Witness falls somewhere between a shorts program and an anthology film. Commissioned for Calgary’s 20th annual $100 Film Festival and curated by the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers, it’s a collection of six short films by six different directors. Although all six films are independent of one another, they revolve around one central theme: the celebration of celluloid.

All the films in the $100 Film Festival are shot on film, a medium that’s fallen out of vogue as the movie industry at large shifts to digital photography. The movies on display in Witness demonstrate why the often-uttered sentiment that film is dead is a mistake.

The collection’s strong opening film, Eva Colmers’ Autumn, can be read as a direct commentary on this. An old editor sits at a Steenbeck and sifts through aged bits of film. The contents of the footage itself are sweetly innocuous when taken at face value. But the piece illustrates the way film’s texture and blemishes cement images in time in a way digital can’t.

In Joshua Whitford’s strong The Balance, there’s a moment where two characters, who look like they could be from different centuries, sit across from each other at a table. The natural gravitas of celluloid makes this surreal image seem possible, and I wonder if it could be accomplished digitally without looking like a game of dress-up.

Like all anthologies, some pieces are stronger than others. Some of Witness’s weakest pieces are, sadly, also some of the longest. The Sentimentalist is an exercise in form and editing masquerading as a riff on film noir, but its writing and acting aren’t good enough to make it as interesting thematically or narratively as it is visually. Semper Porro is Brakhage-esque, a style of experimentation I’ve never responded to personally. But here’s what matters: none of Witness could ever be pulled off without celluloid. Film’s not dead unless we make it dead.

Published in Volume 68, Number 28 of The Uniter (July 2, 2014)