AFI Dallas: Shorts Awards

For a short film to be taken seriously for awards at AFI Dallas, the evidence suggests that it’s best to be serious: the winners featured beatings, smuggling, a shooting, a stabbing, some dead and dismembered fairies, and, in the lightest piece, death by pie. Of course, the awards were purportedly difficult to decide because all the shorts were ‘amazing’; I saw nearly all the shorts in the festival and while I saw more amazing shorts than I did sucky ones, and while I wouldn’t put any of the winners in the sucky class, I’d put the vast majority of the shorts I saw, including all the ones included in the winners’ compilation, somewhere between those two extremes. Then again, none of the ones I thought were amazing won anything and all the ones that won I thought were good but not great (I didn’t think any were the best in their respective programs) so what the hell do I know?

The Grand Jury winner was “The Second Line” which was one dude’s crappy day – crappier than usual, even – in a Katrina FEMA camp and a flood-ravaged New Orleans neighborhood. Honorable mention went to “A Catalog of Anticipation,” about a girl whose collection of dead things comes to include the aforementioned fairies. Two other shorts, “Bongo Bong” and “The Object”, received a special directing mention. “The Object” was most notable for being in English, with English subtitles – and they were helpful. Both these shorts were not shown in the winners’ compilation which was too bad, because I liked them better than any of the ones they did show. Which isn’t meant to be a knock on the shorts that were shown – both of these were inventively entertaining.

The student award went to “The Vulnerable Ones”, which is about a father-and-son relationship but whose plot seems to involve smuggling. In Africa. But with little violence – the son gets slapped near the beginning of the film and the father gets slapped near the end. “A Day’s Work”, about the eventually violent interactions between three immigrant day laborers and the family that hires them to help them move, won honorable mention and also won the audience award.

I liked the various shorts programs, and I saw all but the documentaries and the Booker T. Washington showcase, but I was disappointed by the winners. I thought they were all safe choices – earnest, serious projects carefully snipped from today’s headlines. Well, that last part was mostly true of “The Second Line” and “A Day’s Work” but none of the winners really rocked the screen. At best, they folkrocked the screen but really they were more like early seventies singer-songwriters of shorts. More John Prine, say, than John Denver but still.

One baseless fear I had was that this would be a tough ticket. Turns out, not so much – the theater was the smaller of the two they had at the Angelika and it wasn’t full. I’d say it was maybe two-thirds full although that was partially because all of the winning filmmakers had already left town.