Sundance 2024: More Shorts Than What Can Fit The Big Screen!

Armed with my handy-dandy digital pass, I watched as many shorts as I could as the hours of access clocked down inexorably. The merciless cutoff of 3:00 AM put and end to my mini-festival. I wish I could’ve seen more! Here’s hoping that next year, the Sundance Film Festival will be more generous with access. A weekend is not enough to watch everything you want to watch. Or better yet…maybe they can approve our virtual coverage credentials. That would be wild!

Here are my impressions of some Sundance Shorts that stopped short - did you see what I did? - of scoring an award, but managed to get some sweet, sweet exposure. This is the thing film festivals do best: to get new filmmakers and audiences to meet for the first time. Movie buff, look out for what these talents do next! Even the misfires are full of potential.

Pathological

Alison Rich reveals herself as a triple threat. She writes, directs, and stars in this comedy about a young woman who resorts to desperate, transparent lies to court the acceptance of her coworkers. Nobody falls for it, but that doesn’t stop her. Things change when, by magic, her wildest fantasies become true. She wakes up in a mansion with a handsome, muscular brain surgeon lying next to her, hungry for sex. The people whose approval she craves change, trampling over each other for her friendship. As you can imagine, getting everything your heart desires is not all that is cut out to be. 

Rich is proficient in crafting this Charlie Kauffman-light exercise, enough to make you eager to see whatever she does next. With a bit of luck, she can go farther than milking a high-concept premise.

Rainbow Bridge

I like wacky comedy as much as the next guy, so my problem with “Rainbow Bridge” felt unexpected. A couple of mad scientists develop a method for people to communicate with their pets. When unflappable Thu Tran walks in with her elderly doggy MeeMoo, they find a human-animal bond so strong it can fulfill the promise of the technology they developed. They don't realize that it might break their equipment…and make reality and the afterlife collapse into one. Or something. The low-fi aesthetics are charming. So far, so fun. But this is the kind of comedy that pings its humor on loudness. Most characters scream their lines and paint overwrought caricatures, pushing the volume to 11. I wanted to like it, especially when MeeMoo turned into a giant furry beast out of Sid and Marty Kroft’s nightmares, but the frantic, loud delivery rubbed me the wrong way. 

Alok

I was not familiar with Alok Vaid-Menon, the non-binary personality at the center of Alexandra Hedison's short documentary. So, for a few disorienting minutes, I was not sure if I was watching a fictional short or a send-up of reality TV. The tone seems to be pecking to the converted, or at least, the people on the same wavelength as the activist. The portrait plays like a demo reel of a longer work, which might offer a more well-rounded portrait of them. As it stands, it is the kind of thing you would play at a lifetime tribute: an adoring portrait with all the rough edges sanded down. It tells too little, and it lasts too long.

Essex Girls

This is a warm, sensitive coming-of-age piece that makes you wish for director Yero Timi-Biu to expand it into feature-length, the better to explore the inner life and relationships of the characters. “Essex Girls” follows Bisola (Busy Ige), a black teen girl, growing apart of her two white besties, Saffron (Maisie Smith) and Charlie (Adrianna Bertola), as she accepts the invitations to hang out with another black girl in school, Ashlee (Corinna Brown). The movie makes you consider the other side of integration and the need to connect with people closer to your identity and experience of life. 

“Essex Girls” also offers a look into the liminal space at the end of teenhood and the beginning of young adulthood, when maturing can mean leaving your friends, family, and life in a small town behind. If only, at least for a night of fun in the big town. Once Bisola and Ashlee hit a house party - flat party? - in London, you feel the movie could follow many paths: a wild sex comedy, a cautionary tale about a small-town girl trying her luck in the big city, or a comedy of romantic errors. The director holds on to the matter-of-fact rhythms of ordinary life, tenderly observed.

The Bleacher

A punky, badass piece of stop-motion animation following a tough gal reckoning with the violence in her past. The triggering event is the loss of one of her socks in her local laundromat. Frantically looking for it, Rita gets sucked by the kind of laundry machine that can only exist in the Twilight Zone, a device that reveals her subconsciousness to us and helps her face her inner demons. Or rather, trauma. Alas, to use current catchphrases of wellness culture goes wildly against the spirit of this short. Think of something in the stylistic and temperamental neighborhood of MTV’s “Celebrity Deathmatch,” and you will be closer to the fumes of “The Bleacher.” Crime movies have never been so malleable.

I would say the Sundance jury should have awarded “The Bleacher” over the easy provocations of “Bug Diner,” but you will have to see them both to make up their mind.

The Heart

Sundance can be silly when it tries to play coy. The program identified the novel director of “The Heart” as Malia Ann. Good for the unknown first-time director getting into Sundance! Yeah, right. Throwing diesel to the bonfire of the Nepo Baby discourse, Malia Ann turned out to be an alias for Malia Obama, whose real name graces the credits of the movie. Popflick’s official stance is that, although we are self-proclaimed champions of indie cinema, we have no bone to pick with scions of privilege getting into de filmmaking game. They are just like us! But with connections, living expenses covered, and a big safety net…you know the drill.

It won’t serve you well to approach Obama’s self-assured debut with cynicism. “The Heart” is a humanist tale about intergenerational guilt and coming to terms with death. A man (Tunde Adebimpe) visits his lonely, elderly mother in her big house. He fails to bring her her favorite cookies, and they bicker a bit. When he goes upstairs, she drops dead, alone in her living room. When her will is read, he discovers he is her sole heir. Besides the house and everything she owns, she wants him to keep her heart in a jar. The whimsy is tempered by the urban setting. He rides the bus with the jar on the seat beside him. Later, he sees a woman on the street who looks like her deceased mother. Maybe she is her, carrying her loaded shopping bags with difficulty amid the squalor of a neighborhood gone to seed. He does what he must. He gets off the bus and follows her to ask for forgiveness.

Forget Obama's advantages. She is sensible enough not to splurge on a vanity project, and commits to the low budget film ethos. More interesting, the tone of her movie hints at a particular sensitivity, open to the uncanny but grounded in reality. The matter-of-fact spirituality suggests she has seen Krzysztof Kieslowski. Not a bad influence on a young filmmaker. Then again, maybe I'm projecting. Only time will tell.

Miisufy

The spirit of Soviet-era animation is alive and well in Liisi Grunberg’s bizarre, speculative comedy about an AI pet reveling against the relationship parameters with its owner. Miisufy is a digital Tamagotchi-like cat inhabiting a parallel world. Little by little, the cat invades reality. In spite of the preoccupation with cutting-edge technology, the style is old school. It’s colorful and two-dimensional, with flourishes of folk aesthetics. At ten minutes, it may feel a tad too long, but the way it connects tradition and futurism.