Sundance announced its Short Film Program Award winners on Tuesday, January 28th. If you’ve scrolled the IMDb pages of most feature directors, you would probably find they got their start cutting their teeth in short films. And if you are lucky enough to watch these early works, you will see the makings of the filmmakers they become. That is why the short programs at festivals are not something to dismiss and are a great way to spend your time. Especially as often there are a half dozen or more stories in any set. And, you can still choose between fiction, nonfiction, or even animation.
This year’s Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize went to Theo Panagopoulos for The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (U.K.), an international nonfiction short film about a filmmaker of Palestinian descent based in Scotland who unearths a rarely seen film archive of Palestinian wildflowers and decides to reclaim the footage.
The Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction was awarded to Jazmin Garcia for Trokas Duras, a film that goes into the world of the protagonist’s dreams and his waking reality in Los Angeles and what it looks like for those who serve others as they strive for their own elevation of body and spirit.
The Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction was awarded to Chheangkea for Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites (Cambodia, France), a film about where during her family’s Qingming visit, dead Grandma Nai sneaks away from her peaceful afterlife after overhearing that her Queer grandson is about to get engaged to a woman. The film uses humour to explore self and familial acceptance.
The Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction was awarded to Christopher Radcliff for We Were the Scenery (USA), about how in 1975, Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che fled from Vietnam by boat and docked in the Philippines, and then were utilized as background extras during the filming of Apocalypse Now.
The Short Film Jury Award: Animation was awarded to Natalia León for Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado (France), about a young woman living abroad who returns home to Mexico hoping to reconnect with her past.
The Short Film Special Jury Award for Animation Directing was awarded to May Kindred-Boothby for The Eating of an Orange (U.K.). Fruit comes to the fore in this exploration of convention and sexuality.
And, the Short Film Special Jury Award for Directing was awarded to Loren Waters for Tiger (U.S.A.), a film about the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Indigenous artist and elder Dana Tiger, her family, and the resurgence of the iconic Tiger T-shirt company.
The jury only awarded seven of the 57 short films curated for the festival from over 11,000 submissions, here are a couple more of this year’s selected shorts.
Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan, the Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize winner in 2022 for The Headhunter’s Daughter, returned to the festival with Vox Humana. This short film, set shortly after a natural disaster against the stunning backdrop of the Cordilleran mountains in the Philippines, imagines a human embodiment of the disaster that can be confronted if someone speaks his language to gain answers. Enter a zoologist. The disaster depicted is an earthquake, and one of the other characters is a sound recordist, who we meet lost in the sounds of nature, a potential message of the film becomes evident: to listen for the signs and turn the volume up to 11 if you hope to avoid or mitigate future disasters. An interesting metaphor about vinyl records about earthquakes in the film supports this. The cinematography is breathtaking, particularly the shots of nature and wildlife, from the opening view of a worm, which isn’t in nature but moves across what seems to be something rusty, to the saliva dripping from the close-up of a horse’s muzzle, to the final shots in the lush vegetation.
The Reality of Hope (United Kingdom/Sweden), a documentary short, was picked up by Asteria and Documentary+ before the festival began. The film follows a Stockholm-based virtual reality creator who needs a kidney transplant. He’s set to get a transplant from a New York-based friend, but the twist is, that they’ve only ever seen each other in an online VR community where they each have a “furry” avatar. The film is vibrant in a world of VR, in spaces partially created by the main protagonist of the project, Hiyu. The film showcases the meaningful relationships people make in these VR worlds, while also shedding awareness on dialysis and how it affects those across ages and globes, real and virtual.
The full list of the shorts selected this year can be found on Sundance.
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