An Evening at the First Annual New York Digital Short Film Festival
BY ERIC CORSON
After the festival directors Diane Batson-Smith, Marcus Lovingood and John Hsiang had made their introductory speeches and the lights began to dim at the DGA Theater on Monday night, there was a sense of eager anticipation in the air. In his speech, Lovingood tried to tie recent natural catastrophes to our need for escapism through “culture” (which he swiftly reduced to the moving images) and added that, after sampling over 400 entries “from all over the place,” he felt confident that the 14 short films shown at the New York Digital Short Film Festival were the very best and most innovative short films out there. Diane Batson-Smith went even further and proposed that the following two and a half hours of content would forever change the way we viewed digital short films. So everyone leaned back in their seats, ready to be blown away.
14 films later, almost no one had left the theater but no one had had an epiphany either. The quality of the entries was mostly very strong, but, with a few exceptions, nothing that could break out of the short film mold. The problem with short films is that, most of the time, they rely on a single dramatic idea that, by nature, can only be explored somewhat superficially. Filmmakers have the choice between going the sketch route or trying to build a more satisfying story with limited means. It is the sign of a superior storyteller to find a narrative that will be revelatory under the time constraints and convince visually.
The perfect marriage between smart storytelling and impressive visual style at the NYDSFF was attained in Stanley Pickle, directed by Vicky Mather. Clocking in at just 11 minutes, Stanley Pickle combines time-lapse visuals and stop motion esthetics with live action elements to create a fantastical environment that recalls the fairy world of Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies. The story concerns a young secluded boy who must learn that growing up means being able to move on and go out into the world. Smart, charming and funny, Stanley Pickle deservedly won the Vision Innovation Award.
Another entry that found a simple but telling concept and pointedly brought it to the screen was Fran Guijarro’s Mexican Cuisine. The film won the Best Cinematography award and superposes voiceover narration detailing the main characteristics of Mexican cuisine and how it influenced culinary art all over the world with shots of Mexican cooks in L.A. working in kitchens preparing all kinds of food from Turkish kebabs, over sushi, to Italian fine dining. In just under four minutes, Mexican Cuisine distills grand themes like immigration, ethnic identities, and the segregation of low-income labor into a simple and effective offering.
Love was, of course, a big theme and was treated in a lot of different ways. Bear Untitled (directed by Christian Bach), an 8-bit animation about a relationship between a human and a bear that ends in suicide got the biggest laughs of the evening and should be a YouTube hit, but is nothing more than a one and a half minute-long gimmick. Abigail (directed by Frank Lucatuorto) tells the story of two magnetic people who fall in love with each other but can never be together because their identical charges prevents them from ever touching each other. Demon’s Dilemma (directed by Hanjin Park) is somehow able to lose itself in a convoluted story over the course of its 13-minute runtime, and approaches love from the angle of life and death and what it means to be a human who has to make the right choice. Tell Tale, (directed by Greg Williams and starring Adam Arkin and Carla Gugino) finally, argues that liberated female sexuality inevitably leads into death and doom – a well-known leitmotiv.
Certainly the best film about love, and also the winner of the awards for Best Story and Best Picture, was The Burying Beetle, directed by Dave Rock. The longest film of the evening (27 minutes) tells the story of a boy who tries to convince his dying father that he should be baptized in order to avoid having to go to hell once he passes away. The twist; the father is a scientist and we get a lot of funny, bittersweet scenes between father and son in which the father dismisses religion and the son tries to get his dad to at least consider it. The father-son banter doesn’t offer anything new in the religion versus science department, but the strong emotional core of the movie is very convincing. Without indulging in faux sentimentality, the movie tells a straight forward story about fatherly love and how children try to cope with a world that mystifies them.
The award for Best Direction went to Greg Williams (who somehow had two films in competition) and his film Sergeant Slaughter, My Big Brother. Tom Hardy plays a badass Brit who wants to join the French foreign legion and causes all kinds of havoc at home. While expertly shot, I thought that The Burying Beetle or Feet, an amusing 9-minute short about a man waking up with women’s feet, deserved the award more, but Tom Hardy’s star power (and the fact that he performs full frontal nudity in the movie) probably tipped the balance in Williams’ favor.
But for all of the festival directors’ talk about innovation and digital filmmaking being the future of the moving images, the content presented at the NYDSFF was very white and Western-centered. Gender relations were very traditional, and almost all the movies featured a central character having to overcome obstacles to defeat an inner demon and learn something in the process – typical Hollywood fare. While most of the 14 entries convinced at some level (a few head-scratchers excluded), one wishes that future installments of the New York Digital Short Film Festival grow more mature, multi-cultural and bold in its content. It has the potential to be an exciting venue for up-and-coming international talents to push the boundaries of narrative short films.