Shorts Program 5 - Portable Shorts. The strength of this program lies in the emotional depth of each title, a quality often difficult to achieve in a short film. These seven films span a broad range…
2003
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Shorts Program 5 - Portable Shorts. The strength of this program lies in the emotional depth of each title, a quality often difficult to achieve in a short film. These seven films span a broad range of feeling from the comedic to the bizarre to the tragic. Here, animated shorts mix easily with live action. One film depicts the rise and fall of civilization from a rock's perspective; another is inspired by the work of Japanese author, Kobo Aba.
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Shorts Program 4 - Crossing Borders. Nine short films, crossing all borders: not just political ones, but also the borders between comedy and drama, youth and experience, truth and lies, and life and death. Running the gamut of emotional tones, cultures are reflected from as far as the Netherlands, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
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Shorts Program 3 - Everyday. This breathtaking combination of poignant stories, reenactments, and documentaries focuses on everyday life, but the tales collected here are anything but ordinary. Of course, since life varies from place to place, this program mingles films from around the world, with Persians going through daily rituals and struggles in Iran, British adults looking back at their childhood, and an American parodying his post 9/11 anxiety.
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Shorts Program 2 - Joyride Comedies: Light, Dark, and Deceptive. Comedies come in all shapes and sizes. The "knee slappers" are here for immediate release, but they are finely balanced by a superbly drawn mix of knowing send-ups and dark, serio-comic situations designed to draw out the Schadenfreude in all of us. Look for animated rap/action figures, misinterpreted glances in a fast food restaurant, the rebirth of the King of Rock and Roll, and a bizarre love triangle from Norway in which a mate will not give up his chickenin song. Plus, David Hyde-Pierce as a brow-beaten press agent.
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Shorts Program 1 - Mindbenders. The Mindbender programs always aim to twist those neurons between your ears with perplexing, unpredictable, yet entertaining films of just about any stripe. This 2003 edition hopes to torque that up a notch...with a cheater bar. Expect a variety of animation styles, bizarre stories, and a verbal harangue. These shorts swing from intense, abstract visuals matched with computer-generated dialogue to outright silliness during an earthquake.
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World Premiere Alexander Becker is an ambitious lawyer preparing for the case of his lifetime until he gets a call from the clinic where he placed Fabian, his mentally handicapped brother years ago, at the time of the death of their mother. The clinic is undergoing renovations, and it will be necessary for Alexander to take Fabian home with him for a month. There is just one small problem-Alexander has never told his wife and kids that Fabian exists. When Fabian arrives, unannounced to the rest of the family, big changes are in store.
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World Premiere What happens when a ten-year-old little girl redirects the lives of her two kidnappers? From the creative minds of writers Steven Langa and Philip Angelotti, Jr. comes an urban comedy filled with characters reminiscent of an Elmor Leonard novel. You Got Nothin', recently being touted as the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding, cleverly combines the humor of Midnight Run with the heart of Paper Moon.
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Barry Alexander Brown's Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control is a stylish, laugh-filled drama about two road-weary lounge musicians who get the opportunity to revive their act when one of them begins to display psychic abilities. Stuck together in Holiday Inn hell, womanizing drummer Samuel Menendez and uptight loner/keyboard player Devon Sharpe are opposites that do not attract.
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Games are for children; relationships, for adults-not that you could tell from the participants in Welcome to the Neighborhood, a cast of LA dwellers who are brought together by their misguided definitions of love, trust, happiness, and faith. Four quirky tales are skillfully intertwined as examples of what being a couple is all about, including dealing with the houseguest from hell, some self-absorbed sexual politics, a slight lack of communication, and finding out that your trivial secret may uncover someone else's more personal indiscretion.
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US Premiere Silicon Valley, 1999. As the millennium nears its end, a new fever sweeps through the country, preying on the universal desire of being your own boss. Start-up businesses pop up everywhere as a generation looks to the Internet as the pathway towards their dreams. Trey Segal, a programmer who inhabits a surreal world of psychotic branding, marketing droids, and his own Internet sex addiction, is one such dreameror at least he was. Tired of hopping from one small-time job to the next, Trey resolves to start his own web company.