Mike Plante

Eliza Hittman’s Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight bristles with the kind of authenticity and longing that most feature films struggle to communicate. With a clarity of vision, the short details a Russian teen in Brooklyn who makes an unimaginable choice in order to protect her aging father. Hittman’s natural gifts for honing in on inner teenage struggles blossomed with her debut feature It Felt Like Love, a similarly toned character study that brings out rarely-represented NYC environments. The feature premiered this past January at the 2013 festival in our NEXT section. See the short that sparked her feature below.

On the other end of the spectrum is the ghostly, beautiful MuM, made by Nick Peterson. Using an old school handmade style, MuM harkens back to the pre-computer stop-motion world of animation where atmosphere and textures are as vital to the film as the characters and story. His nuanced timing gives you a nice, moody cinematic trip in the classic Ray Harryhausen realm. Fun side note, MuM was made at the same time as Mark Osborne’s MORE, shot in the same stage with the same stop-motion camera system within the Experimental Animation program at CalArts, shot on 35mm film when they were students. Also, check out the new short film project Peterson just announced with another Sundance alum, Jon Heder.