FORM
THE CALL IS THE PRODUCTION
The film is recorded as a real video meeting. No fake desktop, no cutaway camera, no cinematic rescue.
AN ORIGINAL SHORT FILM / PRODUCTION RECORD
HOW WAS
THE AUDIO?
WCFA/FILM/2026
SCREEN-RECORDED VIDEO CALL
APPROX. 30 MINUTES
SCREEN-RECORDED VIDEO CALL
APPROX. 30 MINUTES
THE FILM
A judging panel meets by video call to establish a common standard for moving pictures. The argument is procedural until one participant decides procedure is no longer enough.
PERFORMANCE
MEETING FIRST. MOVIE SECOND.
Actors behave as people trying to finish an awkward professional meeting. The frame stays ordinary while the consequences stop being ordinary.
END CONDITION
HOW WAS THE AUDIO?
The final interruption is not spectacle. It is the platform asking for feedback.
CASTING
The West Coast Film Adjudiciary is played as an institution people have chosen to take seriously.
MAIRI DALRYMPLE
Chair. Formidable, competent, weary. Converts ideology back into agenda items.
GEOFF McNAIR
Standards and competence. Certain his taste is neutral. “There needs to be a floor.”
FANNY LENNOX
Precise, composed and initially trusted. Becomes ferocious without signalling instability.
SIMON AINSLIE
Aesthetic absolutist. Clever, funny and infuriating. Suspicious of professionalism.
EILIDH
Young filmmaker. Information moves through her faster than the meeting can control it.
DOUGLAS
Older funder. Red wine. Knows people. Remains available for several irrelevant anecdotes.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
The joke is not that the WCFA is a bad film festival. The joke is how completely institutions can turn taste into procedure, then procedure into authority.
THE MEETING BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE IN IT UNTIL IT ENDS.
I do not want actors performing “Zoom acting” or signalling the form. Nobody knows they are in a formal experiment. They are in a meeting. Let interruptions, waiting, muted cameras, note-taking and bad conversational timing do the work.
The violence, when it comes, does not transform the visual language. The West Coast Film Adjudiciary keeps trying to administer what is happening because administration is the only authority it has.
PERFORMANCE RULES
The film depends on ordinary professional behaviour surviving increasingly inappropriate circumstances.
01
DO NOT PLAY THE FORMAT
Do not look for glitches, laughs or “screen life” business. Use the call as you would use a room.
02
EVERY EXCHANGE CHANGES LEVERAGE
Standards, taste, privacy, budget and authority are all weapons. Nobody is there to decorate the call.
03
NO HORROR PERFORMANCE
The frame remains administrative. The platform never learns what genre the meeting has become.