Film Festivals

BEFORE LONG – documentary program

Time waits for no one in these short documentaries. From serious to “show biz”; they run the gamut of emotion. An elderly man struggling to cope with his wife’s dementia becomes captivated by a young actress at Dracula’s, the theater restaurant in Ghost Train. Greg O’Brien, long-time Cape Cod reporter and newspaperman, who is diagnosed with Early-onset Alzheimer’s, decides to confront the disease and his imminent decline by writing candidly about the journey in A Place Called Pluto. When their football dreams are dashed, three athletes use their muscle and charm to become TV stars on American Gladiators, one of the oddest, most injury-riddled ‘sports’ shows ever concocted in True Gladiators. Traveling on the road with one of the most controversial musicians today, AMANDA  F***ING PALMER ON THE ROCKS explores her fractious relationship with the music industry in the aftermath of her record-breaking crowd funding campaign and her intense online and physical interactions with her fans. Three pink tutus, three pink helmets and three pink skateboards—meet Bella, Sierra, and Rella, as the young girls prove skateboarding is not just for boys inThe Pink Helmet Posse. Meet seven Hollywood golden era veterans with a combined age of 662—from a Vaudeville comedian still working at age 100 to the stunning siren that dated Ronald Reagan when he was a Democrat—these, ladies and gentlemen, are Showfolk.

CITY LIMITS – documentary program

This year our New York Shorts program “gets real” with four world premiere documentaries relatable to anyone who calls this city home. My Depression: The Up and Down and Up of It is an animated adaptation of the award winning Book, “My Depression, A Picture Book” with the voices of Sigourney Weaver, Steve Buscemi, and Fred Armisen. 70 Hester Street is about the former synagogue/whiskey still/raincoat factory the filmmaker grew up in on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and how he wants to remember it. Told almost entirely through voice mail messages, One Year Lease documents the travails of Brian, Thomas and Casper as they endure a year-long apartment lease with Rita, the cat-loving landlady. Set against the backdrop of the Arab-Israeli conflict and tensions between Jewish and Muslim college students, Of Many tells the story of the relationship between an Orthodox Rabbi and Imam.

DIGITAL DILEMMA – experimental program

As the commercial movie industry is rapidly shifting on a global basis to digital distribution and exhibition, moving image artists continue to celebrate the material qualities of the film medium, whose physical characteristics consist of reels of celluloid film, sprocket holes, optical sound tracks, mechanical splices, and the film emulsion, onto which they record images and sounds. At the same time, these artists continue to raise poignant critiques about the immateriality of the digital projection formats.

FLIGHT DELAYS – narrative program

Things don’t always go as planned for the characters in this group of narrative short films. Often thwarted but always resilient, these characters reflect dreams, desires, and the need to escape. In The Boy Scout, a couple trapped in their car for days after an unexpected snowstorm strands them on a remote mountain road confronts a life-or-death choice—with another storm approaching – should they stay together, or go their separate ways? A talented prison chef is paroled to a world that does not want him in Pour Retourner. La Carnada follows 13 year old Manny from Tijuana as he embarks on his first drug smuggle across the “Devil’s Highway,” a notoriously fatal stretch of desert on the Arizona/Mexico border. The Kiosk has been Olga’s little home for years, but her sweet tooth and monotonous life has made her larger than the exit, so to distract herself, she reads travel magazines and dreams of faraway places. InSweepstakes, when her husband suffers a neurological complication, a new mother is left to face the life she could have had. Sker is the true story of a kayaker, sailing through the fjords of Iceland, who stumbles across a skerry, but soon realizes perhaps porting there wasn’t such a good idea. Young Alfred is dying, but through the stories about a magical fantasy world told by the hospital’s eccentric janitor, Enzo, he regains the joy and happiness of his life and finds a safe haven in Helium.

HANDLE WITH CARE – narrative program

The delicate situations in these short films require steady hands and minds; the smallest slip can have serious repercussions. Connections and consequences are the key. Eoin works the night shift in a quiet petrol station and his main source of distraction, night after night, is regular customer, Ger, who believes he has a system for picking the winning card in Scratch. In App, a shy engineer desperately needs venture capital for his virtual wing-woman app, but can he and his app seduce a heartbroken girl at a swanky L.A. bar to prove it works? Contrapelo is the story of a proud Mexican barber who is forced to shave the leader of a drug cartel. Set on Election Day 2008 against the sweeping landscape of rural America, For Spacious Sky is the story of three lost brothers finding their way back to each other—one from incarceration, one from addiction, and one from discrimination. Heather is a shy lady who works at a helpline call center and when she receives a phone call from a mysterious man, she has no idea the encounter will change her life forever in The Phone Call.

MORAL FIBERS – narrative program

Decisions confront the characters in these narrative shorts. This plethora of predicaments deals with work, family, and friends, though not necessarily in that order. Love in the Time of March Madness tells the animated and awkward true-life misadventure of being 6’4” tall since 8th grade, becoming a basketball star, and dating shorter men. Free-spirited 21-year old Sheri has her own apartment, an older boyfriend, and works in a bar to make her living, but a surprise phone call brings her face to face with her past in Firstborn. As the class prepares for First Communion, one young girl refuses to do so, proclaiming that she’s an “atheist,” in Ruby. Today’s The Day is about an intern at one of the top dance agencies in town whose dream in life is to become a professional dancer, but he lacks the courage and confidence to fight for it…until today. Trapped in professional purgatory, four junior bankers must decide what they truly want before it’s too late in Parachute. A housewarming party spirals out of control when the host couple is sucked into a bout of light-hearted arm wrestling in Stew & Punch. A father in mourning struggles to connect with his blind daughter and learns that the colors of grief and understanding are more vivid when glimpsed through the eyes of the blind in Record.

SOUL SURVIVORS – narrative program

Life isn’t always easy, and this is exemplified by the shorts with both small and large conundrums; human interaction is life preservers in these turbulent waters. A man drags his girlfriend to the hospital for an abortion, but while sitting in a waiting room, he meets a girl who just might change his mind in Kakara. New York is silent after the loss of its Twin Towers; as loved ones are missing and people turn to prayer, one New Yorker struggles for answers inDay Ten. A woman seeks the comfort of her estranged mother tucked away in the mountainous wine country of Chile following a traumatic miscarriage in Tinto. Two bank robbers run into problems when each takes exception to the other’s mask in Sequestered. A man sets his alarm clock and goes to bed, but during the night, the world keeps turning in the animated, Cycloid. After her father’s death, awkward 11-year-old Nesma is at odds with the world around her since she began caring for her father’s pigeons, but now she faces an even bigger challenge in Nesma’s Birds. Set against the backdrop of 1950 Naples, Italy, Human Voice tells the story of Angela, a woman in the twilight of her years, as she rides an emotional roller coaster in her last telephone conversation with the man she loves.

TOTALLY TWISTED – narrative program

Fun. Creepy. Weird. That pretty much sums up the feel of this program designed especially for our late-night loving audience. This program is a real killer, literally. The 30 Year Old Bris is about an interfaith couple where the girlfriend demands her boyfriend complete his conversion to Judaism by getting a circumcision before they wed. Trust Me, I’m A Lifeguard is a bro-mantic comedy about two lifeguards who, when confronted with the end of summer, are forced to make adult decisions such as: What’s the meaning of life, what makes a good Speedo and are those clams safe to eat? Unable to deal with the pressures of an examined life, Todd and Tamara confront the Peepers who are watching them, and expose what they’ve been hiding all along—themselves. In Remora, on the day of his wedding, Kevin confronts his brother, Landon, to ask for permission to marry his ex-wife, but learns the circumstances surrounding the estrangement were far more fantastic than he had been led to believe. A professional killer discovers he can get away with anything on Halloween night, including dragging his latest victim around as a prop amidst a sea of oblivious London partiers in The Body. In One Please, a young girl’s Mommy and Daddy love her…very, very much. A man wakes up one morning to realize the entire world has dreamed about him the night before in Sequence.

The short film, Incident Urbain, will be screening before Karpotrotter in the Viewpoints Section. On the esplanade in Paris, two enigmatic characters engage in an extended discourse about architecture, cinema, and revolutionary politics.

•          Incident Urbain, directed and written by John Lalor. (France, Ireland) – North American Premiere.

2104 Awards for the Shorts program

Awards in the Shorts program are given out for Best Narrative Short; Best Documentary Short; and the Student Visionary Award; all films are eligible. 

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