Shorts

This crash course in the contemporary documentary features short films from both established and up-and-coming filmmakers working in a dizzying range of forms and tones. Among the highlights are Nathan Truesdell’s The Water Slide (2018), the latest film from the director of Balloonfest (an Unorthodocs. 2017 audience favorite) made up of local news reports about a Kansas waterslide that gets tragically fast-tracked by Libertarian politicians and their love for deregulation. The Labyrinth (2018), the hallucinatory new film from acclaimed filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán, follows the path of an indigenous man working for Colombian drug lords in the 1980s as he runs from the forest to the ruin of a narco’s hideout built in the style of the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty. (program approx. 80 mins., video)

Program lineup

Pumpkin Movie
(Sophy Romvari, 2018, 10 mins., video)
On Halloween, two friends Skype each other with creepy stories of a particular bent.

Black 14
(Darius Clark Monroe, 2018, 15 mins., video)
Directed by Darius Clark Monroe and executive produced by Spike Lee, this documentary short tells the story of what happened when a group of college athletes decided to protest a long-standing racial injustice.

Steve Hates Fish
(John Smith, 2015, 5 mins., video)
Filmed directly from the screen of a smartphone using a language translator app that has been told to translate from French into English, Steve Hates Fish deliberately confuses the software by instructing it to interpret the English signage in a busy London shopping street. In an environment overloaded with information, the signs run riot as the restless software does its best to fulfill its task, looking for French words to translate in places where there are none.

The Waterslide
(Nathan Truesdell, 2018, 9 mins., video)
A skewering of local news cadences that travels to Kansas, where Libertarian-leaning politicians fast-track the world’s largest waterslide.

CamperForce
(Brett Story and Jessica Bruder, 2018, 16 mins., video)
For nearly a decade, Amazon has recruited thousands of RVers for a seasonal labor unit called CamperForce.

The Labyrinth
(Laura Huertas Millán, 2018, 21 mins., video)
“A journey through memory and ruins (if they are different things) of an old palace, built in the image and likeness of the Dynasty TV show, deep in the Colombian jungle. Shot on 16mm, and following up on the heritage of experimental ethnography, the Colombian Laura Huertas Millán approaches the vestiges of the splendor of the drug business to enter a hallucinatory mental journey.”—Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria