Neer Musa Shelter On How Social Media Has Shifted How We Consume News and Our Personal Biases for ‘Perspectives’

Do you receive most of your news from social media? If a random event started unfolding in front of you, would your first instinct be to take out your phone and film it to post it online? Neer Musa Shelter’s riveting Perspectives confronts how we consume media and conflict before our very eyes. All the more impressive? Shelter is able to direct a dramatization of his own experience.

A young couple are being affectionate on a public bus when they catch the eye of a new passenger sitting towards the front of the bus. The man’s stare makes them uneasy, and we begin to wonder if he doesn’t like seeing two young women acting lovey dovey in public. One of the young women, a soldier, then begins to assume that the man is wearing something under his coat. Are the passengers in danger? Or is she overreacting?

Shelter explains how he wanted to knock us off-kilter by jumping around to different kinds of screens. It also reinforces the different types of point of view sitting on that bus as the passengers get warier and warier. We bring preconceived notions of different kinds of people into the film, but Shelter challenges us in such a unique way that we may feel ashamed of carrying those feelings around with us.

Clocking in under nine minutes, Perspectives is one of the shorter films in this year’s Live Action Short Film hunt. But you aren’t likely to forget it any time soon.