Hey, y’all! Happy Thanksgiving! We wish you a happy and healthy one! Here’s the latest buzz with us and the short film genre.
The 23rd Annual FirstGlance Film Festival was a scream – literally! And trust us, that’s a good thing! Normally, when you miss a groundbreaking film showcase like this one, it would be your loss. Luckily, FirstGlance’s awesome panels are available for online viewing.
It was an illustrious panel indeed, with well-regarded actors from TV shows and movies such as “The Young and the Restless,” “Gremlins” (remember that movie?), “Arrow,” and “Resident Evil.”
You can catch a panel featuring the cast of “We Need to Talk,” a critically-acclaimed indie film that won the 2020 FirstGlance Award for Best Feature. This endearing romantic comedy revolves around a single statement a woman tells her self-absorbed significant other. We see how the statement reverberates throughout this thoughtful gem of a film, which stars James Maslow (a member of music group Big Time Rush), Emily Bett Rickards (“Arrow,” “The Flash,” “Brooklyn”), Christel Khalil (“The Young and the Restless”), and Johnathan Fernandez (“Lethal Weapon [TV Series]),” “Gossip Girl”).
Check out the trailer for “We Need to Talk” here.
Another much talked about FirstGlance panel that made waves across the Internets was “Women in Horror” (or as we like to call them, “The Scream Queens”), which featured some of the most accomplished indie filmmakers in horror.
Speaking of horror, we would be remiss if we did not mention the critically-acclaimed FirstGlance Film Festival Best Feature nominee “Bad Candy,” an entertainingly terrifying tale about what happens in a small town during Halloween.
Check out the “Bad Candy” trailer at this link.
There is a panel with the cast of “Bad Candy” and two with the film’s lead stars, Zach Galligan (“Gremlins,” “Tales from the Crypt”) and Corey Taylor (“Resident Evil,” “Rollerball”).
To watch these panels and some wonderful FirstGlance Films on your Turkey Day holiday, all you have to do is register and watch at itsashort.com.
Three of the Best Politicals Shorts…We Think
It was certainly a fitting election season for this topsy-turvy year of 2020. Anyway, all of this drama got us to thinking about the best political short films ever made.
Is there a short that is the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or “Bulworth” its genre?
We did some digging and found three shorts that make some sort of political commentary in their own oblique way.
And the nominees are:
“Night and Fog” is widely regarded as the best documentary short of all time and the greatest film ever made, by some critics. This 1956 French film details the rise of Nazism while revisiting the grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek. “Night and Fog” examines society’s appetite for violence and brutality, suggesting that such a horror can occur again.
You can watch it in full here.
“The Big Snit,” is an off-kilter, animated short about a married couple that gets into an argument over a Scrabble game as a nuclear war takes place outside of their window. The conclusion of this short is open-ended, leaving you, the viewer, to interpret what really happened to this couple. Nevertheless, this groundbreaking Canadian short was voted as one of the greatest cartoons of all time back in 1994. The Simpsons even paid homage to it in one of its episodes.
Thankfully, it is available in full here.
The avant-garde, animated short, “World of Tomorrow,” racked up over 40 awards when it was released in 2015. Considered one of the best short films made in the last five years, “World of Tomorrow” chronicles a young girl’s journey through a vast neural network. The short proves to be a fantastical odyssey, yet it chronicles the human quest for immortality and how economics can determine well-being and survival.
You can check out the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/worldoftomorrow
The Notorious R.B.G.’s Bag Swag
From influential films to influential people: The DOC NYC film festival premiered “Making The Case,” a documentary short on the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her collection of handbags. Yes, you read that right, “handbags.”
Director Jennifer Callahan told Vogue about how she came up with the idea and her meeting Justice Ginsburg.
“I told her I thought bags were meaningful in the lives of women…and that it looked like they were meaningful in her life too,” Callahan said. “When RBG agreed to sit down for [the film], I felt she was acknowledging the fact that even the most distinguished of women need a bag to organize a day.”
You can read the article here.
