Small File Media Festival : Creativity in compact form
On December 17th, the Department of English and Humanities(ENH), Brac University, organized the Small File Media Festival Bangladesh. The chief guest at the event was Dr. Suzan Vize, Head of Office and UNESCO Representative to Bangladesh. Special guests were activist Sohanur Rahman and media scholar Oliur Rahman Sun. Senior lecturer of the department, Mohammad Zaki Rezwan, commenced by introducing the motivation behind the initiative. He talked about e-waste and the vast usage of natural resources to produce large-scale media. With small file films, participants focus on telling meaningful stories with drastically reduced sizes. Dr. Laura Marks, the founder of the small file media festival, was virtually present with her speech. She congratulated the participants for their hard work. Special guest Sohanur Rahman shared the devastations he faced growing up in a coastal area of Bangladesh and stated, “The planet can afford our necessities, but it can’t afford our greed.”
The first screened film was The Veil of Corrosion by Md. Tahzid Ahsan portrays the duality of man and how evil slowly consumes good, just as materials like polythene kill nature. The second film, Wondering Wandering, by Mahamudul Hasan Akhand, shows how urbanization drains our minds and destroys all emotions. Nakshatra Roy’s Elysium followed a beautiful take on the resuscitation of nature through a girl’s simple act of embedding a new plant. There were several other films too. They all had distorted audio, pixelated footage, and startling endings, leaving the audience pondering, hence a colossal creative impact with minimal carbon footprints.
In her concluding speech, chief guest Dr. Suzan Vize radiates enthusiasm, encouraging the students to raise their voices to bring about positive changes and work together to achieve sustainable development goals. The festival ended with the certificate-giving ceremony and closing remarks by the Chairperson of ENH, Professor Firdous Azim. The audience left with newly curated thoughts and a yearning for a new form of filmmaking that would be more environmentally friendly.
