Review | Cuckoo!: Quirkily Quaint

In this year's edition of the SHIFT Film Festival, the Youth Jury got the opportunity to receive a free-of-charge coaching by the film critic Bjorn Gabriels who taught the basics of film analysis and how to write a good film review. After having attended the digital Short Film Competition screening the Youth Jury jointly decided the winner of the Youth Jury Award: Jörgen Scholtens' Cuckoo! Youth Jury member Daniel Feldman reviews the film.

A friend of mine is a musician. He once told me that the secret to crafting unique music is to find something completely simple and something unique; something simple, but something that nobody has ever done before. It is a notion which I have taken to heart and I feel that it can be applied to all arts. It is also a notion which has been, perhaps completely unwittingly, embodied by Jörgen Scholtens in his short film Cuckoo!. That is, the film is beautifully creative simplicity and the result is something which I found utterly charming.

The film concerns the life of a man who lives inside of a cuckoo clock, and the film effortlessly flows from this concept. Cuckoo! has strong humour and hard pathos, clearly defined characters inside of a tight narrative, concluding under a brief 7 minutes. In this, the script wastes no time at all, always cutting straight to the point, but not in a rush, as the film strolls through its narrative in a naturalistic way. The result is that the viewer really feels as if they are simply watching the life and activities of the man who lives inside of a cuckoo clock.

Ultimately, I feel there really aren't a lot of films like Cuckoo!, and at under 7 minutes in length, I feel that Jörgen Scholtens' pithy fable should be watched by all.

(c) All visual material is used with the filmmaker's permission.