Festival Makes a Case for Short Films : The 10 works should be required viewing for members of the academy who have doubts about keeping this category.

The second annual International Festival of Short Films, composed of 10 works ranging from three to 22 minutes, should be required viewing for any member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in doubt over retaining the best short film category in the Oscars.

Selected by festival founder Jeffrey Hamblin and his colleagues Sean Reilly and Shane Peterson from a whopping 500 shorts from around the world, this year’s offering is just as lively and impressive as last year’s. The 110-minute program, which is presenting as a curtain-raiser Edwin S. Porter’s 90-year-old “The Great Train Robbery,” begins a two-week engagement Thursday at the Four Star (5112 Wilshire Blvd., between Highland and La Brea avenues) with an opening-night benefit for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. On the weekends commencing Feb. 12 and 19, the festival will be screened at Cal State Long Beach’s University Theater. All 10 films will screen at each performance.

Most of the films express a view of the universe as absurd, brutal, indifferent--but usually as a darkly funny experience. Setting the tone is Norman Hull’s “Out of Town” (New Zealand), in which a young man (David Morrissey) gets his foot stuck in a pipe in a field alongside a road, but his pleas for help are met with indifference and contempt. Writer Neil Clark builds and builds the man’s predicament to a comically bleak finish.

Hubert Toint’s “Dark Slide of the Trombone” (Belgium) imagines a state so totalitarian that it is held that only one size of photographic paper is valid. For the members of the trombone band of the tyrannical Counselor (read Big Brother), this means that there is space for only 10 of the 15 trombonists--and getting into the group shot can be a matter of life or death.

The hit of the festival is Alison MacLean’s gloriously outrageous “Kitchen Sink,” which brings to mind David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” in its creepy ingenuity and stunning black-and-white imagery. It all begins when a woman (Theresa Healey) starts pulling on an icky tendril out of the gook backing up in her kitchen sink. Instead of revealing what happens, it’s better to quote MacLean’s own description of her film: “It’s a dark little fable about fear and desire.”

The other equally original and quirky film in the festival, Grant Lahood’s “Snail’s Pace,” also from New Zealand, charts, via knockout time-lapse photography, the progress of a snail crossing an asphalt road intent on reaching the lettuce on display outside a small market.

Jeff Balsmeyer’s “The Room” (United States) celebrates the power of the mind and the imagination as a 12-year-old boy (Andrew Barlow) tries to resist his paranoid father’s attempt to keep him inside a New York tenement apartment. “The Room” employs some droll and impressive special effects. Similarly, Guy Jacques’ “Uhloz” (France) features two young boys and adroit special effects and has as its theme resistance to arbitrary parental authority. It takes its title from the name of a model-rocket kit that some man is handing out to every kid who wants one--and, as a toy, proves to be about as benign as the Chucky doll in the “Child’s Play” movies.

Gus Van Sant’s “Thanksgiving Prayer” (United States) features William S. Burroughs reciting his poem of the same name, a mordant and witty savaging of the Norman Rockwell view of America. Framing Burroughs is a collage of archival footage alternately complimenting and counterpointing Burroughs’ sentiments.

Ted Demme’s “The Bet” (United States) is the longest (22 minutes) and the most traditional film in the festival, an increasingly tense study of a young man (Josh Mosby) whose compulsive gambling endangers the modest but thriving Brooklyn delicatessen he owns and operates with his straight-arrow (but not nerdy) brother (John Hickey). Demme, the nephew of director Jonathan Demme, is clearly a talent, a gifted, natural storyteller.

On a lighter note, there’s Pascale Ferran’s charming “This Kiss” (France) in which 17 couples, varying in age, sexual orientation and race, kiss before the camera in varying--and amusing--degrees of shyness, uninhibitedness and passion. Completing the program is an actual Oscar winner--hopefully, not an endangered species as the Academy ponders retaining the shorts category--James Hendrie’s “Work Experience,” a sly, funny vignette about how an unemployed but ingenious young man (Lenny Henry) inadvertently (at first) works his way into a coveted job as a department store floorwalker.

Information: (800) 925-CINE; on night of performances: Four Star: (213) 936-3533; University Theater: (310) 985-5560.