Bing screens festival’s best
Seattle Shorts picks show range of styles, talents
The short film is an art form that usually doesn’t get a lot of attention or respect, probably because the best ones usually seem effortless. A filmmaker only has so much time to make us identify with characters and understand their situations, and a short tends to be more rewarding the more compact and concise it is.
The annual Seattle Shorts Film Festival showcases this particular type of storytelling, and the Bing Crosby Theater is screening a collection of some of the best shorts that have played the fest since its inception in 2011.
Looking at the shorts that will be presented tonight, some common themes start to emerge: Many of the films, in one way or another, deal with broken families, adolescent rites of passage and the importance of communication, and most of them are funny, moving and imaginative. Here are a few of the highlights from tonight’s program:
“88 Miles to Moscow” – During a train ride with her estranged father, a 15-year-old girl named Niki (Brynn Samms) gets off at a stop to smoke and gets left behind. Niki must rely on a young Russian janitor (Roman Marshanski) to get her back to the train, and director Karen Glienke keeps jumping forward in time to show Niki relaying the story of her journey – albeit with a few factual alterations – to her mother (Priscilla Barnes).
“Curfew” – After a failed suicide attempt, a psychologically troubled man (writer-director Shawn Christensen) is forced to babysit the niece (Fatima Ptacek) he barely knows. This has the most impressive pedigree of the bunch: It won the Academy Award for best live action short in 2013 (it also won best director and actor at Seattle Shorts) and was adapted into a feature called “Before I Disappear,” with Christensen and Ptacek reprising their roles.
“Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?” – In this brisk, Oscar-nominated Finnish comedy, a family sleeps in on the day of a wedding and frantically tries to get ready and make it on time. Everything, of course, goes horribly wrong: The wedding gift goes missing, the laundry doesn’t dry, they miss the bus. And it gets even worse when they finally arrive at the church.
“The Hero Pose” – Like “Curfew,” this gentle slice of life from local filmmaker Mischa Jakupcak centers on a man and a young girl, but this time it’s a divorced father and his precocious daughter. Set in Missoula over the course of a single autumn afternoon, we watch as the father, trying in vain to sell a car that doesn’t run, tries reconnecting with his daughter after the fallout of his marriage. Jakupcak will be in attendance to present the film.
“Serenade” – From local filmmaker Kendra Ann Sherrill, this coming-of-age snapshot follows a shy kid (Noah Graybeal) as he tries to gather up the courage to present a love poem to a girl he has a crush on. It’s perhaps the most bittersweet of the collected shorts, dealing with the pangs and disappointments of childhood and the first experiences of romantic humiliation. Sherrill will also be in attendance with her film.
“The Wheel” – Part Tim Burton, part Jean-Pierre Jeunet and narrated in a Seussian sing-song, director John Roberts’ darkly comic fable concerns a dutiful man and his disturbed sister fighting for control of a mystical wheel that helps maintain order in the universe. This is the short with the most bells and whistles, full of special effects and quirky CGI environments.