Short Attention Spans
Bumbershoot’s 1 Reel Film Festival is one of our nation’s top festivals for short films. I want to highlight the handful of filmmakers with local connections who’ll be represented. Friday is the first day for movies, playing host to Marcus Gauteson’s charming tale of an agoraphobic boy who grows up in a car, Carboy. Also on view will be Sam Akina’s Flychopper II, Michell Mouton’s Rain Play, and a funny little alien movie, Wee Entity.
On Saturday there were no local short-film makers that I noticed.
Sunday has the locals returning with a bang. Polterchrist auteurs Brady Hall and Calvin Reeder present Missed Opportunities; Mark O’Connell will show The Economy Is Booming; 911 Media Arts’ own Peter Mitchell will show off his Highway Ninja Shark; and Aaron Bowman’s Residue will play. I also wanted to point out that David Russo’s short film Pan with Us is going to play on Sunday. Many people missed it at this year’s SIFF, and it’s more than worth seeing (multiple times, even). A Sundance award-winner, Pan with Us helped put Russo on Filmmaker Magazine‘s 25 New Faces of Indie Film list. So go see it!
Speaking of SIFF, on Friday they’ll be showing six of the 10 Fly Films. I’m not going to tell you which six, so you’d best find out yourself. Finally, Monday will play host to The Jaded Monk. Brian McDonald, creator of the brilliant short White Face wrote this one, so it’s definitely worth checking out. Also on Monday are episodes 3 and 4 of Trenton Payne’s Midtown, as well as the annual “Best of the Fest” screening. Somewhere else along the line, Wes Kim’s new short will be playing, along with two shorts by Seattle-to-L.A. transplant Evan Mather (one an Aimee Mann video, the other a short he made with still-local Kirk Hostetter). Remember: Music is not the only reason to go to Bumbershoot.
There’s another series of screenings I want to point out that take place starting Thursday, September 4. Normally I would mention them in next week’s column, but since I’ll be in Chicago promoting my short film Apoplexy at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, I’m going to devote the whole column to my trip. Consequently, you should pencil 911 Media Arts’ Four Day Fling with Caveh Zahedi into your calendar. He is a filmmaker whose body of work is great in how uncomfortably personal it gets.
If you saw Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, you might recognize Zahedi as the guy who turned into a cloud. Over two weekends, 911 is going to show four of Zahedi’s features, starting with his most recent. Drawn from a year’s worth of video diaries, In the Bathtub of the World chronicles his sometimes turbulent life with his girlfriend Mandy as he grapples with his reading addiction and his prostitute addiction. The following night they’re showing I Was Possessed By God, where he tries to repeat a psychedelic mushroom trip in which he felt a “divine possession.”