Una Hora Por Favora?
Mike Plante, Short Film Programmer
Starting in this month, the Sundance Film Festival will be programming short films on YouTube’s Screening Room channel, adding two new films every Friday not currently available on the website. Already a vast world for exciting short films, from intense fiction and documentary to risk-taking experimental works (and of course the wild world of cats), Sundance will be pulling Festival favorites already on YouTube into a single page alongside the new films. With millions of videos online, having a curated page provides a history of the Festival and a single go-to portal for great short films.
In honor of Valentine’s Day, check out a hilarious look at bungled Los Angeles romance in Una Hora Por Favora? starring Michaela Watkins and Wilmer Valderrama, directed by Jill Soloway. Just last month, Soloway won the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award for her first feature Afternoon Delight, which premiered in Dramatic Competition at the Festival. Here is the 2012 short that led to bigger things. Also making it’s YouTube debut was Virgil Widrich’s love letter to cinema, Fast Film. Selected at over 300 film festivals worldwide, Widrich’s meticulous style involved printing out more than 65,000 images from some 300 classic Hollywood movies. You can learn more from the ‘Making Of’ featurette included on our page.
This Friday, we present two wildly diverse examples of the short documentary. Acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Sergio Oksman, whose latest project played opening night of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, explores the world of Ernest Hemingway doppelgangers, and the lost legend of one fateful day when Hemingway yearned to join them in the vividly stylistic Notes On The Other (watch here). On the other side of the spectrum lies Anna Cady’s pressing 30% (Women And Politics In Sierra Leone), which also debuted at last month’s Festival (watch the film here). Using luscious oil-painted animation, this affirming portrait of three vibrant women fighting for change in a post-conflict Sierra Leone reveals the strength of the human spirit in the face of corruption.
Rounding out the month will be Kinda Sutra, Oscar-winner Jessica Yu’s touching documentary short hybrid that reveals the world’s collective confusion when it comes to where exactly babies come from, and Keith Bearden’s cleverly made and deeply affecting meditation on nostalgia, The Raftman’s Razor from 2005.
Additionally, collected on our page you will always be able to find shorts from the Festival’s history that filmmakers have already placed online. Some highlights for this month include the early Louis CK short Ice Cream, and, in honor of President’s Day, Funny or Die’s Drunk History: Douglass And Lincoln starring Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle and Zooey Deschanel.
