This week’s Short Film Friday will not, again, be a short film but instead a promotion video for the local film actor Paul Eenhoorn. Why am I doing such a thing? Because SIFF is what’s really happening right now. And what does Eenhoorn have to do with SIFF? He is the star of Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner, a film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013 and won the Audience Award for Best of NEXT. The star will make an appearance today, May 31, at SIFF’s screening of Bonner.

I will screen a real short film next week.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...