Every year, Audience Awards hosts the Experimental Shorts Film Festival open to absurd, unrecognized, progressive, visionary experimental shorts, 30 minutes or under. Here are the top three jury-selected winning films from this year’s 2018 Experimental Shorts Film Festival.
The winners were decided on by the global audience and the Experimental Shorts Film Festival jury panel including, Paz Lenchantin, bass player for the band, Pixies and award-winning stop-motion and Super 8 filmmaker; Jacques Thelemaque, award-winning filmmaker and co-founder of Filmmakers Alliance and programmer for the Los Angeles Film Festival; Johnny Coffeen, 2017 Experimental Shorts Film Festival winner, Student Academy Award winner, Grand Jury Prize winner at SXSW Film Festival.
The first place film is Old Man by Leah Shore. For more than 20 years Charles Manson has refused to communicate to the outside world. Until now. These are actual never before heard phone conversations between Canadian best selling author Marlin Maarynick and Charles Manson. Shore talked with us about the making of her film and explained,
Old Man took about 2 years to make. It was really difficult to produce. I was about 21 years old when I made it and a starving artist, so I had to both work a bartending job and make this film with a small crew at the same time. I knew it was going to be a special film in the end and kept pushing through. It took me a few months to edit the audio of Manson talking to Marlin on the phone into something that made sense to me and when I was done producing the audio story I went to the picture. I was lucky enough to collaborate with amazing animators such as Jonathan Selisgon, Michael Olsen, Isam Prado and Liesje Kraai.
The second place film is Resilience by Aurora Ovan, an immersive experimental short film about the feeling of “home” and the fear of change. The short is mostly a stream of consciousness that takes place in Renée’s head, a young artist who leaves her country for the first time to study abroad. Her memories are connected one to the other in a sequence of lyrical images. The different emotional states that Renée is passing through are represented by matching water physical states. Ovan told us,
This was my first attempt in making a short movie and the decision of having no dialogue to express something so personal has been kinda tough. This then helped me with understanding how to show things without actually telling them which is something that I really wanna keep exploring in my future movies. It’s been crazy, but we made it and most importantly we had a lot of fun.
Third place film, Dissolution by Arly Jover follows the rapid descent of a man whose life has changed in the blink of an eye and follows the dissolution of the life he once knew.
A huge thanks to our community of creatives and filmmakers who submitted to the 2018 Experimental Shorts Film Festival, and a hearty congratulations to all the winners! We look forward to seeing the top three films premiere at AudFest 2019!
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