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Salute Your Shorts: ShortsLab

Since the beginning of Salute Your Shorts, one of the primary reasons for this column has been to support the creation and appreciation of short films. You wouldn’t necessarily think that this would be necessary, but short films, while much more easily accessible due to YouTube and the nigh-infinite other streaming video services, remain critically neglected and weirdly ghettoized. For some reason there’s an assumption that if a movie is 70 minutes long it’s worth $10 of your money to see in theaters while if it’s 45 minutes long it isn’t even worth your time.

One group who has continued to promote shorts is the Sundance Institute. This weekend the Institute, in collaboration with

“Gowanus, Brooklyn” won the Short Filmmaking Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and part of this, I suspect, is due to the thin line it walks between having a story and simply creating interesting characters. Because of the time constraints of the medium, short filmmakers frequently pack their stories with plot and heightened events. Nash Edgerton’s shorts, for instance, are always a rollercoaster ride, and that’s true for many festival shorts.

Fleck and Boden took a much more thoughtful turn in their film and instead are primarily concerned with developing their characters. The film is by no means plotless, but what’s memorable aren’t individual moments but the feeling left by the film, in particular its young lead Shareeka Epps. There’s a maturity to its hands off approach, and “Gowanus, Brooklyn” has a lack of true resolution that marks it as a different sort of story. Its ellipses and mysteries make it feel like real life. This style also marks Fleck and Boden’s later works, and this early feature doesn’t simply feel like a calling card for their later works, like all good shorts it’s fulfilling at its runtime rather than feeling like just a fragment of a longer work.

A nice contrast to “Gowanus, Brooklyn” is Carter Smith’s “Bug Crush.” Much of Boden/Fleck’s film is about the aimlessness of youth, whereas “Bug Crush” is a tense genre picture with a clear story hook. It’s also based around high school, but here a boy’s crush on another, more mysterious boy leads him to a much more sinister, almost Lynchian world nearby.

It’s a deeply expressionistic film that builds its mood through camera angles and audio. That isn’t to say it’s not about normal high school life as well, simply that it’s about taking a trip into adolescence’s darker possibilities rather than working as a character study. Much of the film takes place through nothing more than dialogue played over a road, but this trip oozes with sinister feelings. “Bug Crush” is almost a lesson in slowly building suspense and while its ending may not be the most original, its craft in storytelling is universally impressive.

Purely Vile!: Bugcrush

Have been OBSESSED with "Bugcrush" since i read it in "Queer Fear II" an anthology of gay themed Horror stories...I know I know...usually those things are HORRIBLE but this collection was different........VERY different......and to start it off was a story by Scott Trelevan...THIS story....and I fell in love with his imagery and narritive......his portayal of angsty and dissaffected teens...it was creepy cool without being gothic and scholcky...Somehow the horrors of teen life in a small town are made even worse by not only exploring the feelings of being different and of growing sexual curiosity....but by deving into the OTHER kinds of horrors that are out there...the unspeakable kind...the OTHER monsters in the closet.... I soon heard a rumour that there was a short film made of this story and I waited..and searched.....and waited...and searched...and finally I found it ...and was NOT dissapointed!!!!!! The film is very simple in its approach and uses ambinent noise and overdubbed coversations to created hauntingly unnerving results.....staying true to the original story it brought this truly original and somewhat sexual story to life.....

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