‘Is There Anyone Out There?’: Dublin Assessment | Opinions
Dirs. Trinity College Dublin students. Irish Republic. 2021. 72 min.
Quality in the traditional sense doesn’t necessarily have to be the point when it comes to the new forms of cinema brought about by Covid-19. When the story of the Lockdown era film is written, perhaps a subgenre closer to oral history than standard documentary will get the most attention. What counts is less artistic excellence than openness, empathy and quick reactions – and often courage and ingenuity under limited conditions. Whichever criteria were used, the Dublin-premiered Portmanteau documentary Is There Out Anybody Out There? – with the subtitle ‘Young Voices From Inside a Pandemic’ and created by an international group of around 60 students from Trinity College Dublin – will at least stand as an honorable, adventurous and engaging contribution to this form of crisis cinema.
Energetic and very committed work
The specific backstory of the film is the closing of Trinity College as a lockdown in March 2020, during which students will be asked to vacate their accommodation. Some managed to return to their homeland, all over the world (14 different countries are represented here); some students rejoined their families, others got together with friends, but many spent the lockdown in complete or partial isolation. It’s no surprise to see lots of bedroom interiors here.
We also see many familiar forms of communication, almost every platform you are likely to see on a laptop or phone screen today – Skype, WhatsApp, TikTok and, inevitably, Zoom. Many of these, along with images from television news and various Internet sources, are cleverly put together in the energetic mosaic sequence that begins the film, interrupted by the starting chord of a MacBook. This also introduces a connecting device that runs continuously: close-ups of a young man in his room anxiously scanning despatches from his peers around the world.
Some contributors seem to have it relatively easy in 2020: some sit contentedly in family houses or with pets, or find comfort in groups in the countryside. Others have a harder time: A woman talks about her infection experience, while a young man from Puerto Rico discovers that he is the only one still living in his hallway. Some of the contributors keep in touch, even though they are scattered around the world: a group of Chinese students exchanging messages from their respective locations in Dublin, London, New York, Italy and China.
There are optimistic perspectives, one woman expressing hope that the experience of lockdown could actually be beneficial to the world – “we can change for the better” – while the brother of a student with an autism spectrum disorder , happily admits that for him, homeschooling is “living the dream”. Darker tones are being struck by a report on the state of affairs in San Francisco and by a group of contributors in Peru reflecting on the crisis in their country’s health care system and the dire outlook for those at the bottom of the social ladder.
While Lockdown has forced some professional filmmakers to reinvent their practice and relationship with a very collective art form, the work shown here is only sometimes formal ambition (the exceptions are clever screen-in-screen video mixes and a sequence, which applies fragmented tones to Emmanuel Macron’s virus declaration “We are at war”). But mostly we are presented with a panorama of diary-style dispatches, some of them touching denominational. However, if you want to search the film for evidence of the current thinking and feeling of a generation, you might be disappointed, because the backgrounds and concerns of the participants are so different that they obviously seem to have relatively little culturally or politically in common (It is also surprising that that the other big story of 2020, the Black Lives Matter explosion, is barely an issue).
However, this is energetic and very engaging work, elegantly put together as a whole by editor Andy Wilson – though each of the makers of these essentially self-contained pieces have turned and edited their own sections. Overall, it’s a sobering film, but as one would hope for from a young perspective, not without optimism: Even the young woman who can be seen in front of the camera during the entire conversation, having had a year as gloomy as any other seems, gives an optimistic note at the end and suggests a simple, pragmatic tip to grab a moment of happiness. And when all else fails, as someone points out, there are always rescue dog videos.
Production company: Come As You Arts Eire
International sales: MACGREGJ@tcd.ie
Producer: Justin McGregor
Editor: Andy Wilson
