Don't let the excitement of the ritzy feature premieres fool you – Sundance's brightest gems can be found in their excellent shorts programming.
One of the great pleasures of the Sundance program (that often goes ignored in favor of splashier titles that only exist for viewers able to attend the festival in-person) is virtual access to their wealth of short films. With over 50 shorts programmed this year, the selection was as much of a grab bag of surprises as usual, though the notion of “slice of life” kept coming to mind. This came not so much as a means of genre or storytelling, but instead tied to the way it dawned on me how many films served as glimpses into minute moments of different lifestyles. This constitutes experiencing folklore from various countries; watching individuals navigate the oppressive culture they exist in, and even seeing the ways that filmmakers convey reality through decidedly unreal presentations.
Take 1981, the brief and beautiful short by Andy and Carolyn London that hones in on a boy’s fourteenth birthday party and the surprise his parents get him as a gift. The rotoscoped animation draws you directly into the vibe of what it’d be like to have your celebration marred by the presence of sex and seduction; something intended to be special, and even playful, but instead is just discomforting when it doesn’t line up with your own desires. As ‘Crimson & Clover’ plays over and over for this awkward interlude, the realization that this single experience will haunt this teen for years to come is undeniable.
Don Hertzfeldt’s Paper Trail exists on the opposite spectrum. Rather than just one moment, it captures an entire lifetime in under 15 minutes, entirely told through the imprints this individual leaves on paper. At first it presents this through a child doodling aimlessly, with a free form wildness that knows no limitations. Slowly but surely, that freedom is shifted into order as lines become numbers and letters, equations and essays, until there’s nothing left but years and years of your signature stamped on hundreds of invoices. With age comes disappointment and deterioration, as engrossing to watch as it is outright depressing, but perfectly in line with Hertzfeldt’s brand of existential cinema.
The saddest shorts are sometimes the most absorbing, and two of the best of the festival focused on the weight of navigating elderly care and dementia through wildly different approaches. Stephen P. Neary’s Living with a Visionary does this through animation, the kind that looks and feels like it was taken straight from a storybook, but with a much heftier tale than any children’s story. With James Cromwell’s voice as narrator, the beauty of coping through fantasy and the heartbreak that comes with watching an older couple navigate the harsh realities of illness and the medical industry are both emphasized with grace.
Almost as though to explicitly contrast that tale of painful dedication is a short film about a woman who desperately wants to escape the baggage of caring for her husband. Amandine Thomas’ excellent Albatross will perhaps rub some the wrong way in how bluntly it confronts the exhaustion of watching someone fade away slowly, but its lead, Georgina Saldaña Wonchee, sells the pain she’s going through impressively. There’s a real ache to the way she, a Mexican woman married to a white man, has not only lost herself in the process of caregiving, but also lost the ties to her culture, forcing her to question whether her love has congealed into hatred.
Familial relations were everywhere in the shorts programs. Praise Odigie Paige’s Birdie is a gorgeously shot portrait of two sisters, while the mother-daughter dynamic is at the core of Ana Alejandra Alpizar’s empathetic Norheimsund. The former trades in serenity, allowing us just a brief glance at what life is like for African immigrants living in 1970s Virginia, while the latter embraces the talkativeness of Cuban women who are willing and able to do anything to survive and care for each other. There’s a dreaminess and a sobering realism to them both, but what really captivates is just how much they exist to capture what it’s like to wait – for the ache to pass, for a new life to reveal itself, or for life to go on as it always has.
The romantic, or perhaps anti-romantic, shorts are just as exciting. Riley Donigan’s Stairs had me in stitches as I watched Betsey Brown getting increasingly turned on by the notion of falling down stairs. Comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Crash and the way it indulges in both the humor and horror of watching people self-harm for sexual pleasure are inevitable and rightfully so. It’s brutal, from the committed performance down to some exquisite make-up work, endlessly amusing, and, if I’m being honest, just a little bit sexy. Just as fun is the relationship between two actors in Matthew Puccini’s Callback – a mean little short about what it’s like to truly believe you’re the better person (and, in this case, performer) in your relationship. Any initial sweetness falls away quickly as the passive aggression takes over, but it’s a perfect showcase of misery loving company, as Justin H. Min and Michael Rosen are committed to serving Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf realness.
Queer chaos extended beyond Callback and into other shorts, like Jamie Kiernan O’Brien’s Gender Studies. For all the dull shorts about trans joy we’re meant to swallow up at most film festivals, here’s one that embraces trans sociopathy in the best way. It’d be easy to just label this a play on Single White Female, with a trans woman trying to sleep with her teaching assistant simply because a girl she idolizes is sleeping with him, but there’s more to it than that. In Jake Junkins’ phenomenal performance and intense gaze lies an abundance of subtext that goes beyond the typical tropes of obsession and turns into a study of how we perform gender. Here is a character that wants to be desired like a cis woman, to be free of otherness, and to receive validation from the women she exists with and the men that want them. It’s horrifying, yes, but also fairly exciting to get to see this kind of complicated story on screen instead of being limited to the pages of the best trans lit around these days (a la ‘Tell Me I’m Worthless’, ‘Herculine’, ‘Detransition Baby’, etc).
But one short fully embraces absurdity and surrealism in order to give the most prescient glimpse into what it’s like to be alive nowadays – Carter Amelia Davis’ Homemade Gatorade (which is blessedly already available on YouTube). Unsettling and fascinating from the moment it begins, throwing you into what feels like a creepypasta come to life, Homemade Gatorade tells the story of a woman trying to, well, sell eleven gallons of homemade gatorade on the internet. The sheer unrealness of everything presented on a formal level – fake websites and screen life beats that mimic how AI-ridden and broken our real ones are; distorted live-action footage mixed in with digitally animated and cut together humans; haunting voiceovers that feel removed from any actual bodies – is only part of what makes it feel so real. Davis is a master at crafting this kind of uncomfortable atmosphere without ever sacrificing a chance to make a joke when she can and the result ends up being a truly weird and wonderful descent into madness.
That I could continue to go on about a number of other shorts – the spirited Jazz Infernal, the hilarious Balloon Animals, the meditative Some Kind of Refuge, the charming Hugs, the ruminative The Creature of Darkness, the intriguing Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center For Feeling Therapy, the playful Cabbage Daddy, the inspiring Agnes, the gripping Gnawer of Rocks, the melancholic Buah (Fruit), and many more – speaks to just how much promising material there was available. While many consider short films to be mere fragments of the feature films that some directors seek to make, the best ones are always those that feel like complete works instead of proof-of-concept teasers.
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