The
feature films get most of the attention at High Falls and pretty much every
other festival in the world. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the short
films. Look at it this way: The packaging might be smaller, but the quality is
just as good. Look at John Stockton, or Napoleon, or even Tom Cruise.
There are three programs of short
films screening at High Falls (Thursday night, Saturday night, and Sunday
afternoon — see the schedule on page 21 for more details), and overall,
they’re just as eclectic as the features (which range from hardcore nuns, to
killer siding, to Don Quixote). If you missed the mammary-obsessed double
feature of Size ‘Em Up and the June
Foray-narrated Boobie Girl at the
ImageOut Festival earlier this month, High Falls gives you another crack at
ogling them. Others share similar subject matter despite being very different films, like Who Hangs the Laundry: Washing, War and
Electricity in Beirut and The Gentle
Cycle. The former is a documentary that shows a housewife explaining the
ridiculous process of cleaning clothes without reliable sources of water or
electricity, while the latter portrays an unlikely friendship between two
people at a laundromat.
Some just have damn interesting
titles, like LoqueeshaAshleyFranklinJoséBrown
and How to Tell Your Friends From
Japs. Others sound like must-see prospects once you do some digging into
their backgrounds, like Noël en Famille,
which was co-directed by Aruna Villiers (a script supervisor for giants like
Luc Besson, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Brian DePalma, and Mathieu Kassovitz), and 2+2, an experimental documentary about
John Forbes Nash, Jr. (better known to you as that guy Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind).
You can even catch a program of
shorts made by RIT film students. It’s screening Saturday, November 2 at 1:15
p.m.
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2002.
