UniFest Winner Review | Love & Bootstraps

REVIEW | ISSUE NINE | WHAKAKATA / HUMOUR

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist

The first UniFest short film competition resembles the kind of combination between creative outlet and filmmaking practice which I would have adored during my studies. It’s reassuring to see a body of undergrads wishing for the same, taking that into their own hands – run by the students, for the students. Each entry was held down by only two creative constraints: the theme of Nostalgia, and including the line ‘I knew you’d be back’. Love & Bootstraps, this year’s winning film, is a time-travel picture.

The short opens on a pedestrian bothered by two different travellers, frazzled in a hurry, one after the other. ‘What year is it?’, they both ask before zipping past like Marty McFlies. As it turns out, both runners mischievously stage meet-cutes between pedestrians in the city, and a glance at the fading family photographs they carry around shows that their chosen guinea pigs are actually their own future parents. By intervening in the present, each traveller will settle or disturb the timeline accordingly, guaranteeing either of their existences remains. You can only meddle with young love for so long, however, let alone when there are multiple guys wrestling over the same gal who have time travel apps on their phones. Bootstraps pulls a funny couple of punchlines in the final minutes, one being the answer to the question of which time traveller wins their place in the canon (spoiler: it’s not a pretty outcome for either), and the other introducing a brand new character, thus recalling the old ‘80s adage: that everybody wants to rule the world.

Bootstraps was filmed in a few familiar city-campus locations: Auckland City library, the back of the Metro Building next to Aotea Square, and the underpass next to UoA’s Engineering Leech. Recognising these public access corners of Tāmaki Makaurau is an amusing part of Bootstraps – it’s lovely to see students paying homage to the hangouts they know well, each of the witnessing bystanders potentially participants in their own canon event creation schemes. (I can only imagine that if there was a sequel, the denouement would take place at Shadows.) And at a competition which sees an overlap between the student bodies at both neighbouring universities, it’s honestly fitting that the top spot goes to a film sprawled across campus, with challengers intruding on each other’s timelines.