HollyShorts Film Festival is an Oscar-qualifying event, currently going on in Hollywood. Over 200 short films are part of the festival. If you have read my coverage of festivals before, you know that I always try to see shorts at some point. Here are more than I’ll ever be able to fit in. Life is good.
Let’s start with a trio of films that are categorized as “Adult Animation”.
An Angel on Oxford Street (9 minutes, England, directed by Paul Shammasian), is done in what may seem like black and white, but is really many shades of gray. It opens with imagery and language from Revelation that reflects the feeling that evil is abroad in the world, waiting to do us harm. The question at the beginning is “What are you going to do about the evil?” Saul, must go to London, where evil seems to be omnipresent. In the midst of all the opulence on Oxford Street, he sees a homeless man with no shoes. He wonders how such a thing can be and is overcome with the need to act.
This film encapsulates the Christian ethic in its struggle to move from fear to service. Too much of the time Christians (and others) build a fortress against perceived evils and, in the process, wall off the rest of the world who needs us to be present. It is a celebration of what we can do when we overcome our fear. It’s everything I love about short films.
Corpus and the Wandering (8 minutes, Canada, directed by Jo Roy), is somewhat experimental, but don’t let that put you off. It is made up of up to 100 mini-frames within the frame. Those mini-frames each are a close up of a body part. They are arranged to make a larger picture. It is all done with one dancer and one iPhone.
It is very interesting to watch. I would not be surprised to see this as an installation at an art museum. It is not about story as much as it is about image. It also is about the way an artist can challenge us to take their images and see what that creates in our minds.
In the Shadow of the Cypress (20 minutes, Iran, directed by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani), is a story of brokenness and, perhaps, healing. A sea captain who suffers from PTSD lives with his daughter, but his violent outbursts are driving her away. When she leaves she discovers a beached whale. She is trying to save it, but it only leads to more torment for her father.
It would be interesting to try to mine the metaphors within this film: the beached whale, the seemingly unending flock of gulls, the shattered ship that the captain tries vainly to repair. Each of those reflects a bit of the anguish between the two characters. And it is only by what they can give up that they can find a path to healing.
I also took some time to watch some of the films out of the Pacific Northwest, which ran together presented by the Seattle Film Summit.
Icons (25 minutes, directed by Dillion Leavitt) is a short documentary focusing on the difficulty of women in business, especially in tech, being able to find a place or advance in the industry. It moves on to the founding of Women in Cloud, which is seeking to create economic access to assist women in business.
Tales of the Boiling River (16 minutes, directed by Vitaliy Pernov) takes us to the Peruvian Amazon in following the legend of a boiling river. It hard to tell if this is a doc or fiction. It dabbles in folklore, but I was never quite sure what was or was not real. It has an ecological bent, but even that never gets full attention.
Dream Creep (13 minutes, directed by Carlos A. F. Lopez) is a comic(ish) horror story. A man awakens to his wife’s voice calling to him from her ear as she is fast asleep. The voice says she’s trapped in there and something is after her. She’ll die if she wakes up. She asks him to do things that certainly don’t make sense to him. Can he save her—or himself? Okay, I’m not really a horror kind of guy, but there was just enough humor here to make it palatable for me.
An Old Friend (14 minutes, directed by Nuk Suwanchote) enters the realm of imaginary friends, but with a twist. Suppose an imaginary friend does not belong to a child, but to a man on the verge of death. What is he to do? What struck me about the film was the way it seemed to invoke memories of A River Runs Through It. Perhaps that is because of the clothing that the imaginary friend wears, the presence of Tom Skerritt, and/or the role of flyfishing. Such memories are old friends as well.
Go to Hollyshorts.com to learn how to watch the festival.
