Citadel

Well this is 2021 in a nutshell. Nothing more than a series of locked shots from various windows in London accompanying soundbites of speeches from Boris Johnson. If that sounds like a hard sell, well... it is. It's pretty obvious that like me, filmmaker John Smith isn't a Boris fan. Even at just 16 minutes, this drags a bit though. For a large section the only change in the frame is the time of day, the weather, the odd flock of birds. Mercifully there is a little variation half way through when we get a nighttime tour through some neighbouring windows. It's very voyeuristic and doesn't really appear to have much purpose. Boris isn't ever present, there are sequences of foley sound, planes, helicopters, motorbikes, dogs barking, wind and construction noises. Boris is the backbone though and although the edit of his various covid focused speeches is okay, I found myself crying out for something more substantial. The Skewer do this sort of sound design amazingly and show this up to be a bit lacking. It does get better as we reach the end, becoming a little more playful with the edit, but on the whole I'm not sure this is all that successful.

The confinements have turned us into voyeurs, witnesses of other lives framed between windows. This contrast between the home and the horizon of buildings that sustain economic power emerges as an element of confluence in this short film. The image sometimes dissipates, that financial support is darkened. The fog looks like a symbol of Brexit, the promise of an unreal reality.

The city appears empty, almost inert. There is an invasion of birds that seem almost surprised and proud at the absence of human beings. The city is filled with a sound that connects it with nature. But the shadow of the economic crisis is present at all times. Not only because of the epidemic, but above all because of the terrible management of governments, here represented in the changing, contradictory words of Boris Johnson. In the invitation to return to work, in the representation of a ruler shaking hands in hospitals and later asking citizens to stay at home.

And finally, a terrifying reality remains: more people have died due to the management of the pandemic by governments than due to the dietary consequences of the coronavirus.