An Oasis in the Desert for Short Films

As film festivals go, the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films is a pretty laid-back affair. No high-stakes bidding for hot films, few agents or distributors, no red carpets, little press coverage.

“It’s pretty relaxed here, I don’t see people jumping the film buyers,” noted 29-year-old New York director Zack Resnicoff, whose 9-minute short “The Clearing,” about the redemption of a skinhead, drew a lot of comment at the festival.

Notes Resnicoff: “At other festivals the competition for attention is intense, people pushing their tapes on distributors. We’re being social here and meeting people and not experiencing too much of that.”

Short films, Hollywood’s often neglected stepchild, stepped into the spotlight this week as filmmakers from around the world gathered in Palm Springs for the seventh annual festival, which began Tuesday and ends on Sunday. It’s the largest event of its kind in North America, according to event organizers who expected 10,000 attendees; 280 short films are being screened, 100 of those world premieres.

For a medium with few mass-market opportunities, the festival serves as a showcase to the public that short film is a bona-fide art form, while also acting as a marketplace for filmmakers shopping their properties to the handful of distributors in attendance. Throughout the event’s six days, videotapes of shorts are never farther than at arm’s length, and posters and press kits exchange hands constantly--no studio marketing machines here.

On Wednesday evening, when the desert air outside was still well in the 90s, a crowd of more than 100 lined up an hour early to snatch prime seats for the festival’s sold-out “Let’s Hear It for the Boys” program, which featured 10 animated and live-action short films about gay subculture. The audience seemed to divide evenly between young Angelenos sporting trendy T-shirts and local retirees with silver tufts of thinning hair and Hawaiian shirts.

Films in this program ran the gamut from one-minute animations to the 20-minute story of “Boychick,” a gay Jewish teenager who fantasizes about fictional pop star Melissa Hart (read Britney Spears) not out of sexual feelings, but because he wants her “moves.” Like most of the twenty-and thirtysomething crowd of filmmakers at the festival, Glenn Gaylord of Los Angeles, the film’s writer and director, has a full-time day job--as an AIDS-awareness advocate for a nonprofit group--that doesn’t involve making movies. He spent nine months producing “Boychick” on his own time.

*

The key to a successful short, Gaylord says, “is to grab the audience right away. Whether you do that with your actors or by visual effects, you have to come out with your guns blazing.”

As the festival makes clear, short films are as varied in tone, style and form as their feature-length cousins. Ione Hernandez’s film “Aizea--City of the Wind” tackles the surreal and mystical aspects of Mexican culture with a visual kaleidoscope of symbolism. The film chronicles the return of a husband and father to a small village after the wind expelled him. Though originally part of her graduate thesis, the film spun into a three-year project for Hernandez.

“Once you spend that much time on something, the biggest satisfaction is to have it seen by an audience,” said Hernandez, who grew up in Spain and lives in San Diego. “I would love [to find a distributor], but I am not counting on it. It’s not about money--you end up spending your own for three years. You don’t have anything. You don’t have a car. You just have a movie.”

Director of programming Jennifer Stark says she looks for a blend of student and nonstudent films, as well as a good representation of international cinema. “I try to evenly spread the films like potpourri so that any one program can stand on its own.”

Most of the American films on the festival circuit are student productions. At about $1,000 a minute to produce, they are relatively inexpensive and easier for first-time directors to control in terms of the writing and production. “Short films are accessible financially and technically, and because filmmaking is a skill, they are good practice to develop as artists,” said Sharon Wu, a festival juror and a CalArts professor of animation and film.

Shorts range from highly experimental formats with no dialogue to more mainstream films that some eager filmmakers hope could catch the eye of Hollywood studios. By the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ definition, they must be less than 40 minutes long, but most average between 15 and 30 minutes, according to Wu.

With distribution of shorts limited to specialty cable stations and the Internet, the festival’s screening and networking opportunities drew Judee Wales, an actress and co-producer of the short “Mixed Signals,” to Palm Springs.

“Since this is the largest film festival, it’s the perfect opportunity for filmmakers to see what the response is from a mixed audience,” she said. “But first and foremost, I am here to sell the property.”

As the head of San Diego State’s film department and the executive producer of “The Short List,” a 30-minute weekly PBS series of short films entering its eighth season, Jack Ofield is a much sought-out man at the festival. To Ofield, “There are two kinds of short filmmakers: the ones who are just in it to make a name for themselves--students on the way to feature films using shorts as a calling card--and those who really view short film as its own art form.” Two-thirds of Ofield’s selections for the PBS show are from countries abroad with governments that support artists and with mainstream acceptance of short film.

In the last few years, Internet companies like Atom Networks and Hypnotic Films made a splash at the festival, enticing promising young filmmakers with unprecedented solicitations, according to Denis Pregnolato, the festival’s executive director. “The rule of thumb on distribution is generally [paying the filmmakers] $100 per minute. But some dot-coms were offering filmmakers $10,000 up front for rights to their films,” Pregnolato says.

An easily accessed channel for films, the Internet has increased the visibility of shorts. But with the slowing of the Internet economy, the high-dollar deals of recent memory seem a thing of the past. Though Hypnotic still attends the show (it has a deal with Universal to act as a recruiter for new talent), Atom did not make an appearance--despite hosting one of the only parties last year.

“The Internet was a big white hope with people waving their big checkbooks, but it was never going to last,” said Ben Gregor, a first-time British filmmaker.

For Brian To, whose film “Audit” takes place in an IRS office and stars Sally Kirkland, short films are a stepping stone to a hoped-for feature film career. Getting there involves a good deal of self-promotion, he said.

Together with Kirkland, who doubles as the film’s co-producer, he distributed and posted more than 600 fliers. “We called everyone we knew and said it was a major grassroots effort,” To noted. “Sometimes it doesn’t even matter if people attend the event or screening. It just matters that they know about it.”