MIFF Presents Shorts From Away

by Gregor Smith

Tal Berkovich as Dolores in "In the Blood"

Last week, we took a sneak peek at the Maine Shorts to be shown at this year's Maine International Film Festival. Now, we'll take look at MIFF's other shorts program, the Shorts From Away.

Ranging from 7 to 23 minutes long, the ten shorts total just over two hours. All are works of fiction, and all but two are from the United States. They range from comedy to horror, from sadness to joy.

The Shorts from Away are available only online — they will not be shown at the Skowhegan Drive-In — but you can watch them at any time of the day or night during the festival at www.miff.org. The cost to see all ten is $10. Brief descriptions of each of the shorts, in the order in which they will be presented, follow:

• "Carpetland!" (USA, 23 min.): Twenty-somethings Samantha and Tyler are entry-level employees at a carpet store. According to the filmmmakers, "Sam would do anything to replace their insufferable boss, Dildon, as [the store's] manager…. Tyler spends most of his time making garbage-noise music for his comatose mother. When they find themselves involved in a deadly freak accident, they have to decide: will it be the final nail in a coffin of small-town malaise? Or a chance to escape it once and for all?"
• "Hello Ahma" (Singapore & USA, 16 min.): Unable to return to Singapore for her dear grandmother's funeral, an eight-year-old who has recently moved to the United States with her parents, tries to cope with that loss, at the same time as she is trying to adjust to her family's new life in a new culture. She comes to believe that her grandmother has been reincarnated in a turtle that she got from a pet store.
• "In the Blood" (USA, 7 min.): In this spoof of spaghetti westerns, a grizzled bandit, Sartana, rides into to town to rob the saloon and recruit a gang. Meanwhile, his former girlfriend Dolores is packing to leave town, but her current suitor interrupts her, delaying her departure until Sartana and his gang arrive. A shootout ensues.


Malik Willcot as March in "Waters of March"

• "Waters of March" (USA, 16 min.): In this meditation on loss, a sensitive young man, March, tries to come to terms with the death of his grandmother. Describing this short on fundraising website Indigogo, director Chase Johnson writes, "[F]rom an African American standpoint, the Grandmother is the matriarch and often the glue that holds every intricate relationship together. 5 years ago, I lost my family's matriarch, 2 years later, I would lose my remaining Grandmother on my father's side. Looking back, I had a very interesting relationship with grief and how grief, alone, affects each individual differently. So I wanted to make a film…as an ode to grief, my Grandmothers lost/transitioned, and the ancestors that remain with us every where we go."
• "Sales Ready" (USA, 12 min.): Allistair, a socially awkward high school student, recruits classmates as sales reps in his self-absorbed father's pyramid scheme to sell kitchen knives. All is going well, until one his reps cuts himself with one of the knives during an attempted sale, and as a result, Allistair is threatened with expulsion from his new high school, where he had been thriving.
• "Baby Bites" (USA, 10 min.): Bev is an introverted twenty-something with an eating disorder, which she attempts to conceal. Nonetheless, her obsessive exercising, repeated upchucking, and her limited diet soon make her problem evident to her one true friend and housemate, Sarah, creating a rift, when Sarah tries to intervene.
• "Ouzo and Blackcurrant" (UK, 7 min.): On a peaceful afternoon, two young women, school friends who have not seen each other in several years, take a stroll through a junkyard where they used to hang out and drink. When one lifts her phone to take a picture of the other, she see something that terrifies her.
• "Butterfly" (USA, 10 min.): Brian, a 30-year-old, African-American man in New York City, wears a women's slip beneath his men's shirt and pants. In this short, a wordless exploration of gender fluidity, he struggles to accept and express his identity in a society that scorns and persecutes those who do not conform to male/female stereotypes.
• "Destete" (Argentina, 14 min.): Teresa, a middle-aged woman from Madrid, returns to her father's cattle and sheep ranch on the Argentinian plains, which she inherited upon his death. Originally intending to stay just long enough to review the ranch's operations prior to selling it, a heavy rain delays her departure, giving longtime ranch manager Ernesto a chance to try to persuade her not to sell.
• "Mudminnow Channel" (USA, 7 min.): Through images displayed on a TV screen in a darkened room, we follow the adventures of an unnamed protagonist with an oversized, polyhedral, yellow head. This experimental short combines music, poetry, and pyschedelic animation.

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