The 30th Annual Palm Springs International ShortFest has once again come and gone too fast for my liking, much like a short that ends too soon. The festival celebrates the year’s best in short films, taking place from June 18-24, 2024, but with three hundred and ten short films and a plethora of talented filmmakers, cast, and crew on hand who created them, no amount of time seems sufficient for a movie lover’s paradise in the middle of the scorching desert. There were many truly remarkable films that I saw at the festival and surely countless others that I missed.
The Best of the Festival Award went to the Bogotá Story, an outstanding Columbian/USA movie by filmmaker Esteban Pedraza. It’s about his home country back in 1992, and a young mother faced with living in a dangerous area filled with car bombs and drug violence, who must choose between staying there with her husband and baby or moving away on her own to America for a job. It’s such a gut-wrenching decision to have to make and Pedraza’s film captures the intensity of it all perfectly.
I Thought They Were Protected
The winners of the top five awards all received five thousand dollars and, more importantly, are now eligible to submit their films for Oscar consideration. The Car That Came Back from the Sea from Switzerland won Best Animated Short, Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr (USA) won Best Documentary Short, Oyu (France/Japan) won Best Live-Action Short Over 15 Minutes, and Complications (Norway) won Best Live-Action Short 15 Minutes and Under.
Some of my personal favorite films at ShortFest did not win any awards, but they deserve a tip of the cap for their uncanny ability to make you feel something in such a limited amount of time. Make Me a Pizza is a strange vintage adult movie parody that is as if Weird Al Yankovic went dirty, and I’m all about it. Special Delivery is a sweet rom-com that mixes Foley work with porn. Tragedy Babes is a Twilight Zone-esque parable on the dangers of live-streaming obsession. These movies all have fascinating characters that draw you into their strange and wondrous journeys, which is a key element for shorts.
I’ve always had a soft spot for documentaries, and ShortFest featured some of the best short docs I’ve ever seen. I Thought They Were Protected is a local Palm Springs documentary on the imminent extinction of Joshua Trees. Days of Hate is a documentary that mixes punk rock with a difficult romantic breakup. My favorite of the bunch is Kowloon!, which is about America’s largest Chinese restaurant and the emotional pressure of keeping a family business alive.
