Report from Bodega Bay's Short Film Festival

If there’s one thing more challenging that starting an international film festival, it’s probably trying to run it in a remote location an hour’s drive from any town large enough to be called a “city.” The fact that Pamela and Kirk Demarest undertook both challenges is laudable; the fact that the first Bodega Bay International Short Film Festival was such a success is remarkable.

Despite all the recreational competition on Memorial Day weekend, over 900 people showed up at the wind-swept UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory outside of the town of Bodega Bay to enjoy 93 short films, ranging in duration from 3 minutes to 15, entered from 26 countries as far away as Iran, the Ukraine and South Korea.

For some reason, I was chosen this year as a member of the festival jury, for which I’m honored and grateful. In the next few days, I’ll be receiving a DVD of the top film in each category – horror, comedy, drama, romance, action, sci-fi, thriller, documentary and animation – from which I’ll choose my top-rated films. But the story of how these selections became their category leaders is more interesting than who the jury is.

Each screening took place in two-hour sessions of nine to 12 films,  and everyone in the audience was given a sheet with the names of the film on them – and instructed to rate them from 1 to 5. A #1 rating is the lowest, the 5 the highest, but audience members were discouraged from getting too analytical or comparative: Just vote your reaction to the film, we were instructed. A 1 is an “eh,” a 5 is a “wow.” That’s as clear a judging criterion as I’ve ever heard.

We attended two screenings on Sunday before going to the filmmakers/jury mixer at the nearby Bodega Lodge and Spa. Both sessions were “mixed genre,” which gave us a chance to sample the range of shorts submitted. While there’s no guarantee that we saw any of the genre category winners, there were several films that exemplified the imagination and quality of the entrees.

Appropriately, the 11 a.m. screening began with the ultra-Hitchcockian “Fear Itself,” appropriate because Hitchcock’s own classic “The Birds” was filmed nearby. The black-and-white neo noir short by Brandon McCormick (USA) was both tense and witty, and if it fell short of a “wow” rating it was probably due to the inevitable let-down of tightly wound plot simply running out of ideas before it ran out of time.

Short films are far more demanding on the filmmaker than they are on the audience – they must set up a problem that is appropriate not only to the medium but to the limited duration as well, keeping their few minutes filled with challenges that are not greater than time can support. Thus, big ideas can easily get sink a short, but it’s also possible to have too small a concept even for a miniature.

An apparent audience favorite was “The Hand,” a dialog-free film from Ukraine by Oleg Borshchevskiy. A woman goes to a park bench to read, and finds there a forearm and hand in a box, also reading. She goes through the motions of pretending to read while trying to get his attention, and before long packs up the box and scurries home.

The rest of the movie tells us everything we know about relationships – the ecstatic heights and dismal lows of two people coming to know, fall in and out of love, and ultimately learning to leave one another. The hand emotes the full range of male caring and distance, and the woman plays out her part with conviction. It was one of several films that featured a cast of one (well, one and a limb in this case), which is made or broken by that single actor.

Similarly was a film in the second set, “An Affair with Dolls” from Sweden by Hans Motelius. The actress is dressed up like a child, playing with a box of Barbies and Kens in a game that becomes ever more revealing, and disturbing, as it goes on. The conception is appropriately simple, but it was Alexandra Chalupa’s ability to draw us into the troubling reality of her play-acting that made the film one of my favorites.

Another hit was “Script Cops,” by Scott Rice (USA), which was an hilarious send-up of the TV reality show “Cops” and the obsession of self-deluded screenwriters around the country. It drew a lot of knowing belly-laughs, not unexpectedly considering a fairly high percentage of same were probably in the audience.

There were also serious films about cancer, spousal abuse, immigration, the end of the world – the usual plot devices. Like the annual bill of Oscar-nominated shorts that plays in independent cinemas, the films were diverse and of uniformly high quality. I look forward to seeing many of the movies that I missed in the best-of section that the audience rated at the festival; and even more, I look forward to next year’s Bodega Bay International Short Film Festival.