Alright! Got back from the SF Shorts fest the other night.

The festival was pretty amazing. In my experience there are two types of film festivals: (1) Giant corporate schmooze-fests (ala SXSW) where you see good movies but have to be surrounded by some of the worst human beings the art world has to offer, or (2) Little DIY affairs where you get to talk to nice people but the films are somewhere between embarrassing and excruciating. SF Shorts, thankfully, combined a DIY atmosphere with surprisingly high-quality films.

SF Shorts was a teeny little DIY festival held in an art house co-op theater called the Red Vic, on Upper Haight, two blocks from Golden Gate Park. It was run by a handful of folks who were very nice and super accommodating, and you could tell it was the type of event that just happens because a group of buddies were like "Hey. We like movies. Let's have a film festival." The festival is in its 4th year, and they screened a total of 63 short films and music videos from 20 different countries. Apparently they received over 1200 submissions, so the quality was quite high, and it was certainly flattering to be included.

I only made it to half of the screenings, as I was only in town two full days and was also trying to catch up with friends and family in the Bay Area, but there were quite a few films that made an impression on me, and I'm going to list them below.

A City to Yourself by Nicole Macdonald was probably my favorite film in the festival. It's an autobiographical documentary on urban decay in Detroit, told through narration by Macdonald, who grew up and still lives in the city. The narration is juxtaposed with time-lapse images of the city itself, shot on what looks to be 8mm film. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows my work that this film jumped out at me- urban decay is one of my favorite visual subjects, and time-lapse photography is one of my favorite mediums. In fact, this film is so visually similar to my video for Infinity's Lips that I was surprised that they were both in the same festival. I've not been able to find much about this film online, aside from this 30-second clip where she talks about Detroit's preparation for the 2006 Super Bowl:



Another favorite documentary short was Team Taliban by Benjamin Keegan. It followed a young Muslim man who performs in a small-town professional wrestling circuit in rural Illinois. At the urging of one of his promoters, he decides to become a villain and take on the persona of a terrorist as his wrestling character. It's a fairly interesting exploration of the underlying tension that comes with being a Muslim in rural America right now, but the This American Life-style camerawork was what really put it over the top for me. Here's a trailer:

Speaking of This American Life, I got to watch the John Smith episode from Season 2 of the TAL TV series while I was on the plane to SF, and it was without a doubt the most moving piece of documentary filmmaking that I've seen in a long, long time.

Anyway... back to the festival. The most technically impressive and probably the most moving film I saw was Prayers for Peace by Dustin Grella. The content of the short is the filmmaker's remembrance of his brother, a soldier killed in Iraq. It has a moving narrative, to be sure, but what's completely mindblowing about this film is that it's a stop-motion animation done completely on a chalkboard, with just a tiny, tiny bit of digital compositing. Watch this clip, and think about the fact that every single frame is drawn on a chalkboard, with each image slowly drawn over the last as the film progresses. Unreal.

Okay, just one more, I promise. This Australian film called The News played as part of a bloc of films about love and relationships. It kind of blew me away because it starts out excruciatingly cheesy and then takes an amazing turn about halfway through. Behold:



Okay, that's it! Had an amazing time in San Francisco, and was super impressed by the festival. Yeah!