 "Photo: CCNY")
 "Photo: Columbia University")
 "Photo: Art Center College of Design")
You think about it, it's obvious. At some point back in the day all of our directing heroes must have, somewhere, somehow, gotten their rocky start. Even the heavyweights - Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese - must have, at one time, had to lift themselves up from the bogs of obscurity and screen their first raw and rough-around-the-edges film. What if we could be there for that magical moment? What if we could turn back the clock and rediscover our heroes anew? For that matter, what if we could walk into a theater today and discover for the first time the heroes of tomorrow?
Well, now you can. The Denver Film Society this month proudly presents its annual First Look Film Festival. Founders Wade Gardner and Josh Weinberg have pored over hundreds of short films from student filmmakers across the country and assembled the best into six packages: Bold Beginnings, Truth and Lies, Late Night Zombie Horror Madness, One Step Beyond, Colorado Focus and Total Control. Each contains between six and nine short films, which vary in length. The shortest entry is just 76 seconds; the longest clocks in at 28 minutes. This special extravaganza runs Thursday through Sunday right here at our own Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli.
I know what you're thinking: a bunch of whack, artsy, bijou movies that only a handful of film majors and philosophers can appreciate. Not so. This year's lineup has already garnered several industry awards, including South by Southwest winner of the best experimental short ("27,000 days"), winner of the Student Emmy Award ("Las Piñatas"), and two, count 'em, two finalists from the student academy awards ("A Very Small Trilogy of Loneliness" and "Bartholomew's Song"). Not bad company for a band of up-and-comings.
Here, then, is a short selection of previews to prime you for this year's event:
Pop Foul Friday, April 20, 8 p.m.
Package: Bold Beginnings
Bobby (Sekou Laidlow) - father, dutiful husband - prides over his grade-school son, Lavonte (Steven Clark). One of his most treasured moments is watching Lavonte play ball for the neighborhood little league. An opportune dropped foul ball - one that lost the game - offers Bobby a perfect moment to teach his young, impressionable son how to be a man in the face of defeat. But perhaps this lesson is best reserved for Bobby himself. What promises to play out as Norman Rockwell relationship turns south when, on the walk home, Bobby and son are confronted by local thug Daryl (Keith Bullard).
We don't know the history, we don't know why, exactly, Daryl beats Bobby down; but we accept it. We gather that these two deal in bad business together and that such are the travails of a modern-day daddy who has a dark side.
But instead of treating that dark side, writer/director Moon Molson investigates the world that lies beyond the 'hood, opening doors on the interior life of a JV gangsta. The film examines without flinching the fallout generated when commitments to the street conflict with obligations toward the family.
Can Bobby maintain allegiance to both? Ultimately, no. When the stability and the harmony of the family unit rely on such a dubious head-of-household, the house cannot hold. As Bobby's credibility and powerbase erode, his wife (played by Danielle K. Thomas, who simply destroys as the steel-fisted, true backbone of the family) and his son find themselves learning newer, crueler lessons of what it means to be a man.
In the end, "Pop Foul" asks us to reexamine our notions of manhood and our fidelity to them. As the thicket of Bobby's lies and duplicity becomes untangled, so does our knotted understanding of what family participation means and family devotion requires.
By appointment only Friday, April 20, 10 p.m. Package: Zombie Horror Madness
Lyle (Matt Ryan) has a problem. He cannot reconcile his larger-horizon cravings with his small-town, dust-bowl wasteland of a life, and he wants out. But Lyle has a girlfriend (Annya Broderick) and "girlfriend" wants him to stay. He's forced to choose between the woman he's attached to - she's a tight package and the sex, apparently, is killer - and the life beyond he yearns for. Now enter wayward Lillian (Nancy Sinclair), a beautiful stranger emblematic of that life beyond. Will she compel Lyle to break free?
Of course, this is Zombie Horror Madness, so there's far more at work here than simple sexual politics; Lillian isn't merely a wayward lamb. In fact she's in town by way of appointment, looking to buy that perfect country getaway.
But instead of a rustic ranch home she finds herself on the wrong end of girlfriend's cruel schemes. Such is the crux of this fun and fangorous short from director John Faust. (No laughing, English majors - that's his real name.)
For a first film, Faust has found his stride: The movie is equal parts shock and mock, riding the ol' suspense/shocker train as well as offering to derail it with yuks (as in ha-has) and more yucks (as in what, exactly, is she going to do with that blood?). The characters are wonderfully one-dimensional and the plot about as thick as O positive, both of which work wonderfully for this genre.
Silences Saturday, April 21, 8 p.m. Package: Total Control
To read the news, you'd think that racism and xenophobia radiated solely from the loud mouth of shock-jock Don Imus. But sometimes the sounds of inequity and discrimination can be heard sharpest in the cruel absences of what isn't said.
Meet Octavio Warnock-Grahm. He's your average American kid who grew up in your average, cracker-white (I'm cracker white; I can say that) Midwestern small town with an average pasty white family of five. Which is fine, except that Octavio happens to be more than a few shades, er...darker. And his mother isn't saying why.
Why does our culture invest so much in skin color? Why does it matter how much English or Dutch or German or (gasp!) African blood you might have? Academically worthy debates, I'm sure. But for Octavio Warnock-Grahm, these are his life's burdens.
Be the first to comment on this article!