HollyShorts Film Festival is underway! This festival focuses on stories that are told with precision and succinctness. It may surprise you to discover who some of the filmmakers are who have films at the festival. Other filmmakers may have great futures ahead of them. Lets’s start digging into the films.
Meeting Your Maker (18 minutes), directed by Gregory J.M. Kasunich, is the story of Otis, a Muppet-like hand puppet who has had a 15 year run on a TV show. But after 299 episodes (and another season in the works), Otis is having something of an existential crisis. His celebrity no longer brings him joy. He finds himself on a bridge considering the jump. Thinking of his creator, he says, “I wish you’d never made me.” Or is that really the hand inside him?
The tagline for the film is “Life is hard. Puppets are soft.” To use a puppet as a surrogate for someone who may be suicidal, makes this something of a stealth look at depression. It uses a cuddly protagonist to take us deeper than we may expect.
Pigeons (12 minutes), directed by Amos Sussigan, is an animated film, but don’t think that means it’s lightweight. It is the story of a pair of carrier pigeons that are released after their owner gets a telephone early in 1938. They manage to find a safe place and survive on what they can find. One is captured and used in World War II, and returns an injured hero. But what awaits him now?
Just as the pigeons were viewed as disposable by their owner, so to does society often think of people as disposable, or not worthy of caring about. This film asks us to consider who and what gets left behind as the world progresses.
Sweetwater (21 minutes), directed by Michael Keaton (as Michael Keaton Douglas) has mild sci-fi overtones as it touches on grief and identity. Keaton plays the son of a movie star. He has gone to her Hollywood ranch to get it ready for sale after her death. There is a parcel waiting for him. Inside is a device that has an AI holographic version of his mother (played by Kyra Sedgwick) as a tour guide. Of course, the hologram doesn’t know who he is. He is on strange journey of memory, nostalgia, and understanding.
Echoes (18 minutes), directed by Alex Lanipekun, is a story of repression and recovery. Andre, a well-off business man, sees Robert, an old classmate from private school, who is now homeless. In speaking with Robert, Andre must come to grips with memories he has repressed all these years about what happened at the school—and his and Robert’s complex relationship. Perhaps Andre will be able to find some grace as he reconnects with the friend who had his back.
Sisters of Scott County (12 minutes), directed by Courteny Hoffman, is an old fashion romp. Mary Cherry just wants to get her commercial drivers license to become a trucker. As she’s taking her test, she gets a call from her moonshining sisters about a motorcycle gang that has destroyed their stills. Mary sets out to save the day, while the official testing her is along for the ride. Think of The Dukes of Hazzard with eighteen wheels.
