DC Shorts Blog

‘Best Of’ Screening

By DC Shorts on February 9, 2009 6:28 PM | Comments (0)

Hundreds of people attended the Best Of screening that showed the winners of the 2008 DC Shorts Film Festival Friday and Saturday night. A huge success, the U.S. Navy Memorial Burke Theater was filled to the brim with people anxious to see the absolute pinnacle of last years’ DC Shorts Film Festival.

“There were some really good films in there,” Curtis Cannon said, after leaving the theater. Cannon’s personal favorite was Irish Twins , an intense thriller about death and memory with ample parts humor and drama that never loses its razor sharp edge.

Not limited to one drama or even one country, three of the shorts were foreign language films, two were documentaries, five were comedies and five were dramas. Every one was unique and compelling in its own way, be it funny, exhilarating, terrifying, horrifying or cute.

The shorts were “very beautifully done,” Kent Morrison said, at intermission.

Morrison identified two favorites, the gritty and shocking reality of sex-trafficking in Nina Quebranda was a “beautifully done, serious subject,” he said. He described A Land Called Paradise, a documentary expressing the voices of Muslim Americans as “so warmed hearted.”

Friendly and entertaining was CU@ED’s, a comedy about two people meeting for coffee at the title restaurant with blackberry and laptop in hand that speaks volumes about modern social life.

Luis Medrano enjoyed the humor of a woman running over men in the hopes of winning Prince Charming’s heart when she brought him to the hospital in Speed Dating because it “makes me think of a lot of DC area people,” he said.

Universal in its own way was PATH, a short about a man reflecting on his girlfriend, both the positive and the negative, in a way that is funny and that also speaks to memories we all have about the heaven and hell that special someone has put us through.

“It was amazing,” Amy Friend said. Enchanted by the power of stories mere minutes long, “you watch a short film and you feel like its a feature.”

The List had all the markings of a feature length film, action, drama and huge implications for our world in its depiction of a woman being tortured for her suspected links to terrorism.

The Best Of screening set “a high bar,” Amy Saidman said. While its easy to make a horrible film, good ones are far more difficult to produce. “There are a lot of festivals of shit, and this isn’t one of them.”