AIFF - Shorts in Competition Catch Up

This evening we saw Body/Antibody at the museum and then back to the Fireweed for Cthulhu.

But I need to catch up with all the great shorts we saw at the Shorts in Competition showing Friday night. Was that only yesterday? This was a very strong field of good shorts.

I'll give you the Festival website blurb and my comments.

The Wine Bar
When blue-collar Henry orders a beer in a snooty wine bar he offends everyone and has to defend himself and the woman sitting next to him.
In Short Competition

This one I already liked the best last Saturday and did a short comment then. This one is just a very well made, funny, insightful, and you feel good at the end.

Dear Lemon Lima,
A lonely girl with a vivid imagination struggles to plant seeds of love after her narcissistic sweetheart breaks her heart.

Posted about this one already.

Boletos Por Favor
(Tickets Please)
A train, a pursuit, only one way to escape.

It's hard to write about shorts without telling too much. This one was like walking into a highly charged situation and getting to watch it close up. The ending wasn't as satisfying as it could have been.

Anonymous
New fresh kind of independent cinema.

This one blew me away. It had a quirky style, every now and then it got jerky, like stuttering visually, along with the sound of the turntable scratching back and forth. And it was just right for this strange little story of a writer, his typewriter, the woman in the apartment next door, and an elevator. This was my favorite. Though it might not be everyone's taste.

Security
Dark humor veers into tragedy in Security, a drama about an American Immigration agent at Newark International Airport whose private fears spill into his professional life when he confronts an Iranian mother and her son. Starring Chris Messina (Six Feet Under). Based on the play by Israel Horovitz.

This one had me so pulled in that I totally forgot about my camera. Powerful. Homeland Security is NOT the hero of this film.

La Parabolica
(The Parabolic Dish)
During the broadcast of the Pope's visit, Vicente’s television is broken. Desperate, he decides to make a homemade parabolic dish.

This was the weakest of the bunch. It was fine, but not up to the quality of the others.

Demain la Veille
(Waiting for Yesterday) (See the trailer)
Bob is a 30 year old man like all others: he walks backwards, looses his memory, his skills, like a good citizen. But one night, he wakes up in sweat realizing that the world that he lives in is not “normal”. As he starts behaving differently, he finds himself chased by mercenaries, trying to put him back on track. Little does he know what he is in for: fighting the abstract power that has taken mankind backwards.

This one was also amazing. Seeing the world go backwards - wine pouring out of the mouth into the glass, ink disappearing off the page into the pen - is a nice brain stretcher. Making the film go backward isn't that hard, but at times I thought the storm troopers might actually have been running backward. I'd like a copy of this to play over and over again. Not sure if this was that good or it was simply the novelty of everything going backwards. Definitely worth seeing.