My recent trip to Bermuda for their annual Film Festival may well have been my last (the family I have there might be moving off the island later this year). So now is as good a time as any to profile the mobile landscape on “The Rock”…

On my last stay in Bermuda I narrowly escaped the advancing hoardes of 3G iPhones. This time I wasn’t so lucky — Apple’s locked down JesusPhone arrived with complementary 3G service on Tuesday, March 26th.

The lucky exclusive carrier is M3 Wireless, appearing as “MOBILITY” on my handset. It works out nicely for me, as for some reason I can’t get a data connection at all using the island’s other GSM network, Digicel Bermuda (formerly AT&T).

And just like my experience in Tokyo last summer, the only iPhone I actually saw in the wild was in the window of a local shop. As Bermuda is populated largely by expat financial mucky mucks on work visas, BlackBerries are everywhere — though I did spy a native Bermudian with a Moto Ming a few years back.

Since Fido, my carrier here in Canada, charges 5¢/kB for international data I couldn’t really test the speed of Bermuda’s 3G network. Fortunately the diner down the road from my brother and sister in law’s place has free and ample WiFi, along with excellent banana pancakes.

Such a bold statement is tantamount to heresy from this Film School Graduate, but hear me out…

I remember hearing or reading somewhere that if you want to make a feature, why waste time and resources on a short film that could be better spent on your ultimate goal?

Indeed, of the eight films that made up this year’s Bermuda Shorts Program two were actually good (with Rúnar Rúnarsson’s 2 Birds by far the best), one wanted desperately to be an action film (and failed miserably) and the rest were built upon a single revelation so arbitrary that it would make M. Night Shyamalan wince.

It also didn’t help that these films were pitted against each other in the same screening, encouraging the audience to pick favourites and boo the rest. And for the first time since I started attending the festival, there weren’t any local entries.

Could the 15-20 minute short film be a dying art form?

From The Bermuda Film Festival website:

In September 2000, 191 governments committed to halve world poverty by 2015 and set eight goals to achieve this: the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). At the halfway point, eight directors were invited to share their vision of these major issues, each by way of a short film.

And here’s how effective those 8 short films were: As soon as the houselights came up I came straight home and signed up for an account at Kiva.org

I was more than a bit disheartened by the surprising number of Bermudians who left before the screening was over — most left after the particularly devastating profile of a dying AIDS victim. Their loss, clearly, as the hauntingly beautiful (and equally sad) The Story of Panshin Beka followed directly afterward.

The last short in the collection, by Wim Wenders, was contrived to the point of being silly — yet this was the very piece that introduced the audience to the idea of microfinance. And it’s kind of hard not to heed the call of developing world entrepreneurs speaking to you directly from the big screen.

8 should be required viewing. For everyone.

Last night I saw the 12th annual Bermuda Film Festival’s first dud.

The Dutch documentarians’ naïveté is undeniably charming as they set out across America in a run-down camper van, to answer the question of why so many Americans don’t participate in the democratic process.

But by the end of the film this very premise proves faulty, because folks do get out and vote — partially because Oprah throws her considerable media influence behind then-Senator Barack Obama, but for a lot of other reasons revealed in course of the film.

And so, Dear Oprah: Non-Voting America’s Wildest Dreams ultimately proves to be as confusing as its title. And clocking in at a mere 55 minutes it’s probably more suitable as an hour-long piece of TV fluff than a big-screen doc.

Yesterday I did two back-to-back screenings at The Liberty Theatre. First up was Of Time and the City, a documentary about Liverpool by a director who hates The Beatles.

Commissioned to celebrate Liverpool’s year as Cultural Capital of Europe, the striking archival footage certainly made me want to visit this “capital of the north”, but the biting narration damning the Catholic Church was a bit lost on me.

Next up was À l’ouest de Pluton (West of Pluto) yet another fantastic Quebecois film that highlights the disparity between English and Francophone cinema in Canada.

On the plane ride down to Bermuda I chose to watch a feature called Toronto Stories, and it was awful. The dialogue written for the two child actors was particulary bad — was there no parent on the production to raise their hand and say: “Kids don’t really talk like that…”?

The makers of À l’ouest de Pluton, on the other hand, auditioned and improvised with students from their old high school rather than trained actors — and got predictably more authentic results. The portrayal of suburbia as an alien landscape was also a stroke of genius.

And the title? You’ll have to see the film to get the clever double entendre, which I highly recommend you do.

Don’t mean to be glib here — this was the inescapable theme of the first two screenings I saw at the 12th annual Bermuda Film Festival.

The first of the two, the Bahamian Rain, was clearly anticipated by fellow Caribbeans — there was a waiting list to get into the small venue where it was playing. And it didn’t disappoint.

Beautifully shot and superbly directed, Rain is an encouraging reminder that anything is possible — and it’s a lot more believable than the trite piece of pap that got the Best Picture Oscar this year.

Representing Senegal, The Absence screened at the festival’s largest venue — but at curtain more than half the seats were still empty. Shot on video, The Absence didn’t have quite the same polish as the previous film, but its look was a good fit for the raw and abrasive story.

The message here? You can’t go home. Or maybe you can, but don’t.

The Absence was bleak enough that I kind of wish I had seen it first, then Rain afterwards…

Now that I’m officially a Nokia Ambassador I’m happy to report that my trusty E61i more than proved it’s worth on my three-hour return trip home to Toronto from Bermuda yesterday.

Seated beside me on that flight was a kid on his first flight ever – and he was travelling alone! I felt bad for the brave little guy for the fact that we were on an older aircraft that didn’t have an individual entertainment centre for every single seat, so I offered up my Nokia to help him pass the time.

He spent about half an hour on S-tris alone, and after he told me that he had a modded Xbox in his knapsack as carry-on I figured he could handle the Nintendo games on my emulators from Vampent. I guessed correctly.

Towards the end of the flight I even powered up Nokia Maps for a quick geography lesson (the difference between New York City and New York State).

Will this newly-crowned international jet-setter choose an S60 device for his first mobile when the day comes? Here’s hoping…

Featuring interviews with comedians, filmmakers and fellow artists, Born Dead, Still Weird is a thoughtful portrait of a veteran cartoonist whose modern gothic perspective on society has fostered and influenced many, as well as an entertaining chronicle of an artist still at work.

Replace “thoughtful” with “mediocre” and “entertaining” with “plodding” and you’ve got my two cents on this Gahan Wilson’s biopic. It didn’t help that that the director Steven-Charles Jaffe was there for the Q&A afterwards and gave us all the impression that his time was being wasted along with ours…

Truth and Reconciliation is over. Modern South Africa is about sex and hanging out, hook-ups and ganja.

Or in other words I’ve wasted my life, and should have been a stand-up comic in Johannesburg.

At any rate Bunny Chow, which took the Toronto Film Festival by storm in 2006, also won the hearts and minds of Bermudians at its screening last night. It’s not so much “a black thing” as it is likable (or at least recognizable) characters who you can’t help rooting for. It’s a definite high point in the festival thus far.

This is a story about a love that grows where there is no more love – and about a town that tries to destroy the beauty that it cannot have for itself. Can a town be wonderful again?

Well if it can’t be then the producers of this film have no right calling it Wonderful Town then, do they?

Seriously though, the backdrop of Tsunami-ravaged Thailand is an interesting setting for this quiet seaside romance. The only thing I didn’t get is the gangsters — does every Asian film have to have gangsters in it?!