The film is posted on Virgin Media Shorts and takes a look at colonialism from the point of view of a London illegal immigrant.
The film opens with a non diagetic soundtrack of upbeat Mexican music signifying a different ethnicity. The sound bridge of the man taking allows us to hear his foreign accent as he talks about his life and the difficulties he is faced with.
A range of camera angles and shots are used- over the shoulder shots, point of view shots, jump cuts etc, to make the film more interesting to watch. Again, this is obviously a very low budget film yet acts almost as a video diary to capture the struggles immigrant are faced with.
It follows the typical documentary style film as it has captions of different buildings and at the end through a few sentences, gives us an update on the immigrant focused on in the film. It's a non fiction text which adopts the conventions of a video diary to present the material. This is a very moving and powerful story and is a good way to draw attention around the issue.
The narrative voice is of the immigrant speaking to us, and the USP (appeal) is the story he retells to us and its controversial quality. I suppose the genre of the film is a drama as it dramatises a real life issue to make it more appealing and interesting. The representation is of ethnicity and the unfairness around different cultures. I would say the film is targeted to illegal immigrants, but also people who are interested in the subject.
It is not the best of short films as it is very basic and simple. The choices about the editing, pace and narrative structure and very deliberate and are crafted accordingly. There are a number of interesting edits- over the shoulder shots, pans, tracks and extreme close ups- which help to highlight the narrators feeling of segregation and abandonment. The pace is more or less the same the whole way through, there are no particular long of short edits which are noticable.
5/10
I think the genre is video diary as you identified. It's a non fiction text which adopts the conventions of a video diary to present the material. It's an interesting example - for me, despite my sympathy for the narrator and his situation, it never quite catches fire as a media text. I think this is a lot to do with the way it's crafted - choices about editing/ pace/ narrative structure etc. Worth deconstructing a bit more closely with this in mind. Examples you don't want to emulate can be just as useful for critique!
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