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At the Sundance Film Festival, shorts have to gasp to get any of the high-altitude oxygen; journalists tend to lavish their hype on features. So the festival’s annual traveling shorts program functions as a kind of counterweight. This year’s grab bag, like those of years past, is a mixed one, of award winners, nonwinners, promising shorts and meh shorts. Say this for the lineup: Of the seven movies here, no two are remotely alike.
Things kick off intriguingly with Stefanie Abel Horowitz’s “sometimes, i think about dying,” a portrait of a suicidal office worker (a very fine Katy Wright-Mead). Her introverted routine is disrupted when a colleague (Jim Sarbh) asks her out on a date and tries to coax her out of her shell. This 12-minute film ends with a powerfully abrupt cut to black, but with such a brief buildup, the catharsis feels premature. (Kevin Armento’s “Killers,” the play on which the film is based, seems to have had an additional layer; it contrasted two pairs of characters.)
Next up is a Canadian documentary, Alexandra Lazarowich’s “Fast Horse,” which follows a Siksika Nation horse-riding team as it prepares to compete in the annual Calgary Stampede. It’s mainly notable for some dangerous-looking jockey’s point-of-view shots.
Nikyatu Jusu’s “Suicide by Sunlight” begins with a premise that could sustain an entire series. It’s set in a world where vampires exist — but white vampires, who can’t go out in the daytime, are the second-class citizens of the undead, while black vampires, protected by their melanin, can roam during the day.
Despite this setup, the movie is a smaller-scale character study: Valentina (Natalie Paul), who is secretly a vampire, yearns to see her human children, who are kept from her by their father. There’s a lot of metaphorical potential here — vampirism as addiction, vampirism as leverage for domestic power — though 17 minutes is not enough time to make much of it.
On the other hand, “Muteum,” at four minutes, is the tightest and the only animated film in the bunch, and a reminder that brevity can still be the soul of wit. The director, Aggie Pak Yee Lee, depicts the adventures of a group of mischievous children at a museum who take advantage of their teacher’s brief absence to add their own twists to Michelangelo, Magritte and Vermeer.
Christopher Good’s “Crude Oil” is the most ambitious narrative film in the group, trying to capture a years-spanning friendship — between bossy Lynn (Tipper Newton) and mousy Jenny (Andreina Byrne) — in just 15 minutes. Good’s colorful montages seem poised somewhere between playful experimentation and any number of this-product-is-our-lives commercials. His formal skill compensates for an under-realized central conceit. When Jenny reveals a useless superpower — the ability to make people smell odors — Lynn, as usual, refuses to be topped.
Robert Machoian’s “The Minors,” in which a guitar-playing grandfather has a basement jam session with his grandsons, is too mild to make much of an impression (although one of the Sundance juries, in awarding it a directing prize, seems to have disagreed).
The most substantial short is Meryam Joobeur’s “Brotherhood,” in which a Tunisian family is plunged into suspense after the eldest son returns from Syria, where he had gone to join the Islamic State. His views have since evolved, but his father distrusts him, wary of his influence on the younger boys. It’s the most complete-feeling film on offer here — and perhaps the one with the biggest stakes.
2019 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.
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