Sundance Day 3: Shorts IV Carter Smith, Daniel Mulloy, Hong Khaou…

Odds that a Sundance short films program will be a good harvest are in the high percentile — with over 6000 short film submissions sent in and about less than 100 selected certainly increases those odds. In any given year at the festival, you could easily trace back a filmmaker’s presenting his/her feature film to the roots of shorts included in the fest from previous years. Because we’re big on auteur theory, this year’s coverage will include several short film items. Program IV was the tops of my list because it includes the latest works from two filmmakers I discovered in 2006 with their ward-winning shorts: Carter Smith (Bugcrush) and Daniel Mulloy (Antonio’s Breakfast).

Carter Smith’s YEARBOOK (see pic above) was a DIY (set in his kitchen actually) is a slideshow talking-heads-esque with distinct flavors a la Smith — warped comedy elements (perhaps a companion piece to Bugcrush) with sci-fi elements. Nicolas Provost who was the only fillmmaker who didn’t make the trip to Park City, basically grabs a bunch of footage from the tourists and residents of Las Vegas and makes a mafia-esque thriller out of conversations that random folks are having – call it a docu with plenty of imagination. Stardust even features Jon Voight and Dennis Hooper who ventured out to Sin City I guess for some gambling and card-playing.

Jeremy Konner’s The Majestic Plastic Bag takes a National Geographic approach to the oceans being littered by our consumption of plastic with a voice-over from Jeremy Irons. Oddly this comes across as knock-off from Ramin Bahrani’s short which was shown in Venice. Jeff Tomsic’s I’m Having a Difficult Time Killing My Parents provided the comic relief for the section with a man-boy who doesn’t want to grow up. Writer and actor T.J. Miller provides the laughs. Ethan Suplee is also on board. NYU student Tahir Jetter deals with some personal issues in his mini non-relationship drama called Close., and the more alluring pair of the night come were supported by the now defunct UK Film Council.

Hong Khaou’s Spring uses the same locale as found in The King’s Speech (he mentions how he found the place in the video below) and produces a trippy exploration of an S&M encounter, while Daniel Mulloy’s Baby features a Dardenne Bros.’ find, the beautiful Arta Dobroshi (from Lorna’s Silence) in a film about a woman’s need to get pregnant no matrer what the circumstance are — it’s a layered, mysterious piece that makes us look forward to the day Mulloy turns in his first feature film. Here’s his placeholder for the film and the rest of his work.