short film
*Editorial Note: This documentary short won the Best Documentary prize at the first Drunken Film Fest, organised by Film Inquiry’s Jax Griffin. The documentary selections were hand picked by Arlin Golden, another contributor to the site* Every American community is home to countless strange pastimes and traditions, but many of these events don’t fully adapt to modern American life.
After School, directed by Alec Tibaldi and written by Tibaldi and co-writer Anne Berkowitz, is a film where the deserved praise goes to the technical crew over the story-line and talent. The film stars Piper De Palma and Ruby Modine as sisters Addie and Xandra in this short drama. Instead of a dramatic story, the film feels like a story about dramatic people.
That’s Opportunity Knocking is a short comedy that starts off strong, panders down and then picks back up, written and directed by Charles Pelletier. Starring Satchel André and Moronai Kanekoa, the film recently won “Best Comedy Short” at LAIFFA. Pelletier clearly has a lot to say and harbors strong feelings about the 99% vs the 1%, which is how he opens his film and also is a theme that carries throughout.
We are often faced with circumstances that challenge us in ways we feel unprepared to face. Sometimes, these challenges come in the form of an option: to accept or deny, to speak or to be silent, to stay or to go.
To accompany Pixar’s latest underwater road movie, Finding Dory, we have a similarly ocean-themed short. Pixar’s Piper started as the brainchild of director Alan Barillaro, and tells the story of a young, diminutive sandpiper learning to gather its own food for the first time. Barillaro worked as a supervising animator on several past Pixar features.
I first saw My Brief Eternity at the Wales International Documentary Festival, and such was its impact on me that after meeting the director Clare Sturges, and after writing up the festival itself, I resolved to review it so that others would come to know of it. The short documentary is a joint project between Maggie’s and Brightest Films, the former being a cancer charity, the latter Sturges’ production company. The film is about the Welsh artist; Osi Rhys Osmond.
While many recent horror films have been heavily influenced by the works of prominent directors of the 1980s like David Lynch, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg (very good ones like The Guest and It Follows), this one addresses subject matter not even those films were willing to tackle. Richard Powell’s Heir is the next great homage to those great directors, and can proudly be a part of the recent resurgence in thoughtful horror films designed more to represent real world conflicts as opposed to cheap scares. The plot is simple at first:
The story of Freckles, written and directed by Denise Papas Meechan, opens with Lizzie introducing herself by voicing her strong hatred she has for the “ugly orange dots” that she refers to as her “star map to loneliness”. This is a story of a woman who has a disturbingly distorted view of herself. Despite her mother telling her that the freckles are “kisses from God”, Lizzie sees them as a curse.
Modern creatives have taken many liberties with the subject of vampire/werewolf lore. Films such as Blade and the Underworld series’ brought slick, Hong Kong-style hyper-violence wrapped in a trench coat, whereas Twilight added teenage brooding and sickly bubble gum romance, which many purists would rather see vanish into a sparkly haze. Emma Darks’ latest short Seize The Night fits categorically into the first grouping.
With technology rapidly advancing as the solution to even the most basic human tasks, director Ariel Martin’s sci-fi short The iMom takes “what if” to a chillingly stark place. Modern Parenting Set in a not-too-distant future, robotics has evolved to the point of public consumption. Realistic in both appearance and reaction, the affordable iMom (Matilda Brown) is the latest innovation in aiding new parents with the daunting task of child rearing.
Long maligned no matter the medium, the short film is often seen merely as a launching pad for bigger and better things. However, for documentarians, the short is almost the primary form, as it takes a lot of time, funding and quality footage to come up with a feature-length documentary worthy of release. Thus, for documentary, the short is the rule rather than the exception, and the field is stacked with quality, potent films, more or less unhampered by typical commercial expectations.
Watch Our Lad here. Our Lad, brought lovingly to life by director Rachna Suri, is a compelling insight into a British Muslim community and the conflict between two brothers. The short film stars Shazad Latif (The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) as a young Muslim soldier returning from Afghanistan to an antagonistic brother and community.
Fingers, the Indiegogo-funded short film from writer/director Alex Marx and producer Savannah James-Bayly, is a slick and stylish crime drama that blends Biblical themes with 1960s London glam. From the filmmakers’ own mouths: Fingers is a short crime drama based on the Biblical story of Salome and the martyrship of John the Baptist, reimagined in the murky underworld of a 1960s nightclub in London’s East End.
In this darkly comic short film, director Jackson Mullane explores the age-old question of ‘would you live your life differently if you knew you had two weeks to live?’ Red Nuts features Kevin MacIsaac as Sam, a thirty-something ginger-headed nobody watching helplessly from a rut in his life as his marriage falls apart. But when he is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he embarks on a night of debauchery and anarchy, sticking his middle finger up at the rules and living his life to the full.
Written and directed by Simeon Duncombe and starring Jack Fagan, Trick Meter is an action packed four-minute adventure into another (quite nightmarish) dimension. It tells the story of a young skateboarding enthusiast who quickly finds himself in a deadly game of survival. With only three minutes on the clock, does he have the skills to make it back to reality?