 
1. your name, 
2. address, 
3. email address, 
4. the title of your film, 
5. and a 2-3 sentence synopsis.

For more information about the festival visit 
www.eiu.edu/~evff 
or email rlmurray@eiu.edu

There is no submission fee for this student film festival. 

Awards & Prizes

Small monetary awards will be provided for first, second, and third place winners.

Rules & Terms

We are looking for short films/videos of high artistic quality made by student filmmakers, including promos, documentary shorts, and fictional films of any genre. 
Preference will be made for student filmmakers from Eastern Illinois University, the Central Illinois area, and Illinois high school students.

Submission Guidelines: 
• Films should be short: under 10 minutes in length. 
• Entries should be labeled with: 
1. your name, 
2. address, 
3. email address, 
4. the title of your film, 
5. and a 2-3 sentence synopsis.

For more information about the festival visit 
www.eiu.edu/~evff 
or email rlmurray@eiu.edu

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White God Finale

In White God, Hagen finds the men who bought and tortured him, and with his canine army, kills them one by one. He even kills the neighbor who reported him to animal control. Police retaliate violently, shooting and killing dogs as they run wild throughout Budapest. Hagen continues his revenge plot, searching out and finding Lili’s father’s slaughterhouse workplace. Lili is there, though, and tries to bring back the pet she loves. She first tries playing fetch with him, but he bares his teeth instead. Yet when Lili plays her trumpet, Hagen and the remaining pack members stop barking and lie down. Lili lies down with Hagen, and her father joins her, bringing the film back to its opening Rilke quote. Made terrible by eco-traumas and the horrific behaviors they have caused, Hagen and his pack need love and respect and seem to find it with Lili and her trumpet.

Many reviewers agree with the production notes’ argument that White God serves as a “metaphor for the political and cultural tensions sweeping contemporary Europe.” Anthony Lane asserts, “you can hardly stage an insurrection, of whatever species, on the streets of Budapest without raising the ghost of the uprising there against Soviet rule, in 1956.” Rene Rodriguez suggests director Mundruczo

is up to something far grander and more ambitious than putting the viewer through the wringer. Although the allegory may seem facile, White God pulls off the difficult trick of exploring the consequences of exploiting the lower classes by using cute dogs as symbols for the oppressed and downtrodden.

For these reviewers, Hagen and his pack represent oppressed humans rather than dogs suffering from real environmental trauma.

For us, though, Hagen moves beyond symbol. As a companion species whose pleasure and pain align with our own, Hagen stands in only for himself, a dog who, as Donna Haraway asserts, is a “full partner in worlding, in becoming with” (301). Manohla Dargis sees White God as a parable about how “a faithful animal, separated from its loving owner, endures, suffers, struggles and resists while trying to transcend its brutal fate.” Hagen is certainly a loving dog who endures and resists, but he is also Lili’s companion species. Together they are “messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or not” (Haraway 301). Haraway’s parting assertion regarding messmates is one “with a longing that it might be said of me someday what good agility players say of those whose runs they admire, ‘She has met her dog’” (301). By both disrupting and affirming that possibility, White God reveals the consequences of eco-trauma while offering a solution to its violent repercussions: a mutual longing between species.

White God, continued.

White God acknowledges and illustrates in detail the loving home Hagen must leave when Lili is forced to live with her father for three months. Before dropping Lili off at the slaughterhouse where dad works inspecting freshly slaughtered beef, Lili and her family share a picnic. Hagen seems joyful as he plays what New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis calls “a quietly portentous game of tug-of-war” with Lili. His tail wags as he adeptly catches and retrieves the toy. And the close relationship between the two continues even in Lili’s father’s cramped apartment, where she attempts to feed Hagen meat scraps from the table. Los Angeles reviewer Robert Abele calls Hagen “her true bestie, a lovable reddish-brown mutt.” Despite dad’s refusal to allow Hagen to sleep in Lili’s room, she preserves their bond by soothing Hagen with her trumpet in the bathroom where he’s trapped.

White God also shows the horrific conditions and experiences Hagen faces in the streets of Budapest. Although Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald suggests the first half of the film “plays like a spinoff of Babe: Pig in the City or a Disney movie about a lost pet fending for itself,” it also illustrates how Hagen’s former relationship with Lili transfers to other species. He sleeps under a bridge and searches for food and water, but he also seeks community, connecting with other dogs around the city. With a small canine companion, Hagen discovers a pack of dogs in a wet empty lot.

As a group, their intelligence seems to grow. Hagen and his companion dog “escape [] from a cleaver-wielding butcher tired of mongrels hanging outside his shop” (Abele). When animal control arrives, Hagen leads the dogcatchers away from the lot, so the other dogs can escape. Hagen and his pack adopt behaviors Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Professors Ferdowsian and Merskin suggest parallel those of humans, including “avoidance behaviors” when they evade the dogcatchers who not only plan to force them into kennels at a crowded dog pound, but also seek to euthanize them as they routinely do in American animal shelters according to documentaries like One Nation Under Dog, City of Dogs, and Out of the Pit.

Hagen’s newfound freedom turns into a vengeful battle when a homeless man (János Derzsi) saves him from the officials but sells him to a dogfight coordinator to train. As Rodriguez declares, “Anyone who wasn’t able to sit through Amores Perros should take heed: What comes next isn’t easy to watch.” The trainer’s horrific tactics line up with those documented in Out of the Pit. First, he feeds Hagen sleeping pills and offers him protein injected with steroids when he awakens. Wearing a mask, the trainer beats Hagen while chained and builds his strength on a treadmill. He even sharpens his teeth. Drugged up on steroids, Hagen kills his dog opponent in his first fight. According to Abele’s review,

These scenes bond us to Hagen’s plight with unrelenting primacy. Filmed with the jagged energy of a Paul Greengrass nail-biter, they make clear that few films have ever so explicitly shown the daily threat to life for a creature left to fend for itself in a society that dismisses it as a beast designed for subjugation, abuse, and/or extermination.

Having maintained some connection to his canine comrades, however, Hagen finds a way to escape this abuse. He runs away back to the vacant lot where he finds his former little dog friend. When animal control captures and cages them, however, the dogs’ fates there depend on their responses to vicious shelter officials. When Hagen tries to attack a woman attempting to pet him, he is sentenced to death. Seemingly aware of his doom, Hagen again breaks out, freeing other caged dogs and stampeding over the woman who would have killed him and his pack, in a scene taken straight from the slave revolt in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). As Abele suggests, Hagen’s breakout is also a “reminder that the iconography of freedom and uprising needn’t only belong to humans.”

Despite the horrors he experiences, Hagen still searches for Lili, leading his gang of dogs into the concert hall where she is performing with her band. When she discovers Hagen and the pack’s entrance into the hall, Lili leads them away on the borrowed bicycle that opens the film. Instead of ending here, though, White God continues, showing the dogs knocking her down as they run on. Abele calls the scene “dreamlike…until scores of dogs careen around a corner, their bodies in full, magnificent motion.” With only her knee skinned, however, she gets back on her bike. Hagen makes no attempt to deliberately hurt his former companion.

Companion Species Versus Traumatized Pet in *White God*

Companion Species Versus Traumatized Pet in *White God*

White God showcases how the connections between humans and dogs can torture and nurture both species. Ultimately, though, it offers a way to build relationships based on Haraway’s companion species ideal instead of either pampering or torture. The opening title quotation from Rainer Maria Rilka establishes the primary argument of the horror drama White God (2014): “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” To support its claim, however, White God demonstrates how horrific mistreatment may also create the terrible, turning a house pet into a feral hyper-intelligent revolutionary menace.

Set in an alternate Budapest, the film’s conflicts begin when Hungary sets a severe tax on those who own mixed breed dogs, so pedigree and purebreds will be favored. To avoid the tax, mixed breed owners dump them on the streets or in overcrowded animal shelters. The film’s production notes argue the film serves as “a stark, beautiful metaphor for the political and cultural tensions sweeping contemporary Europe.” But its focus on one mixed breed dog’s responses to a lifeless urban environment and the hostile situations he experiences after abandonment by his young owner’s cruel father also suggest an expanded view of eco-trauma may be warranted. In White God, mixed breed Hagen battles urban ecological catastrophes and eco-trauma that transform him from loving pet to vengeance seeking monster.

For Anil Narine, eco-trauma is a product of the ecological catastrophes that “confront us directly, as experiences, or indirectly, as images circulating in the media” (1). Narine suggests, “these events tend to confound us and even paralyze us politically and psychologically” (1). Psychologist Tina Amorok argues that ideally, humans experience lives that are interconnected with others and the natural world. But, Amorok suggests, “The experience of interconnectedness contains paradox, for we sense not just the profound beauty of life but also the pandemic of human violence and the existential anxiety that it causes” (29). Our responses to the eco-trauma this dilemma causes may be violent, Amorok declares, and include

separation ideologies and practices (war, religious fanaticism, racism, and sexism), psychological defense mechanisms (denial, dissociation, psychic numbing), and an array of debilitating behaviors and responses that bear the signature of trauma, ranging from depression, anxiety, and addictive lifestyles to violence toward self, others, and nature. (29)

White God illustrates how a domesticated dog reacts with similar violence when facing eco-trauma and urban ecological catastrophes associated with it.

Dogs and Eco-Trauma: The Making of a Monster in White God Part I

After adopting several rescue dogs, all of whom suffered abuse and neglect, it comes as no surprise to us that both human and nonhuman animals may suffer the consequences of eco-trauma. As part of human society, dogs may also be traumatized by a toxic environment. As cultural critic David R. Shumway asserts, “pets … ought to be understood as elements of a healthy human society” (272). According to Shumway, “if humans have typically lived in a mixed community with animals, then our definition of ‘society’ should be expanded to reflect the fact that not all of the subjects to whom we relate are human” (272). As noted ecocritic Anil Narine suggests, “a traumatized earth begets traumatized people” (13), but a traumatized earth may also negatively affect other species. 

Films highlighting dogfighting reveal much about the complex connections between humans and their dogs. In this presentation, we argue that by exposing the abuse dogs endure during cruel training for and violent assaults in the dogfight ring, the fictional film White God(2015) powerfully demonstrates the repercussions of mistreatment in a toxic environment: eco-trauma. But it also offers a solution: love.

White God suggests a traumatized earth may also traumatize the pets we love, especially in an urban setting. The opening of White Godhighlights the consequences of such environmental trauma. A long shot reveals a starkly empty silent Budapest street where thirteen-year-old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) rides her bike across a deserted bridge. The music is quiet as she passes an abandoned car and bus, suggesting a forced escape for their passengers. Cutting to a city street as she continues to bike, an enormous pack of dogs runs up behind and past her, as if responding to the trumpet in her backpack. This opening scene ends with a flashback to Lili playing with her dog Hagen to underpin the dramatic change trauma has produced in this once happy house pet.

When her mother leaves for three months to Australia, Lili and Hagen’s lives are disrupted when they are forced to move in with Lili’s meat inspector father Daniel (Sándor Zsótér), who lives in a small and insular apartment building. In this traumatic ecology, a neighbor (Erika Bodnár) reports illegal mixed breed ownership to authorities, claiming Hagen bit her. Canine officers warn Lili and her father they must pay a heavy state tax and register the mixed breed or lose him. Forced to sleep in a closed bathroom, Hagen howls. Only Lili’s trumpet can calm him. When Lili sneaks Hagen into her band rehearsal and disturbs the practice, her director throws them out. In retaliation, Lili’s father casts Hagen out of their car in the middle of a crowded avenue and drives off. His actions catalyze the series of traumatic experiences that nearly condemn Hagen to death. 

Ultimately, White God illustrates the similarities between humans and dogs. Both species respond positively to love, and negatively to cruelty. In White God,the hope is that love may counter the environmental trauma humanity creates.

EVFF EIU Student Film Contest

Mother! and the Cli-Fi Conundrum Part IV

When His story of Mother’s creation is suddenly published, the eco-disaster on display becomes almost unbearable to watch. The hallucinogenic sequences show a home invaded by ever- larger hordes of followers of Him. Him and the visitors take even more from Mother and her home. “But it’s not yours,” Mother tells the masses stealing food from her table, while Him orders her to “share it. They’re just things. They can be replaced.” 

Ever larger hordes of invaders intensify Mother’s pain.

Eagerly Him even shares their newborn son with the mob, perhaps because he knows another woman will fix the mess and call him “Baby.” The only way Mother can cope with such intense pain is immolation. In the end, Mother gives us the environmental message we crave: “You never loved me. You just loved how much I loved you. I gave you everything, and you gave it all away.”

In a May 2014 interview, deep-green activist Dan Bloom—arguably the first to use the term cli-fi for climate fiction and film—asserts, “I believe that cli fi novels and movies can serve to wake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse that awaits humankind if we do nothing to stop it” (Vemuri). 

Bloom’s claims echo those of Rahman Badalov, who in 1997 declared, “Blazing oil gushers make marvelous cinematographic material…. Only cinema can capture the thick oil bursting forth like a fiery monster.” But Badalov not only views these oil gushers as monstrous nature. He also notes the dual message of monstrous nature cinema: to both condemn environmental degradation and entertain with spectacle. Bloom’s admission that “the impact of cli fi novels and films has been minor, very minor” may point to the same dual role of cli-fi cinema. 

For Badalov and Bloom, cinema has the potential to bring environmental issues such as climate change to the forefront. But the cinematic mechanism also has the potential to obscure that message with spectacular beauty. In Mother!, the treatment of women, of Mother, obscures any cli-fi message with disgust.