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 BAM, will be putting on a ShortsLab workshop for short filmmakers in New York, with directors like Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone), Carter Smith (The Ruins) and Ryan Fleck/Anna Boden (Half Nelson) participating.

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck will be speaking at the workshop’s story panel, which is a particularly interesting place to put them. Although Half Nelson was their breakthrough film, it was by no means their first, and what helped them find funding for the later picture was their 2004 film “Gowanus, Brooklyn.” It focuses on a young girl in the titular neighborhood going about her life and wondering about what it is that seems off with one of her teachers.

“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.

Stylistically both films are completely different, but both tell fascinating stories without resorting to gimmickry (a common problem for shorts). In any case, they’re both well worth checking out and the workshop’s appreciation for these works bodes well for its future graduates.