[caption id="attachment_24409" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] CERULIA by Sofia Carrillo[/caption] The 2017 Fantastic Fest announced the short film line up for the 13th edition of the festival, which runs September 21 to September 28, 2017 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, TX. This year, to celebrate the festival’s Arabic theme, veteran festival programmer Peter Kuplowsky and Fantastic Fest creative director Evrim Ersoy have added a unique sidebar to the festival’s regular short-subject programming. YALLA! ARAB GENRE SHORTS assembles four remarkable genre productions from Arab countries, each with a distinct sensibility and style that further expands the breadth of genres traditionally showcased at the festival. The 48 film lineup, culled from a record submission pool of nearly 1200 entries, spans 23 countries and features a trio of stop-motion mini-masterpieces including the North American premiere of the chilling CERULIA by Sofia Carrillo (who genre fans will be familiar with from her contributions to the anthology feature XX) and the US premiere of THE BURDEN, Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s award-winning musical. Other highlights include an acclaimed and mind-melting short about escaping a Red Lobster commercial (GREAT CHOICE), and a potent sci-fi skewering of government bureaucracy so incendiary it was banned in Turkey (THE LAST SCHNITZEL)! Speaking on the program, curator Kuplowsky commented: “With the proliferation of digital distribution channels, the audience for short films is growing exponentially and the mode of filmmaking is becoming more relevant than ever before. I’m thrilled that Fantastic Fest can be the first stop for so many of these fantastic films on their road to people’s eyeballs.” The complete lineup, divided by program, is as follows:

FANTASTIC SHORTS

ANIMAL Iran, 2017 US Premiere, 15 min Directors: Bahram & Bahman Ark A desperate man adopts the guise of a ram in a plot to penetrate a heavily guarded border crossing. THE BURDEN Sweden, 2017 US Premiere, 14 min Director: Niki Lindroth von Bahr Lonely fish, tap-dancing mice and telemarketing monkeys harmonize in their collective angst towards the apocalyptic banality of the modern age in this epic stop-motion reverie. DEAD HORSES Spain, 2016 Texas Premiere, 6 min Directors: Marc Riba & Anna Solanas A child caught in a war zone innocently grapples to understand his horrifying surroundings in this grim stop-motion parable. FUCKING BUNNIES Finland, 2017 Texas Premiere, 17 min Director: Teemu Niukkanen The comfortable routine of Raimo’s middle-class life is interrupted when a Satan-worshipping sex cult moves next door. A wickedly funny comedy of manners. JUST GO! Latvia, 2017 Texas Premiere, 11 min Director: Pavels Gumennikovs Young Just may not have legs, but that doesn’t prevent him from proverbially kicking ass in this remarkable slice of action inspired by the star’s extraordinary life story. KAIJU BUNRAKU USA, 2017 Regional Premiere, 13 min Directors: Lucas Leyva & Jillian Mayer The Japanese art of bunraku puppetry dramatizes the existential crisis of a despondent denizen of a Kaiju-infested region of Japan; a rigorous theatrical tradition soaked in profound absurdism. THE LAST SCHNITZEL Denmark, 2016 US Premiere, 22 min Directors: Ismet Kurtulus & Kaan Arici The world is ending, but the president of Turkey won’t let it until he has a chicken schnitzel. Gleefully silly science-fiction satire with political bite. LET THEM DIE LIKE LOVERS USA, 2017 World Premiere, 16 min Director: Jesse Atlas Fantastic Shorts Award Winner Jesse Atlas (RECORD/PLAY) returns to the section with an arresting sci-fi character study about a body-hopping assassin. THE NIGHT I DANCE WITH DEATH France, 2017 Regional Premiere, 6 min Director: Vincent Gibaud The consequences of saying “hell yeah, I’ll try that” at a party. A marvelously animated kaleidoscope that collides liberating euphoria with crippling anxiety.

SHORT FUSE Presented by Stage 13

CERULIA Mexico, 2017 North American Premiere, 13 min Director: Sofia Carrillo The brilliant animator behind the stop-motion segments of XX spins an eerie fable about a young woman’s repressed memories luring her back to her childhood home. CRESWICK Australia, 2016 Regional Premiere, 10 min Director: Natalie Erika James Creeping dread meticulously escalates to an understated but deeply unsettling coda as a father and daughter pack away the contents of their family home. EARWORM USA, 2016 Texas Premiere, 5 min Director: Tara Price When a few measures of music get stuck in a man’s head, the consequences are almost as disturbing as the source of the tune. GREAT CHOICE USA, 2017 Austin Premiere, 7 min Director: Robin Comisar A woman is trapped in a Red Lobster commercial. Sublime absurdity that crescendos to nightmarish heights and remarkable emotional resonance. HIGHWAY Australia, 2016 Texas Premiere, 10 min Director: Vanessa Gazy A teenage hitchhiker traverses a lonely mountain highway and begins to pick a mysterious radio broadcast rife with ominous reports of the near future. LATCHED Canada, 2017 International Premiere, 17 min Directors: Justin Harding & Rob Brunner Spilt milk is nothing to cry over but when it inadvertently awakens a voracious woodland creature, this funny and freaky short makes the case that it might be something to scream over. SETACEOUS Australia, 2017 World Premiere, 11 min Director: Tel Benjamin An incessant car alarm attracts the curiosity of a cul-de-sac’s residents with chilling consequences. A measured slice of suburban horror that implies and terrifies. STAY USA, 2017 World Premiere, 9 min Director: David Mikalson Satan sucks, but this pitch-black comedy about catching the eye of the prince of darkness is the best. THURSDAY NIGHT Portugal, 2017 US Premiere, 8 min Director: Gonçalo Almeida Hypnotic cinematography buoyed by a ghostly soundscape envelopes remarkable canine performances in this moody, experimental nightmare. TOOTH FAIRY Uruguay, 2017 World Premiere, 6 min Directors: Jeremias Segovia & Gonzalo Torrens A greedy young boy discovers that the Tooth Fairy is a stickler for the rules in this frightening permutation of the folk figure. VOYEUR Canada, 2017 US Premiere, 4 min Directors: Claire Stradwick & Charlotte Lam The private spaces of women are unnervingly encroached upon by a masculine other in this confrontational work that shifts cinema’s scopophilic gaze back on the audience.

SHORTS WITH LEGS

THE ALIENS USA, 2017 World Premiere, 4 min Director: Alex Lee A punk ruminates on the consequences of an alien invasion during some katana practice in the park. beans. USA, 2017 World Premiere, 7 min Director: Maxwell Nalevansky An acerbic narrator reflects nostalgically on the profound pleasure that was afforded to him upon once being offered a free bowl of beans. CALL OF CUTENESS Germany, 2017 Austin Premiere, 4 min Director: Brenda Lien A parade of cat meme tributes mutate into a disturbing animated critique of how these sublime objects of cuteness belie a more sinister cycle of exploitation and control. THE CURE USA, 2017 Texas Premiere, 20 min Director: Mike Olenick A surreal sci-fi soap opera that collides the idiosyncratic private lives of both humans and aliens in a parade of hypnotic slow-zooms and kitschy feline totems. HOMER_A Canada, 2017 World Premiere, 10 min Directors: Milos Mitrovic & Conor Sweeney Conor Sweeney of ASTRON-6 and FF alumni Milos Mitrovic smash the characters of THE SIMPSONS with the aesthetics of TRASH HUMPERS, and the results both haunt and disturb. Ay caramba. LA TRISTESSE DURERA TOUJOURS USA, 2017 Texas Premiere, 12 min Director: Vinny De Giulio Vinny De Ghoulie returns to SHORTS WITH LEGS with what may very well be his 8 ½. This is a maddening deconstruction of his own process culled from the remnants of a feature film he mounted, but failed to to realize. As amusingly bemusing as it is devastating. MÖBIUS USA, Canada, 2017 Regional Premiere, 15 min Director: Sam Kuhn A hallucinogenic dive into the consciousness of a teenage poet in the wake of her lover’s mysterious death. Exquisitely photographed and seemingly assembled in a Lynchian dreamstate. THE TESLA WORLD LIGHT Canada, 2017 Texas Premiere, 8 min Director: Matthew Rankin Visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one last appeal to his benefactor in Matthew Rankin’s mesmerizing live-action/animated hybrid that paints with light itself to conjure its indelible abstract visuals. THE VETTING USA, 2017 Texas Premiere, 19 min Director: Matthew Dunehoo A twitchy and hysterically garish political satire in which a US senator is vetted for a Presidential nomination by a 6,000-year-old telepath that secretly rules the Earth. THE VIEW FROM HERE Canada, 2017 US Premiere, 9 min Director: Sofia Bohdanowicz A delirious puppet-theatre libretto that depicts two lovers nostalgically yearning for the good-old-primordial-soup days of yore.

YALLA! ARAB GENRE SHORTS:

DUNIA Qatar, 2017 North American Premiere, 15 min Director: Amer Jamhour Little Dunia is asked to wait in the car in an effort to shield her from her mother’s desperate decision, but when a curious cop comes a-knocking, Dunia’s innocence is suspensefully put to the test. FEAR: AUDIBLY Saudi Arabia, 2017 International Premiere, 22 min Director: Maha Al-Saati Anxious that Judgment Day is on the horizon, Amal keenly awaits to hear the Trumpet of Doom; could the incessant mewing of cats in her office be the first harbinger? An eccentric and experimental rumination on the end of days. KINDIL Algeria, Kuwait, USA, 2016 Regional Premiere, 40 min Director: Damien Ounouri The spectre of a murdered woman returns to the site of her death, claiming the lives of those responsible, as well as those who turned a blind eye. An arresting social critique in the guise of a vengeful ghost story. LAST DAYS OF THE MAN OF TOMORROW Germany, Lebanon, 2017 World Premiere, 29 min Director: Fadi Baki A remarkable mock-doc that profoundly explores Lebanon’s turbulent history through the life and times of a reclusive metal automaton that once was emblematic of the country’s hopes and dreams.

PAIRED WITH FEATURES:

THE ACCOMPLICE USA, 2017 Regional Premiere, 7 min Directors: Jon Hoeg & John F. Beach A man discovers his unwitting participation in a bank robbery across a series of increasingly incriminating (and hilarious) answering machine messages. CATHERINE Belgium, 2016 Special Presentation, 11 min Director: Britt Raes Delightful animation depicts the origins of a crazy cat lady, while disturbingly proving the axiom: “You always hurt the ones you love.” THE DROP-IN Canada, 2017 US Premiere, 13 min Director: Naledi Jackson A hairstylist confronted with her past fights to protect her future in this stylish, genre-hopping metaphor for the immigrant experience. THE DUNDEE PROJECT USA, 2017 Texas Premiere, 19 min Director: Mark Borchardt Cult filmmaker Mark Borchardt (as seen in AMERICAN MOVIE) takes a trip to the UFO Days festival in Dundee, Wisconsin. Eccentric personalities abound as Mark poetically ruminates on why the compulsion to seek out little green men seems to converge in his home state. THE END OF DECAY USA, 2017 Texas Premiere, 12 min Director: Chris Todd A paraplegic scientist attempts a dangerous experiment to reclaim his mobility in this visceral bit of gruesome, wince-inducing body-horror. GIRL AT THE DOOR South Korea, 2017 Texas Premiere, 11 min Director: Song Joo-sung A young girl gleans a few choice maneuvers from gym class that enable her to turn the tables on her abusive father. MANILA DEATH SQUAD Philippines, USA, 2017 World Premiere, 13 min Director: Dean Colin Marcial An ambitious journalist challenges the leader of a violent vigilante group to a high-stakes drinking game that may score her a scoop or a bullet to the head. NEONATAL USA, 2017 Austin Premiere, 15 min Director: Andrew McDonald In this tense Austin-bound thriller, an expectant mother is lured into a sinister plot by a disturbed and desperate woman. NOTHING A LITTLE SOAP AND WATER CAN’T FIX USA, 2017 Regional Premiere, 9 min Director: Jennifer Proctor An exhaustive and illuminating deconstruction of how horror films frequently feature the bathtub as both a private sanctuary for women and, damningly, as an impromptu sarcophagus. THE PASSENGER Russia, 2017 International Premiere, 11 min Director: Egor Abramenko A Russian cosmonaut grapples with post-traumatic stress following his return from orbit. But that’s not all he’s brought back. UFO DAYS USA, 2017 Austin Premiere, 9 min Director: Quinn Else A fascinating fusion of documentary and fiction against the backdrop of UFO Days that juxtaposes a Ufology lecture with the rural wanderings of an enigmatic “visitor.” VIULU Finland, 2017 Texas Premiere, 12 min Director: Ramin Sohrab When a precious violin is snatched by gangsters, an ex-hitman wreaks some serious martial-vengeance in an effort to reclaim it. YOUR DATE IS HERE USA, 2017 Austin Premiere, 6 min Directors: Todd Spence & Zak White An old Mystery Date-style board game holds more evil than amusement in this expertly wound fright flick. ZARR-DOS Switzerland, 2017 North American Premiere, 7 min Director: Bart Wasem Two grotesque floating heads engage in an aerial waltz of wanton destruction in this spectacularly animated epic. You won’t have a clue, but you’ll appreciate the cosmic justice.

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