The Paris International Short Festival is an online bi-monthly festival. There are 69 films in the current selection. I selected four films to review based on their summaries, picking films across multiple genres and in both live action and animation.
Danny Boy – If it wasn’t for the establishing shots, you wouldn’t know this short was set in Los Angeles. You’d probably assume it was New York or New Jersey as they often get portrayed with the gangsters with names like Danny and Francis (played by Jett Jansen and Sammy Horowitz), especially ones that talk with Francis’ syncopation. Francis’ dialogue draws on your conceptions of this genre and its tropes, right down to the macho homophobia that’s peppered the dialogue over the years. The twist in this is that Danny, his partner in the heist, is gay, unbeknownst to Francis and the audience until Francis refuses the outs Danny gave him to retract his homophobic statements and Danny has enough of him. The filming is simple, almost entirely just the conversation between the two in the car, but the dialogue snaps.
Written by Sammy Horowitz and directed by Cory DeMeyers.
A Journey to the Moon – Written and directed by Jack Getschman, the story is simple, based on a simple cheesy premise; what if the moon was made of cheese and a pair of mice made a rocket ship to get moon cheese? Clocking in at two and a half minutes, it’s one of the shorter films submitted to the festival. However, that’s always been the beauty of animation/silent films; the ability to tell a story through a series of moving images at a faster pace than with dialogue. This film tells a complete story; there’s the goal, the execution of the goal, unexpected danger, life and death stakes, a great escape, and a successful mission. And, on top of all that, the animation is super charming.
Juliet – The premise of this AFI student short film is a high school is performing Romeo & Juliet and Serena (played by Reise Alexander), a young trans woman, decides to audition for Juliet. Made to address the very real-world problem that many transgender actors face when wanting to be considered for cis-gendered roles setting it in a high school, where mean girls and boys reign with social media cruelty to your face was inspired. For the purposes of this theme, Romeo & Juliet was the perfect pairing because Serena and the “Romeo” aka the theatre hot throb, share a moment of genuine connection and flirtation over a spontaneous rehearsal of the bard’s words. However, much like their source material, their flirtation also ends in tragedy, in the form of him caving to peer pressure and assaulting her (that is another unfortunate real-world problem).
Though unlike Romeo & Juliet, Juliet doesn’t have a tragic ending, because the goal of everyone in the film was to get Serena not to audition, to invalidate her as a woman, as a Juliet, but she gets on the stage in the end and auditions, despite them.
Written by Wilandrea Blair and directed by Irina Storozhenko.
Cold Dark Hollow – When I read the premise of this short, I was intrigued, I grew up on Rod Serling, but the film itself didn’t quite connect for me and I tried to figure out why, after careful examination, I think it’s because the music felt too all in composing and undercut the performance/lines during the scene with the nurse. That said, I enjoyed the ending, and it did feel reminiscent of The Twilight Zone.
Written and directed by Patricia Vonne.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.