Farhad Tohidi(Screenwriter)//

When we speak of motion picture, we must know that it has one universal language, just like music. If you show a picture to someone in another country, they understand it. Language is an agreement, but picture manifests the relation between sense and reference—the symbol which refers to what it originates from. Anybody understands it. So picture is like melody in this sense. ″Where everyone stops talking, music starts playing.″ Cinema also has a universal language since the movie maker makes use of symbols that are understandable to anyone to communicate with the audience. A movie is reproduced and understood as many times as the number of audiences. It shows the potential of the movie.

It′s a fact that art is not produced via setting rules and regulations. We can set the rule that this festival accepts 100 second movies, but it means we have confined the artist to a preset framework of time. Isn′t it better to just speak of short films? What if there is an application for a great 110 second movie?

It is just like you call for a festival of movies about vaulting. Then you say we mean cement vaulting. Then again we narrow the subject. What would happen to the filmmakers′ creativity? More innovation occurs inrcase the artist is free.

Now the question is what the structure of 100 second films is. Does it have a message?

Certainly, any structure has its own message. Even art for the sake of art has a message. Since our goal carries meaning, what an artist thinks about is meaningful. But a mistake is that the director make a very personal movie. We had a professor called ″Kioomars Monshizadeh″ who once said a poet who writes personal poems is like someone who posts a mail to his own address.

A short filmmaker shares his experiences and the audience enjoys it, whether or not he has already had the same experience. It is not acceptable that a film is only understandable and enjoyable to the director. Someone who watches a movie must discover the meaning. 

A filmmaker with motivation and knowledge, has a view. We cannot ask him to do the job in a specific manner. Many factors helped him have a view.

Making a short film is a more demanding job compared to feature movies. In a feature film we have enough time to communicate a meaning from among lots of events. But in a short film, especially with one hundred second limitation, we have to make use of symbols so the audience would use the keys they have to come to the same experience with the artist.

Short films have the beginning, middle and end, just like a feature movie. The end would be closed or open. The artist has to preset a subject and develop it and come to a conclusion. But the important thing is that in short movies, the meaning has to be concise, like teasers, in order to be communicated fast. It can be educational, for example about AIDS and what kind of care the patient requires. Anyway, it must draw the audience′s attention to something.

The filmmakers tell the story and in the end, they have to convey the meaning to the audience. Selection of picture is a significant task since abstract images are fast to communicate. So the rules are the same in both short and feature films. The form and content is important in short films so they would convey the meaning more effectively.