NYC Shorts, in Time for Fall
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When Tribeca Enterprises, which stages the ever-growing Tribeca Film Festival, lent its considerable backing to last month’s glitzy, media-savvy Tropfest short film competition, a new, New York-based major-circuit film event was christened. Tropfest drew thousands to Battery Park to watch some of the best shorts the independent community had to offer.
It seemed a new frontier for short films in New York. Of course, few New Yorkers realized they already had a great short film festival in the city — much less one that is organized each year not by festival bigwigs but by like-minded filmmakers. The New York City Short Film festival (nicknamed “NYC Shorts”), a smaller and, admittedly, less glamorous affair, will begin its three-day run at Symphony Space on Wednesday evening. The star-studded juries and celebrity endorsements that accompanied “Tropfest” may be missing from the equation, but the third annual edition of NYC Shorts (nycshorts.com) offers a proven track record of launching films to prominent destinations. One after another, the festival’s trio of founders — film students David Barba, James Pellerito, and Jennifer Pellerito — has watched official entries receive warm welcomes at the Sundance Film Festival and the Academy Awards.
Advancing to Sundance in past years were such works as Tze Chun’s “Windowbreaker,” about a series of burglaries and the subsequent wave of paranoia overtaking a quiet corner of suburbia; and Douglas Bensadoun’s “At the Quinte Hotel,” which used an Al Purdy poem to tell the story of a man’s experience at a hotel bar. Kitty Flanagan’s NYC Shorts entry, “Dating Ray Fenwick,” was optioned by the BBC as the basis for a British sitcom.
It was last year, though, that the festival displayed an even greater sense of prescience when it selected Torill Kove’s 14-minute “The Danish Poet” not only to be part of the NYC Shorts roster, but to screen almost every night during the festival’s run. “The Danish Poet” went on to win the 2007 Academy Award for best animated short film.
So it was with a sense of encouragement that Mr. Barba, Mr Pellerito, and Ms. Pellerito set to programming their third annual festival, poring through more than 900 submissions to come to a final schedule of 31 titles, spaced out across five programs. All this, despite the fact that Tribeca Enterprises announced mid-year that it would be moving Tropfest to September — only a month before NYC Shorts — to take place under the lights of Rockefeller Center and with well over $10,000 in prizes to be handed out.
“As a challenge, it’s nothing new,” Mr. Barba said. “If you look at all the big festivals out there, you see so many that are making the same mistakes — in being the biggest or the flashiest, by going for a list of 300 movies or the big stars, they dilute their quality.”
It isn’t the competition’s selectivity, he said, but the motive for that selectivity.
“In New York, the biggest events in town aren’t ideal for the sorts of filmmakers we appeal to,” he said. “The New York Film Festival is less a festival than a showcase; they go to other festivals and only bring back the best. And Tropfest is less about bringing together films with original concept than in having a competition, using a theme to foster creativity. But that kind of approach can also become gimmicky real quick. We’re less interested in gimmicks or people making movies as part of a competition than in filmmakers who set out to tell a great story.”
As Mr. Barba sees it, this year’s slate of 31 titles (divided among two Wednesday evening programs, two Friday evening programs, and a Saturday morning children’s program) is packed to the brim with intriguing, insightful stories. He points to Tiffany Shlain’s 18-minute “The Tribe,” one of the festival’s two documentaries, which offers an unorthodox history of the Jewish people through the lens of the Barbie Doll. Beyond documentaries, Kun-I Chang’s animated “Fission” envisions the point at which reality merges with art as a man comes to see himself as sprayed graffiti on a wall. And the German film “The Pick-Up Artist,” directed by Steffen Weinert, imagines the awkward meeting between a sex-obsessed bachelor and the 6-year-old daughter who resulted from one of his one-night stands.
The larger mission of NYC Shorts, Mr. Barba said, has been molded in large part by his experiences as a filmmaker. (Indeed, the tagline of the NYC Shorts organization is “by filmmakers, for filmmakers.”) The three co-founders recently completed Columbia University’s MFA program in film production, and all have learned the bewildering ropes of the festival circuit. Together they have shown work at more than 200 festivals and received more than 40 festival awards.
Recognizing how challenging this world can be, Mr. Barba hopes that the growing reputation of the NYC Shorts selections process will help the event rise above the A-list-only New York Film Festival and the competition-oriented Tropfest as the most important, Academy-qualified shorts festival in the city. “Without a doubt, it’s the Academy Awards that are viewed by the everyday person as the most important award you can win, and to see a film like ‘The Danish Poet’ go on to win the Oscar, it says a lot about us — that this is a festival that shows Academy Award winners,” Mr. Barba said. “The Academy has about 20 film festivals that are Academy-qualified events, where the best film from that festival is automatically considered for the short list. To become one of those festivals, I believe, you have to be in existence for five years, and I think we’ve already shown a track record for choosing quality films during our first three. So this is now one of our biggest goals: to become Academy-qualified, and help get all these great films the recognition they deserve.”
ssnyder@nysun.com