Roxy Screening 21st Feb

Dark Orchard

Director Grant Orchard returns to the Roxy Bar and Screen with his acclaimed short, “Welcome to Glaringly”, and an new addition to his “Love Sport” series. The look of Orchard’s work is easy to identify as it often looks like an early video game, but the two shorts at tonight’s screening show the range of permutations Orchard can pursue.”Welcome to Glaringly” recalls how we first met Mario and Luigi back in the mid-eighties; the portend torso, stubby legs and dot nose. But Orchard demonstrates how communicable those blocky bodies really are. The characters in the volatile little town of Glaringly easily express a range of emotions, as a festering problem takes root in the community. Meanwhile, the film teases out the town’s subtle beauty with colourful sparrows or lively streetscapes against the black void of a computer generated world.The latest addition to “Love Sport” is a blip on High Diving. The human figure is entirely obviated, replaced with a coloured dot that performs the sport in question with a distinct lack of grace. Orchard shows off his own dark brand of humour as the human dots tend to injure themselves often, the only hint of such being a swelling pool of red underneath them.