by Dov Kornits
The director’s latest short film, The Suit, will premiere at the opening night of Flickerfest, competing for the Academy® qualifying Best Australian Short Film award.
“I’ve been making films for quite some time and in the last few years, it feels like momentum has picked up and that there’s a pathway,” says emerging director Jesse Vogelaar, who makes his 9th [if IMDB is anything to go by] short film with The Suit. “We have received development funding from Screen Australia for an online series [Chinwag at Camp Collapso] and also being able to work as a commercials director and still have my voice in the comedic elements that carry over from my films, which all complement each other.”
Vogelaar has a particularly significant relationship with Flickerfest, with the aforementioned web series an expansion of a short film that previously played there, but more significantly, the filmmaker won the first ever Specsavers TVC competition hosted by the festival.
“Flickerfest launched me into commercials,” says the New Zealand born filmmaker, who is now represented by Supernormal when it comes to commercials work in New Zealand and Europe.
The Suit is an assured and unique film that is mostly set in one room, as a family interrogates an enigmatic person wearing an Evel Knievel style outfit. We nervously suggest to Vogelaar that it reminded us of ludicrous comedy Stepbrothers if it was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
“I don’t mind that description because I feel like my style is somewhere in between really silly comedy, but more arthouse in approach,” Vogelaar answers surprisingly. “I’d often look at something as silly as Stepbrothers or Napoleon Dynamite. But then there’s a European sensibility that overlaps.
“When I read the script, my instinct was to just treat it completely seriously, because there was already so much that was so absurd, so that the more gravity it had, the more it paid off in the end.”
The screenplay is by Scott Limbrick, who also acts in the film. “He sent it to me five years ago and I really liked it.
“We met through the improv community here in Melbourne, at The Improv Conspiracy, which was a bit of a hotbed from a very particular moment in time, similar to UCB and Second City in North America.
“I got into that because I liked the idea of generating ideas collaboratively and thought it could help. And also, just pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. It ended up being a lot more than that and this film wouldn’t have been made if that didn’t happen.”
Shot over two days, the fact that it was mostly made in one location excited Vogelaar. “I’ve previously done shorts that are very scattered, lots of different scenes, different ideas, but this was very distilled and it’s all continuous. It’s all in real time. It’s one 10 minute long scene where you have five different actors that all enter at different points, and you have to introduce every single one of them. And the whole structure of the script is done in such an interesting way where exposition is just drip fed like a leaky tap. You find out one thing and it makes even less sense or raises more questions. And hopefully it makes people even more intrigued as the film goes along.
“When we were structuring the shot list, we wanted it to always be moving, wanted it to have forward momentum. The coverage never stayed the same for more than a minute or two. It’s always evolving. As the film progresses, the camera starts behaving differently, and as the audience might become more confused, the camera also might be more confused, doing double takes or panning around and struggling to keep up with what’s going on. It was really important for us to try and create that movement, so that it didn’t just feel static.”
The Suit screens at the Flickerfest opening night on 23 January and on 25 January in the Best of Australian Shorts 4 program
