Festival View: Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting

There is a look to genre short films. You expect a DIYness, and a high contrast shooting. I see hundreds of them a year, so when something bucks the trend, I know I am watching something special. 

Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting is one of the most beautiful short films I have ever seen, with effects that are on-par with Hollywood’s best, and a story that is equal parts heartbreaking and breathtaking. 

The story is this; in an alternate Depression era, a mother, Selma, and her daughter, Em, are griffin hunters, the most significant ritual of their ancestors. The two have a different point of view on the griffins. Selma is of the tradition, while Em is far less staunch in her desire to continue it, but if it’s gonna happen, she wants a big score. 

If you’re thinking this is a lot like the 1930s in many ways, you’re absolutely right. The Depression was an era of massive cultural and societal change. The young, those who would be fighting in or dealing with the impact of, World War II in a decade, were coming to grips with the idea that their future was likely to be worse than their parent’s past. The way mother and daughter interact with one another shows the difference between those upon whom the Depression landed fully, and those that came up through it. Selma is simply happy to have something, Em wants different, if not necessarily better. 

Something that is interesting is in the writing process; they viewed the griffins as co-stars. That is demonstrated not only through the way that the characters interact with them, but how they interact with each other about them. Selma sees their role as important, and they must do right by the beasts as well as themselves. Em doesn’t think the ritual is doing right by the griffins at all, but seems to want to do ti right.  

There is an interaction with wood nymphs that shows Em’s still a child, even if she’s saying things that indicate her maturity, at least unto herself. The inclusion of the wood nymphs does a lot of work in establishing the world as more than simply the humans and the griffins, which in the weeks since I watched it for the last time, has made me wonder what else is out there. 

I can talk about the mythological connections between the griffins and Christian iconography, about how that plays with the new religious movements of the 1930s, about the nymph as a signifier for youth, beauty, nature, all of which are embodied by Em. It’s all there, and I chewed on this for days and days, watching it a half-dozen times during programming, and then in the weeks after the festival where it was incredibly well-received. 

But the thing that hit me was the look. 

Let’s start with the griffins. 

I was 18 when Jurassic Park was released. I remember sitting in the theatre, it was the morning of my high school graduation, and seeing the first dinosaurs appear and just being incredibly stunned by the realism. Even back then, I knew computer graphics, had seen SIGGRAPH video compilations, and this was better than anything I’d ever seen. 

The griffins were at that same level, only now, with decades of advancement, improvement, this was easily the best fantastical animal I’ve ever seen on screen. They are realistic in a way that not only brings them to life, but also makes everything around them seem more realistic, adding an almost Dorothea Lang sense to the action, and that adds a sense of pathos. It is incredible what effects can do when they are integrated into the story instead of being illustrative. 

The black and white cinematography is utterly clean, perfected graded, and insanely precise. It may seem as if it was chosen because of the timeframe, and the director has said as much, but it also did something that no one may have seen in the process. It draws out sorrow. There is a natural bleakness to black and white in this age of the hyper-colored cinema experience. What filmmakers are starting to realize is that is it not merely the setting that is portrayed through the color palette, but the emotional signifier. This, actually, is a concept that dates back to German Expressionism, but it has often been buried under decades of most contemporary film criticism. 

This entire story deserves to be played by fine actors, and this is where Semla & Em Go Griffin Hunting gets it so right that it hurts. Selma is played by Pollyanna McIntosh. You may recognise her from The Walking Dead or Vikings. She also directed the exceptional short Quicksand. There are few genre actors today who naturally inhabit their characters as McIntosh, and I can not express how she manages to play the fantastical and the Depression era equally well. Em, played by Milly Shapiro of Broadway's Matilda and the horror flick Heredity, hits every note hard. The little softness to her performance allows the breaking of the tension, and it makes the hard hit harder, smarter. 

I can’t recommend this film enough. It’s won more awards that I can count and has played dozens of festivals. I hope it’ll get a general release of some-sort, but who knows. Shorts are still hard to find after they’ve run through their festival life.  

--

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: Matti Like

There is a long history of music videos commenting on the history of film. Welcome to the Jungle and Dancing on the Ceiling come to mind. There is a long history of genre music videos. The Blackeyed Peas and Janelle Monae play there. There is a long history of genre music videos commenting on the history of film, like Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight Tonight fits that perfectly. The Italian music video Matti Like, a wonderful video that played at Cinequest in 2026, is one of the best of all those I’ve seen.

Let me start with the basic idea: it’s been 50 years since Young Frankenstein was released and director/songwriter Federico Cavallini has decided an homage was due. Not only an homage to the original masterpiece, but a fan and funky short film that plays in the music video form. The closest thing I can think of is the Paula Abdul classic Rush, Rush with Keanu Reeves that plays with the Rebel Without a Cause story within the music video form without making the song about it at all.

The thing is that it’s not a shot-for-shot re-make, for one thing it’s only 4 minutes long, and it tells another story within the visual aesthetic that defined Mel Brooks’ genius work, while also nodding the head at the classic Universal Frankenstein in much the same way that Brooks did... mostly.  It’s gorgeous, but I tend to think that anything playing in the realm of the classic high-contrast, Expressionist stuff of Arthur Edason deserves positive attention! The look works, and Director of Photography Rui Dias deserves a lot of the credit.  

To really make good understanding of a music video, one must find the appreciable portions of both the music and the video. Now, the song is written and performed by Cavallini, who is one of a growing number of musicians also making their own videos (Kate Bush’s Little Shrew played Cinequest this year, for example) and it’s a fun little bop. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d hear as a mid-pack Eurovision entry from a middle-European country. The song is sweet, but the video is even better.

The idea is pretty much that the Frankenstein that is created (and it is named Frankenstein, just like an astronomer gets to name an asteroid after themselves!) is a woman without the neck bolts or the scars (or the vegetal appearance of Charles Ogle’s first monster in 1910) and she goes on to become an influencer and when the villagers storm the castle, she turns their fear-filled rage into a sweet castle dance party.

Now, let me break this down in a weird way; this is a love story about filmmakers and Mel Brooks.

If you wanted to pay homage to Mel, typically you’d choose Spaceballs or The Producers, but Young Frankenstein is something even more special; it’s Mel’s unseen hand. It is exactly the movie that Mel Brooks could do that exposed his very real love of classic literature (he apparently once wrote a script, very early on, for a Golem picture) and an understanding of the genre film and how its roots mingle with comedy. Don’t believe me?  Look at the evolution of humor and genre fiction magazines. They mirror each other, though a big part of that is the general advance of printing technologies. He is tying so many of the moments and characters that populated 1930s genre film and amped them up in an incredibly intelligent way. The greatest example of why it's about the unseen hand is that he's not in it, and it's working in a field where he was not well known. While his hand (and face) is absolutely seen in the comedy science fiction masterpiece Spaceballs, in Young Frankenstein he was working more slyly. 

Brooks wasn’t just making a funny science fiction film based on a horror film (that's another debate that needs to be had; remember, there was no Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation to require that debate at the time), but a specific reference to the way that 1930s science fiction worked.  The way that he approached the material, and especially the famed Me and My Shadow performance, which was exactly the kind of thing you'd see in 1930s and 40s MGM flicks, is entirely based on one of Mel’s more impressive ideas: that comedy must reflect something back at the viewer. Brooks was not merely reflecting the individual film Frankenstein, but everything from The Island of Lost Souls, The Invisible Man, and Things to Come, and to a lesser degree Laurel and Hardy, the Keystone Cops, Buster Keaton and many many more. Brooks got all that, and incorporated the ideas without being showy when paying tribute. Cavallini works with that idea as well. Even when it breaks down into a modern dance party, headphoned DJ groovin' and all, it feels less like responding by presenting a music video dance party, but more like the ones you might have caught a glimpse of in 30s films… or perhaps more like retro-30s comedic things like the ending of The Imposters.

Now, here’s the ultimate question: is it genre?

Well, yes, or I put it in the wrong category at Cinequest. No matter how you slice it, it’s telling a science fiction story. It’s still giving us Frankenstein, just told in reflection of Young Frankenstein which just happens to be in reflection of 1930s genre film and fiction and so on. That is incredibly smart short filmmaking.

While there’s still some festival life in Matti Like, you can actually watch it on Vimeo! 

--

Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: IT'S HARD NOT TO BE ROMANTIC ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

Sometimes, a title hides the way the film you’re about to watch will move. Other times, it says exactly what kind of world you’re about to step into. This latter segment is the realm in which It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time Travel falls into. 

The premise is simple: an ex-con named Swan’s weed-loving best friend Randall has decoded the secret to romantic time-travel that has been hidden in the film Somewhere in Time. To combat this secret information from getting out, the rest of Hollywood has flooded the zone with their constant stream of impossible time-travel films. He’s deduced that the real secret to time-travel hides within copious amounts of marijuana, falling asleep, knowing what someone looks like and where they’ll be at some point in time, and love. This he uses to go back to the party that was taking place in the house where Randall lives at the same time as the robbery Swan was framed for. There, Swan meets an incredibly charming young true crime podcast aficionado who apparently likes ‘em a little scruffy. They flirt and try to “solve” the crime. Well, they mostly flirt and make brief mentions of the crime. Randall spends the time eating edibles and having adventures...and being chased by “the golden girls.”

If this sounds like a lot to pack into twelve minutes, you’re right, but the script by director Michael Charron is just about perfect and hits the beats at every moment. It’s a remarkable act of content stuffing, especially when he’s also able to give things time to land with appropriate impact. The direction is incredibly solid, and the cinematography and editing by Steven Gunter only helps put the entire package together in a way that feels both polished and immediate. That’s a fun realm for a work of fiction that literally dwells in the not-so-distant past. Production wise, it’s a simple series of locations made to feel foreign through character interaction, which probably speaks to the actors ability to play the room. 

Let me explain:

There is a genre-acting theory that a character makes the setting. If a character reacts to the environment in a way that shows the foreignness of what is otherwise a normal situation, it is what’s establishing the setting far more than any prop or piece of set design. Hence an actor can change a romance into a horror film, a science fiction film into a stoner comedy. That’s what’s going on here, because there are elements of romance, stoner comedy and science fiction all roller-up into a single, tight, twist-ended package, and there is a character who is embodying each of those settings with their performance in the piece. Randall provides the stoner comedy with not only the prodigious amount of herb he eats, but by a reaction to the world that is a little bit Cheech and a whole lotta Chong. Swan delivers the romance by his focus on the new woman he’s just met at the expense of the weird, messed up situation he’s in vis a vie his time travel. Liv provides the science fiction by reacting to the world she finds herself in with a happy mix of confusion, disassociation, and utter reaction. They are creating different genre settings within the same visual frame. I love that. 

And I should mention that Liv, played by Alyssia Rivera, is absolutely eye-gluingly perfect in her role. She’s insanely charismatic, and certainly out of Swan’s league, but more importantly, she’s believable in a world where suspension of disbelief is exactly as difficult as the plot it works in. None of this should be easy to accept, but somehow she makes it feel so incredibly natural. We tie into Liv, and her placement in the universe (multiverse?) is one of the most important drivers of the story.  She’s an actress to watch.

I would be remiss to not mention that another film I’ve written of lately, Fireflies at Dusk, dwells in the same cinematic region. In fact, it turns out that the filmmakers know each other. They both reference, obliquely in the case of Fireflies and explicitly here, Somewhere in Time. Both make excellent use of the idea of that long-ago premise to explore contemporary cinematic ideas. Really, there’s just no way an audience who likes to laugh would ever reject either of these. While Fireflies at Dusk is about the class between past and present, It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time-Travel is far more about the actual petty complications of time traveling stoners, a problem that we are certain to encounter as the technology becomes available and decriminalization spreads ever-wider. 

I will also say that this is a film that shows things like Dude, Where’s My Car are valid expressions of science fiction. I have long held that to be not only true, but vital to a genre that often eats its own tail and says that it’s reinventing itself. Science fiction comedy does not always have to be high-brow (like Buckaroo Bonzai) nor even middle brow (like Teenagers from Space) but can comfortably sit among the types of comedy that appeal to smart teens and 50-somethings who occasionally run Pineapple Express-Ted double feature evenings. I love when we still have to think, but might still get a classic He’s so wasted! Laugh out of things. 

Keep an eye out for this one. 

--

Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: Anwar by Fawaz Al-Matrouk

Life as a genre-nerd film programmer isn’t always easy, largely due to the number of genre-hating film programmers. One interaction I had, years ago, was a film programmer for a significantly large, and now very significantly larger, festival who said that there hadn’t been an intelligent science fiction fiction film since Blade Runner, and even attempts to bring the idea back, like Gattaca, failed because “science fiction is no longer about ideas other than what effects they can make flash across the screen.”

Needless to say, we haven’t spoken in a while. 

Every year, dozens of intelligent short genre films cross my desk programming for Cinequest, and many of them are beautiful without relying on effects to drive the storytelling. Some of them are call-backs to the kind of films that were being made in the 1960s and 70s by the likes of Kubrick and Godard. Some years, there is something so fresh that it pushes those comparisons out of in. In 2026, the film that made me feel like intelligent and emotionally complex science fiction is alive and well was Anwar by Fawaz Al-Matrouk.

The story is of a mother and her son. In the future, seemingly the near-ish future, people can chose to live forever, longer than the Earth if they can get off-planet. The mother, played with incredibly pointed emotional resonance by Kerry Bishé, has chosen to become an EverPerson. Her husband, stayed human and paid for that choice with death, leaving behind his wife and a son: Anwar. Anwar is a Muslim, his mother is not a woman of faith. Anwar longs for Heaven and his mother has chosen the certainty of eternal EverPerson life.

The story moves from Anwar at ages 8, 18, and 80. Mother remains the same age, but not the same person. The story deals with the path of choice between technology and faith, at the same time as dealing with the idea of a parent’s obligation and limitations. There are, or course, questions of faith, and not simply religious faith. 

How’s that for thinking science fiction? 

The film is not only intricate emotionally, but it is so very beautiful in nearly every aspect of production. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, stunningly so. The setting, the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains (where I happen to live) are some of the most beautiful vistas in America, and every shooting choice takes great advantage of it. The music, somewhere in the range of minimalism, is used as a salve for the moments of disharmony, a stab for moments of indecision. Silence, though, plays a significant role as well, and when we are left with the silence of emotional situations at their peak, we are forced to fill the air ourselves with thought. That is, without a doubt, the hardest kind of filmmaking; where you establish enough trust with your audience that you can be certain they’ll do the work. If anything can be said of Anwar, it is that Al-Matrouk has faith in his audience to take the effort determine whether a character’s choice is right or wrong, and what that means. We are given a full story, but we have to work through all that means ourselves. 

There is also a significant written science fiction pedigree to the film. Fawaz attended Clarion West, that legendary site for the creation of fine stories since a time called the past. He was mentored by Ted Chiang. You might remember him from such award-winning stories as “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Exhalation.” He also wrote the story “Story of Your Life” which was made into a movie called Arrival. If you’re gonna have a mentor, Ted is the one you wanna get. Fawaz developed the story there, and wrote his own adaptation into the short film. The story will be published in Autumn 2026 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can’t get more deeply tied to the history of science fiction than having a story published in F&SF.

And yet, this is one of the most modern of science fiction tales. The villain, if there is one, well, it could be the very concept of choice. Or maybe time. Or maybe, just maybe, it is technology’s siren call. Or the mind-body problem.  That thinking in the silence of the tensest moment I mentioned, that’s where that decision is made in the mind of each and every viewer. 

I’ve watched Anwar at least five times, and have had at least five different interpretations. It is not that it’s left open-ended, but there's no coda that tells us how to feel as we watch the credits roll. That alone plays so differently from much of the genre work of the last couple of decades. It is a complete story, but just like the stories of our lives, it is not answering any question. That’s a task left for those of us still here after it’s been told.

You can see Anwar as a part of the Unconventional Families program as a part of Cinequest at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, on March 15th and 17th at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, or as a part of Cinejoy (https://creatics.org/cinejoy) online from the 24th to the 31st.  

Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: Fireflies in the Dusk

Comedy science fiction takes many forms. Thoughtful (if strange) scifi like Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension sits right there alongside the more intellectually down-market (but no less enjoyable) Teenagers from Outer Space. That comedy can exist across that spectrum isn’t shocking, but it’s surprising when something lives on both those lines at the same time.

And Fireflies in the Dusk has entered the chat.

The story is actually fairly simple: a 19th-century woman, Charlotte, has discovered that her desk has a temporal connection to a credenza in an ad agency office in 2025. Through letters exchanged via this unusual method, she has met her man Zack, technically a DudeBro, and she’s in love from the letters he’s been sending through the cabinet to her. When she is about to be forced to marry Cecil, a right-proper English gentleman, she chooses to go through the desk and be with her true love in 2025.

And, of course, Cecil follows.

The situation arises where Charlotte and Zack become a 21st-century couple. Cecil and Zach’s boss, Martin, also come together in a lovely sort of twist where Cecil discovers everything from GRINDR to Showgirls.

Of course, things go about in a strange and weird way, and the ending is a wonderful, twisted, utterly appropriate comedic finish.

The first thing is that everyone simply accepts the idea of a credenza that is a time portal, and that passing between the time periods. It’s an absolutely bizarre possibility, but everyone’s basically just “yeah, whatever” about it. That is what I love about science fiction comedy, when the unexpected becomes the completely blasé. That’s a key to genre acting, to be able to play off the strange and interact with a new reality in a natural way. Everyone in Fireflies in the Dusk manages that, with special note going to Emily Goss, whose work I’ve admired since I first saw her in the lovely horror film The House on Pine Street. She’s hilarious presenting a Charlotte that is utterly of her time and finds herself settling into her new one slightly uneasily. Her role at the end is a delightful twist in tone. She provides the backbone of the story.

But it’s Hale Appleman (probably best known for his role in The Magicians) as Cecil who absolutely kills every second on screen. He’s deadpan, but he delivers even lines like “Have you heard of poppers?” with nothing more than a late Victornian Gentleman’s droll. He’s great, and his boyfriend played with absolute dead-on comedic energy by Drew Droege (of Drunk History and Chloë Sevigny imitation YouTube videos) gives the flip side to the Zack-Charlotte relationship.

It’s a perfect little seventeen-minute experience that could be chock-full of fascinating ideas. If time travel is possible through household goods, exactly how many people take the journey? Is it a manufacturing glitch, or a planned feature?  Are there repercussions? What exactly is the mechanic that makes it possible?

Now, these questions exist, but that’s where the trick happens: we’re not here to have meaningful thoughts about time travel; we’re here to see what these two fish out of timestream’s water do when tossed into the present. It’s a relationship comedy, mixed with an office comedy, all set inside a time travel story. That takes doing, and in such a short timeframe, it’s a near miracle.

It’s a short with such good acting (including a lovely couple of pop-ups by the wonderful Amy Yasbeck) and smart writing, which makes for the fact that the biggest laughs at points are not exactly higher-than-middlebrow. The best of these, and they are pointedly funny, are delivered by the excellent Jade Catta-Pretta. She doesn’t have a huge role, but it’s remarkable.

So this is one of those wonderful shorts that don’t only live in one world, both within and without the story of the story, which is the story itself. It’s not as meta as that makes it sound, but it’s so much fun getting there, you wouldn’t mind even if it was. There are smart references to classics like Somewhere in Time (and the poster is a direct reference to it) and The Lake House, but it still feels fresh because, well, it's not super serious about things. Can't argue with that direction if you've got a cast with the comedic chops to pull it off.

You can find Fireflies in the Dusk on the festival circuit, and it’ll be playing Cinequest in March. You can view a trailer here.

Festival View: The Ugly Chickens

Every now and then, there’s a short that comes across my desk that plays on each and every one of my things. The Ugly Chickens happened to be one like that. Subtle science fiction? Yep. Extinct animals? Quite. An adaptation of Howard Waldrop? No doubt. Felicia Day? In the extreme!

Let me start with a thing that has always been true: the best science fiction short films are gentle science fiction. This is what draws the line with features for me. Yes, effect-driven features are really where it's at (and you can fight me on that!), but the shorter the short, the more based on our world the science fictional scenario should be. When I came across The Ugly Chickens, I knew that it was going to be the one that made me happiest.

The story of The Ugly Chickens is fairly simple: it’s the late 1970s in Texas, and an ornithology associate professor, Paula (played by Felicia Day) is running to her class when she bumps into a woman who sees the cover of her extinct birds book showing a dodo. She says she hadn’t seen ‘those ugly chickens’ in years, and tells the story of how her neighbors had raised them. She’s been obsessed with the dodo for a long time, and that led to an adventure to find the dodo, who she hopes is not as dead as everyone had thought. Her obsession leads her to travel to Louisiana, and she finds proof that there were dodos, but runs into a local, and that sets her off on another series of adventures at tremendous cost to herself. The way it plays out is both utterly satisfying and completely non-ambiguously a let-down.

I can remember reading the story in the late 1980s. It was so smart, and it dealt with my favorite: the dodo. They were a sweet, loving bird. They weren’t dumb, just trusting. I might have identified with them a bit too closely, and when I read a story where these noble creatures were present, well, I dove in. It’s helped by the fact that it was a Howard story as well. His writing went into so many other areas and there's always the Waldrop style I miss so much now that he’s gone. I was lucky enough to get to meet Howard a few times, and even did an exhibit based on his book The Texas-Israeli War of 1997. The Ugly Chickens was easily my favorite of all his stories.

The short switches the gender of the ornithologist to a woman, which, when played by Felicia Day, is a perfect choice. I maintain that Felicia is the finest genre actor in America today. Yes, it is a different and more specialized form of the art. It requires the ability to interact with a setting as much as other characters. It’s a multi-tier reaction process that Felicia has mastered in a way that few not named Christopher Lee have managed. She gets to roll through a series of emotional tones in a way that brings her natural charm to the front, while also not blowing out the story as it progresses.

The film is beautiful. The cinematography, handled by Alan Poon, is magnificent. It looks gorgeous, and it takes the changing setting, various time periods, and regional environments, and gives each a deliberate sense of place. Poon also handled the shooting of American Born Chinese, one of the best shot TV programs of the last decade. The entire look of the film plays with Howard’s tendency towards the rural, the backwaters and backwoods. There’s a certain Southern Gothic sense even to the classroom scene.

Now, is this an adaptation that isn’t exactly fully faithful to the story, but it absolutely maintains the spirit of the original. George R. R. Martin, one of the producers, reports that Howard saw an early cut of the picture before his passing and much approved. The script is really smart, and moves between beats without dwelling too much. This is actually more difficult than it sounds to maintain across 30 minutes and still give time for character development and Day’s amazing emoting.

I’ve programmed thousands of shorts, and there are a few which I knew would be winning awards from both audiences and the jury. The Ugly Chickens was absolutely one that I knew would, and I wasn’t wrong. At Cinequest, it won both, and I could not have been happier.

I hope that The Ugly Chickens gets a release along with the other short films that are being made from Howard’s stories, including Night of the Cooters and Mary Margaret Road Grader. 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View - On the Matter of Time Travel in 2023

“Time travel is really hard to write about!” Dean Pelton, Community

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction short films since the very beginning. George Méliès did films about time travel; that’s how very it gets. Part of the reason is that the process of editing creates a form of narrative time travel, moving the viewer jerkily forward or backwards, completely unstuck in time like a Vonnegut character. In recent years, there have been an incredible amount of time travel shorts, including the Oscar-nominated short Time Freak. I’ve programmed dozens of time-travel shorts, from the absolutely blissful Multiverse Dating for Beginners to the darker Conversations with My Time-Traveling Future Self to the smart caper flick Heist, to a brilliant film made in 48 hours, Sorry About Tomorrow.

2023, though, saw Cinequest put three exceptional time travel shorts out there for all to enjoy!

The Problem with Time Travel

Mr. Chevesky of the International Brotherhood of Time Travel Workers has been sent to visit a woman in 2030 by the President of the World to ‘set her comfortably on the viranda,’ which is 2370 talk for eliminating her. He first arrives as a holographic phone call, while he’s waiting outside to come in and do the murder stuff. They actually have a very nice little chat that evolves into… well, that’s the play, and we wouldn’t want to give it away.

The film is satire, and it’s fun, and the pacing is great. The idea of the International Brotherhood of Time Travel Workers is great to see mentioned: instead of being a government agency that sends out the messenger, it’s a union! There’s a theme of ecologic catastrophe due to silica desiccant packets. I knew it all the time!

There’s smart comedy, and the acting is sly in a way I didn’t expect.

Creeper

Amy Acker is always great. She’s been around for a couple of decades and she’s appeared in a few shorts I’ve programmed over the years, including the hilarious The Lord of Catan. Though she’s not the star of Creeper, she adds a touch of gravitas that this short assuredly needed.

It’s not an overt time-traveling short, at least not at first. It reads like a stalker’s tale, but the single greatest use of time-traveling as a way to save the narrative of a film since Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure makes this a 100% certified time travel story.

But really, it’s a story about the dangers of families that don’t function and how the long-term effects can manifest in the present just as easily as in the future. It’s a fascinating examination of that idea, and its pacing is fantastic.

Plus, that one moment when they realise that time travel can literally save your life is just perfection.

Time Tourists

This one is a short from New Zealand, a country that has been making fantastic short films that I’ve shown in nearly every festival I’ve ever worked on. The story is simple, actually: a pair of travelers arrive at one of the most beautiful places in all the universe, a large inlet surrounded by mountains. It’s gorgeous, and that allows for all sorts of fun cinematography.

Oh yeah, the two folks are from the future, where the world has been befouled by us terrible humans.

The pair of them have a little flirting, but one of them is staying in the past for the long haul, and the other has his return ticket already punched.

It’s kinda a cross between a meet-cute and a missed connections, but the time travel plays a role that is both charming and heartbreaking. It’s only 6 minutes, but it packs in the emotional resonance without feeling like it’s trying to pack so much in.

So, what do they say about time travel in today’s festival film world?

A fair bit, actually. There’s the obvious, that time travel is still a totally valid form of science fiction to explore in the short form. In fact, while films like Bill & Ted’s and Looper and even 12 Monkeys certainly make a case for time travel in the feature film mode, the short form allows for things like causal loops and entropic ensnarement to be skillfully dodged, or explored without the sort of pedantic detail that so many feature films feel like they have the runtime to dig into. Two of the films Cinequest is showing this year explore the secondary effects of environmental destruction in the present, which is a classic for SF films of all sorts, but they see the future as being able to change all that, while accepting that humans never change their behavior no matter the certainty of the outcome of contemporary actions. We tend to think that we will change our behavior if only we can be shown the effects, but these stories speak contrary to that idea.

Which sounds a lot more dour than these films turn out to be. Creeper is a thriller. The Problem with Time Travel is a dark comedy. Time Tourists is a romance. This ability to explore different parts of the genre spectrum shows not only the malleability of time travel as a plot device, but its role as more of a setting, an idea Jay Lake and I would argue over for ages back in the day. This sort of flexibility is much easier to explore in less time, and that why I’m so glad that time travel has replaced zombies in genre short film festival submissions!

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: The 1 Up Fever

Sometimes, filmmakers really do manage to see the future

Film festival programming can be a vicious vocation.

It’s true, a lot of us fight, hard, for premieres. It’s a sad thing for me, as I’d love it if every film could show everywhere, but it’s usually the big players that end up with the big films, and the tiny folks, they get the the crumbs, usually a year or two old by the time they fall into our laps.

Now, there are few festivals smaller than the Silicon Valley Science Fiction Short Film Festival. In fact, we don’t have a full-time home. We tour, showing shorts wherever we can. Mostly, it’s at cons, sometimes at libraries, we’ve even projected on a sheet hung on a prominent Silicon Valley engineer’s garage door! We don’t do every year, in fact there’ve only been 8 editions since I founded it in 1999. Luckily, I get shorts from film friends I know through Cinequest or have met on the circuit, and those have buoyed us through the years.

So, it wouldn’t be the place you’d expect a North American primiere for a short that ends up playing around the world and making a buzz again a couple of years later when the world had moved along the path it envisioned and made it seem even more like the documentary it proposed to be! The film, The 1 Up Fever by director Silvia Dal Dosso was our one big win.

So, let us go back to the far-off year of 2013. It was a year like many others, only more so. The world had yet to experience the hellscape that begun in 2016, and Prince and David Bowie were both still alive.  I remember sitting down to work on screening for the festival and coming across a film that had graphics that harkened back to the 8-bit graphics of my all-time favorite gaming system. This film had hit the exact right set of eyes.

Honestly, I don’t think it would have mattered who’d seen it; it’s just so good it can’t be denied.

The film was delivered as a documentary, and not played for knowing laughs as in Arrested Development, The Office, or What We Do in the Shadows sort of way. It was played straight, a series of interviews inter-cut with action scenes of people, out in the world, playing an Augmented Reality game.

In the first segment of the film, a bunch of folks were running around Berlin which had been turned into a giant level of Super Mario Brothers. The graphics are straight out of the NES text-interludes. We see coins, just like those found in the Mario franchise, hanging in the air.

The concept that the ‘documentary’ was pitching was that a game added a layer of false reality where you could go through Berlin collecting coins by hitting the coins, which were virtual representations of literal amounts of the virtual currency Bitcoin. They would collect these by hitting them with their smartphones. If you got your phone taken away by a security guard after trespassing to collect coins, you lost your entire stash. They told the story largely through interviews that seemed 100% legitimate.

And that was the brilliant part, and why so many people were brought into the idea that this was an actual documentary. They spend a fair amount of time going over the mysterious origin of the game and make direct connections to the mysterious origins of the game. Those of us in the know about Bitcoin, and at that point cryptocurrency wasn’t a thing that made headlines, nor were there real cryptobros, though a few of the folks ‘interviewed’ for The 1 Up Fever would certain qualify as such before the term was coined.

What may be the most fascinating part of the piece – it’s all come to pass!

Several AR experiences existed at the time, though nothing at the level that the film presented. Things like the fascinating but glitchy Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary existed as a real-world based mobile AR experience, but they were few and far between, and technologically The 1 Up Fever was worlds ahead of any of the significant platforms. It showed a phone-based game, while many of the real world examples were based around special glasses (and I can’t be the only one who remembers and loved GoogleGlass, right?) or head-mounted helmet-style displays. The idea of using a phone for a real-world-based augmented reality game would become the standard following Niantic’s Ingress. It was still a teeny-tiny segment of the gaming world until a little game called Pokemon GO was released in 2015.

That’s when The 1 Up Fever got a massive up-tick in attention.

The short played various festivals in 2013 and 2014, then showed once in a while until about 2017, when it played not only fests, but also conferences. You latch on to that presentation model and you’re likely to play for a lot longer than the average festival run a short might enjoy. There was a renewed series of debates over the reality of the short, just as we had at our festival when we showed it at BayCon 2014. They played it brilliantly down the line, and it’s only been helped by the real world catching up to their vision. Even today, you’ll find folks asking what the name of the game is and wondering if it’s available in the App Store.

You can still see The 1 Up Fever on Vimeo, and if you’ve got the time, you really should. It’s the kind of sly, prescient sci-fi you really can enjoy while fitting it in with the world around you. Just like in the game...

 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View: Fudgie Freddie

Creators and Creations are deeply tied, and sometimes it gets dark...

One of my all-time favorite musicals is 1990’s City of Angels. It’s an amazing story of a mystery writer and his detective creation. The story goes that the writer is watching his work being adapted into a film, and lo and behold, he hates it. The detective in the story that Stine is writing, Stone, is also disgusted with the way that Stine is writing the story and how it’s coming along. There’s a song, a masterful piece of lyricism by the great Cy Coleman and David Zippel, called “You’re Nothing Without Me” which is the declaration of the writer that his creation wouldn’t even be there if it weren’t for his writing him, and the creation saying that it is only his existence that has made his creator matter at all. This is, in essence, a battle of wills between God and Man, and they eventually reach détente. 

 

Let us flash-forward to a time called a little time called recently. I’m watching short films for Cinequest, and going over the database where the other viewers are rating movies as well. There was one title that I thought sounded fun: Fudgie Freddie. I have no great, grand reason to have thought that it would be a masterpiece; I actually hoped it might be something along the lines of a documentary detailing the life and times of the Carvel creatures: Cookie Puss, Fudgey the Whale, and Hug Me The Bear.  

I was wrong, but Fudgie Freddie was truly brilliant and more than a little terrifying. 

 

The story begins at the start of a live-stream. An animator, Vic, starring down the last hour of his crowd-funding push, is trying to drum up business. He’s no amateur, in fact, he’s previously created an absolute smash-hit of a creation: the sentient, Looney Toons-esque ice cream cone, Fudgie Freddie. The character has defined his whole career, but now, like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock on top of the world, he’s decided to push his creation over Reichenbach Falls and move forward with his passion project: a Star Trek-like science fiction animation that he knows will set the world on-fire! 

 

The world, it seems, is not so sure.

 

He streams and the fundraising is going poorly. So poorly, he’s having to call his mom to give more money. He really believes that this is the animation that will finally break him free of the spectre of Freddie that looms over everything he wants to do. He’s had this vision in his mind since he was six, and if it holds him so thoroughly, it will clearly have the same effect on the viewing audience, right. 

 

A viewing audience that really only wants more Fudgie Freddie. 

 

A well-heeled donor appears in the feed. They start asking for concessions towards the Fudgie Freddie character in the new creation. Our hero gives in, happily, then pushes back against the recommendations, but eventually relents. This brings in fast money, but also more and more requests for Freddie in the new series. He gives an inch; they demand an entire spaceship. As he gives in, our animator finds himself becoming more thoroughly tied to his earlier creation. It actually becomes a part of who he is. 

And not just metaphorically.

 

This is a fantasy short film, and it’s really a piece of body horror. The transformation of Vic’s vision of his work leads to a transformation of his corporeal reality. This is a literal transformation, and it’s super-creepy, but it’s also very painful to anyone who has worked on life-long passions only to find that they can not break away from their past. The idea that Fudgie Freddie is a part of Vic that he is trying to suppress is clear, and I think there’s a lot there to explore. Freddie is one of those early 2000s Flash-style silly animations (think Radiskull and Devil Doll or Homestar Runner) and one that’s clearly not particularly mature in nature. Vic tells us he created Freddie when he was 18, and now, he wants to bring that old vision to life instead of delving back into his sophomoric work on Freddie. He’s so determined to get this vision done that the early asks by his anonymous donor are done with joy and no questions. It’s only when they start to impinge on the vision that’s lived in his head for so long that he begins to push back. 

 

And, spoiler alert, he loses. 

 

The fact is creators deal with this constantly, and while we like to think that the removal of the studio from many of the most popular animation projects frees the creators from interference, it’s still not the case. Frequently, artists still have to try and drum up funds from people who want their vision represented in the projects their funding. Working with festivals, I’ve heard many of these stories, though none that would evolve into this sort of bodily transformation. 

 

We try and say that we are not our projects, that we hold healthy boundaries between our creations and ourselves. So many of us fail this, or at least play a version of Let’s Deny The Reality. Creators, especially those who have to stump to make their creations happen, often begin to live the gimmick. Those that make hard right turns out of those creations often fight against returning because they fear the frequent fate of returning to what they managed to break away from, to become what they were instead of what they want to be. Vic may recognize that he is far more mature than Fudgie Freddie, and we wants to express that, but he knows that if he turns back, he will become the monster he created. Again. 

 

And all of that, the deep thoughts, are only benefitted by direction, cinematography, and especially sound design that only amplifies every beat. The effects are clean, and fairly simple. The way it’s shot is claustrophobic, amping up the tension. The sound has a sort of disquieting unnatural resonance that it allows the ordinary sounds, the ring buzzing and the message arrival notifications, to feel as if they are intruders instead of the anticipated sounds of daily life.

 

The only acknowledgement to the outside world are a phone call and the text messages and money transfers that we see play out. In other words, the only world outside is completely mediated through one kind of screen or another. That message stuck with me, because it also speaks to the loneliness of Vic in particular and creators in general. In recent times, and especially during COVID’s early period, so many writers, artists, and especially animators, have lived reality. I can remember an early proponent of crowd-funding saying during a panel at LoneStarCon in 2013, ‘I didn’t see the sun for weeks on end, but at least I made my goal and then some.’ Sometimes, you must sacrifice vitamin D for cash. 

 

Fudgie Freddie is a great film, and when Cinequest returns to San Jose in August for the in-person festival, it’ll be playing in our Mindbenders program. You can likely find it playing more festivals as well, though it doesn’t appear on my recent searches. You can learn a bit more about the film, and the team behind it, at https://twitter.com/5sf and check out 5-Second Films (https://5secondfilms.com/) where director Joe Salmon and Brian Firenzi have both done a ton of great work!

 

Apparently, this is also a proof-of-concept for a feature film called Ice Cream Man, and if it can maintain the intellectual power and impressive technical filmmaking of the short, I’ll be sure to see it. 

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Festival View - Intense Science Fiction Short Films of 2023

In addition to being a nerd who lives and breathes zines and scifi goodness, I happen to be the co-head for Short Film Programming for the Cinequest film festival. That’s right, I get to watch a couple of thousand short films and choose a hundred or so to put on at the festival every year. It’s a fun job (so fun I’ve been doing it for 20 years even without being paid!) and I’ve been lucky enough to see some actors and filmmakers at a critical point in their careers and even help a few along the way.

Every year, there’s an unwritten theme that bubbles up from the best films. Some years, it’s a lightness, a visual aspect, or even just a technique. In 2022 and 2023, it was genre films that took on pretty big issues in a way that wasn’t lasers-and-dragons, but more near-to-home takes.

The best genre short films usually look like every other short film. Rarely is it the window dressing, the costumes or the sets or the effects, that set them apart from your average short. It’s the utter core of the concept. While films like Gattaca and Blade Runner drop you into a visual world that is clearly something else entirely, it’s the films that play in the world we know like Her and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that have always appealed to me. They look like now, with a few minor exceptions, but the very idea at the heart of them is someplace else.

That can easily be applied to the masterfully dark I XXXX My Sex Doll, which showed at Cinequest this year.

The idea boils down to this—the British government has noticed that the levels of domestic violence have increased to epidemic levels. Like all governmental programs of the 2020s, they decided to regulate all dating by the use of an app where you meet people virtually, and then if you’re deemed suitable, you can date in reality. That seems logical, no? I mean, aren’t governments always getting in the way of our personal relationships in various ways, and they’re often trying to figure out a way to make use of those cell phones we’re all carrying these days.

Now, with the law in place, a new need arose—sex dolls.

Now, these dolls are human-shaped androids, and they’re ultra-realistic. Their voices are modulated, and there are problems with the software, like any other banal technology, and there’s even a customer service line you can call, and our unnamed main character does just that.

And he has to make a return because his doll is broken.

Let me be exceptionally clear—this is a film about men being violent to women, and has a high potential for triggering and general discomfort. It’s a commentary on the violence that lives within many men, and how our current thinking that technology can solve our problems will always bump up against that violence itself. This story could be told as a satire, about how dumb legislative ideas can have unintended consequences, but this is almost 180 degrees away from that. This is blunt, in-your-face, brutal light-of-day stuff meant to slap you out of your assumptions, and about the inevitability of violence. In this world, it can not be destroyed, merely channeled, and here, it is a humanoid who pays that price.

And people know it.

It could easily be read as a condemnation of men, and that’s a valid reading, I think, but there’s also more to it. Our main character is vile, and is viewed as such, but only behind the scenes. Those that know talk, quietly, but they do nothing. How often have we heard that story about humans doing terrible things to other humans and the loudest comments we hear about it are barely amped beyond a whisper as a warning to a friend? When the target of the terror is non-human, there are more questions, of course, but also more self-justification, perhaps. Fay Beck raises all these questions, and they each made me incredibly uncomfortable every time I watched it. It is high cinema when you can manage that sort of effect in such a compact package; she manages it all within 10 minutes.

This is a story that is told with strong aesthetics, the camerawork is precise, and the acting falls in with the kind of genre acting we don’t see as much these days. It’s not subtle, but it’s also not only showy to the edges, never beyond. Every choice made here is meant to make you question why this happens, and after a while, you realise that your assumptions are probably wrong.

Thought-provoking SF like this happens in short films from time to time, but rarely is the landing punch of the content quite this visceral. It is literally hard to watch, though the production is incredibly easy on the eyes and ears. The banality of evil presented here is so utterly thorough that you feel as if it’s the message, but I see it as something that hits deeper. It’s somewhere between a call-out and a cautionary tale, and one that wounds deeply. I went into my first viewing not even knowing the name of the short or anything about it (we do largely blind viewing for programming) and as I passed through the film, I was deeply moved, angered, and made dark realisations that this is a story that Ballard would have understood, Dick would have conceived of, and Butler would have written, though only as a stat down an even darker road.

I XXXX My Sex Doll is still on its festival run but keep an eye open. You can hear director Fay Beck talk about the film for the Deep Fried Film Festival here.

Fast recommendations

AlieNation (trailer). This is a very good short film about the perils of border crossings. Also, there’s a monster, both literally and metaphorically. There’s a lot here to see that makes it a commentary on what we should and shouldn’t be doing with regard to immigration, but also about the view of the ‘other’ we encounter in extraordinary circumstances. It's another punch-to-the-gut short, but it's so well done that I watched it three times to absorb it fully. When you've got a pile of a couple of hundred films you've got to watch in a week, that's a big compliment.

BEBE AI (trailer). Two young people with Down syndrome want to adopt an AI baby in a strange future. They have to fight for it, and get assistance and find new troubles along the way. It’s both a heavy story that deals with the disposableness of people with disabilities, and a somehow heartwarming tale of perseverance. It has elements of A Handmaid's Tale, as well as commentary on the idea of brand control and identification. There are so many great layers to it that it demands your full attention.

POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Contributor Profile: Christopher J. Garcia

Today we're welcoming the first of our new contributors to the flock: Chris Garcia

Chris Garcia? You mean the archivist, curator, film festival programmer, fanzine editor, professional wrestling enthusiast, painter, true crime writer, podcaster, and father of 2? The one from Boulder Creek, CA? The one that won the Hugo for Best Fanzine a couple of times? The guy with the hair? Oh, he's @johnnyeponymous on all the social media!

NAME: Christopher J Garcia

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Boulder Creek, California, about half-a-mile from downtown, on the right.

NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): Short films, fanzines, history of fandom, professional wrestling and the relationship to fandom, short stories, podcasting

MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: Pretty mild, really.

VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: UFOs, which are basically alien robots, if you think about it...

RIGHT NOW I'M READING: Blackbeard by Kurt Vonnegut

...AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser, Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: The Employees by Olga Ravn. Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE... trying to keep my kids from breaking every object in the house.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: Hero: Plastic-Man. VIllain: Plastic-Man, but with a goatee.

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: None. I'd be a nerd-type Batman.

THE BEST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Captain Marvel

THE WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: .Logan

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: SHARE?

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE. White Zombie

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE, Hundreds of Beavers

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: Twin Peaks: The Return

NAME A BOOK YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): A Scattering of Jades by Andrew Irvine.


Welcome Chris!