Thousands of short films are submitted to SXSW every year, and only 18 make their way into three narrative shorts programs, with a few more shown as part of the Texas Shorts programming. The quality of these films is consistently high every year, and 2017 was no different. The following short films are presented alphabetically and represent excellence in the category.
American Paradise
What starts off as three guys lazily fishing turns into a morality tale with a stark take on race in the modern age. The tall tale being told features a man whose life is small and sad, who decides to fix it by robbing banks dressed as a black man. That’s all fine and good as far as it goes, but when the mask gets permanently attached to his face, we’re in allegory territory. American Paradise mixes in a little Raising Arizona to explore this urgent issue.
Cla’am
If you’ve ever seen a “Sir Digby Chicken Caesar” sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, Cla’am won’t appear out of the ordinary. As it is, a homeless-looking British dude tracking down a Soylent Green-esque coffee conspiracy is the perfect kind of weird. Why are there coffee shops popping up on every corner? Well, it’s obviously an addictive drug, and the beans are made out of abducted people. Cla’am is just the right mix of paranoia and dark-roasted humor.
CUBS
This Icelandic offering concerns a single dad and his attempt to host a sleepover for his teenager daughter and her friends. There are certainly uncomfortable shades of American Beauty, but the piece ends up being much more about the rivalries of young girls and the way they must navigate modern social mores. The story takes a tragic turn, a real punch to the gut. Director Nanna Kristín Magnúsdóttir has captures both sweetness and sadness in one fell swoop.
DeKalb Elementary
In the vein of Gus Van Zant’s Elephant, this is a re-imagining of a school shooting, this one in DeKalb County, Georgia. In this short, however, the action is quickly narrowed down to just two players: the unstable shooter and the terrified office assistant. We see waves of anger, suicidal tendencies, and regret, all with an unexpected dose of love from the victim. DeKalb Elementary is certainly tense, but not graphic, and leaves the audience both shaken and stirred to contemplation.
I Know You From Somewhere
Take the L.A. dating scene and add in an ugly internet story, and you get I Know You From Somewhere. The main character is a young women just trying to find love, but not only is she on the receiving end of some rather bad behavior, but she also becomes the target of internet trolls when she’s falsely accused of racism. Angela Trimbur carries this most timeliest of short films.
Mutt
Addiction is a great conflict around which to build a story, and in the case of Mutt, we see a family desperate to help a young man hooked on booze. Just before our story begins, though, he adopts a stray pit bull, and while that might sound quaint (or terrifying) it turns out to be a four-legged excuse for him to avoid rehab. Father and sister do everything they can for their son and brother, but nothing comes easy. Mutt takes well-explore territory and makes it fresh.
The Rabbit Hunt
Director Patrick Bresnan, who screened his amazing work The Send-Off at last year’s SXSW, is back with a new work also set in midst of rural African Americans in Florida. This is not Bresnan’s culture, but in both films, he has captured it with a removed but observant eye, this time following a family out on a hunt for rabbits. The clubbing, the skinning, and the butchering can all be brutal, but they are real as is the few dollars each bunny brings in. The Rabbit Hunt isn’t long, but it packs huge insight into its short run time.