Sundance Shorts

Short films offer artists a way around limited budgets, limited casts, limited equipment, and limited access. It's one of my favorite genres, and we always schedule a couple of blocks of shorts to see what's germinating in the fertile ground of future great filmmakers.

To be honest, it really comes down to my attention span -- visible only through an electron microscope, and comparable to the lifespan of the male of the mite Acarophenax tribolii. This thing "develops inside the body of its mother, fertilises its female siblings, and then dies before it is even born, all within the space of a couple of hours." Actually, that's too long in real time; but I'm pretty sure my focus on anything is generally over before it begins. Short films appeal to me in particular because I'm never more than 14 minutes away from seeing something else.

Where was I?

Shorts. Shorts can be comedic, tragic, evocative, shocking, endearing, way cool, way off base, intensely personal, or an effort to lobby for more funding for expansion into a feature.

They are like those beer samplers stacked in the aisles at your local grocer and gift shoppes around the holidays. You get an ale, a lager, a port, a double-bock, a stout, an IPA, and another three kinds of brew whose recipe was scribbled on the back of a TGIFriday receipt when the brewmaster wondered if jalapeno poppers and pizza bites could be brewed into bottle form. Some are good, others are merely noble efforts. Over 5600 short films were submitted for competition -- less than 50 made the cut for inclusion, so they all have something worth noting.

I walked out of first block of shorts firm in my belief that it was biggest pile of steaming crap left behind since the circus left town.

Dude, when I think about one of the shorts, from Iceland, even now my hands are shaking a little -- I have never been so enraged by something so raw and painful and wrong. When the directors go down front for Q&A afterwards, many of the questions are about budgets, lens choice, shooting schedule and production development. I wanted to ask, "Yeah, WHAT IN THE FUGGING HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?!?!?" I still want to punch him in the face.

Huh... Two days later... I still want to punch him. He created a story that was so brutal and painful, that I feel rage days later. I may have to concede that kind of impact is a form of artistic success.

And then, there was the one about the giant pencil with the creepy face. And the one they made for just the $50 in digital tapes they used. And the one by a famous music video director that bounced around time and viewpoint to let you come to an conclusion about what happened in a drug shootout. And the one that was technically porn, but in a good way, with a Buzzcocks soundtrack. The variety is wonderful, the results vary, and the passion for film is inherent in each.

As with the beer sampler, I generally discover a couple that I wish there were more of, a few worth recommending, and at least one that is like that beer with the upside-down chicken on the label that tastes like Pine Sol, coffee grounds, and the floor of my fraternity house basement.

(Try the Almost-Porn Ale.)