Sundance 2024: Award-Winning Shorts Hint at the Future of Indie Movies

Out of all the film festivals in the US, Sundance offers an amazing starting point for young filmmakers. If you get in, it's like entering a trade union. Many short-films auteurs who debut in Park City go on to remake their work into feature films - case in point, Carey Williams, who won the 2018 Short Film Grand Jury Prize and, in 2022, returned to the Dramatic Feature film competition with an expanded and improved "Emergency" - Others leave their opera prima behind and jump to new productions once they prove their mettle with a brief, tight film. They all can return for more exposure and professional chances. Nice break, if you can get it.

It's hard to tell which ones in the 2024 crop of winners will go on to longer, greater features, but plenty of talent is around. Check out our impressions of the winners in the Short Film competition at Sundance 2024. Movie buff, take notes. You'll be hearing about these directors in the future.

The Masterpiece

Short Film Grand Jury Prize Winner

Xenophobia, racism, and good old class struggle make an explosive mix in this dark comedy that plays the audience's prejudices like a fiddle. A moneyed couple in a Tesla hit the local recycling center to dispose of a broken flat-screen TV. Chafing at the long line of cars, they take on an offer by a black African man: he will take the thing off their trunk so they can dash off to their fabulous life. The wife remembers she has much more stuff she wants to get rid of and is sitting back home in their garage. Maybe he would like to pick it up? He would, and he would bring along his son to help him.

They arrive at a stylish modernist house that has become the international shorthand to signal rich assholes -. As they set to accomplish their objective, the four characters get on a game of cat-and-mouse. Each exchange turns into a testy power game. Director Alex Lora stirs up tension and fear at every moment while the characters engage in a battle of wills over the spoils of privilege. All bets are off when the wife sees an old painting in the poor man's pickup truck that may be a lost masterpiece from a great painter. It's easy to see why the movie took the Grand Jury prize: it's efficiently made, it feels timely using migration as a lynchpin, and it offers a new twist on the classic home-invasion thriller. Wait for Hollywood to snatch the rights for a feature-length remake.

Say Hi After You Die

Short Film Jury Award, U.S. Fiction Winner

My favorite of the winning bunch. Writer-director and star Katie Hollowell proves to be a certifiable triple threat in this fantastic comedy, as hilarious as it is poignant. She plays a twenty-something girl whose best friend is run over by a truck when she is distracted twerking on a highway. We see the ghastly and ridiculous accident through a dinner window, seconds after the two promised to each other that whoever died first would visit the surviving one. The dead girl does just that, in the shape of a port-a-potty. A construction worker crew appears magically in front of her house and installs the unlikely vessel conveniently in front of her kitchen window.

Is the grief-stricken friend left behind imagining things? Or is the Great Beyond manifesting through a plastic commode? Late at night, she engages in one-sided conversations. Fanciful musical numbers contribute to pulling her out of her funk and pushing through the grieving process. Hollowell cuts a great presence and manages the whimsy with a sure hand. Expect great things from her in the future.

The Stag

Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction

Taiwanese director Chien-An Chu serves a morsel of Art House bait in this atmospheric, contemplative short about a father who takes his two kids to work. The catch is that he works on a deer farm, complete with an abattoir. Wanting to give him a chance to show off in front of his sons, the boss asks him to cut the antlers of a magnificent stag.

Chu is going for dour, grubby realism, moving slowly like molasses. We may recoil at the prospect, but it's hard to tell what the characters think about it. Chances are, it's not a big deal. In a way, Chu plays with the international audience's unfamiliarity with the culture. The farm raises deer precisely for this purpose. The place has a showroom that highlights all the uses of this animal byproduct. You can imagine Chinese audiences shrugging while American viewers recoil.

Bob's Funeral

Short Film Jury Award, Nonfiction

Jack Dunphy's autobiographical exploration of family neurosis will set your head spinning before breaking your heart. He starts by meditating on his unlovable, deceased paternal grandfather and the emotional landscape of his relationships. In contrast, Mom's side of the family is warm. Everyone is close to each other and deep into each others' businesses. Dad's brothers and sisters are cold and remote. Young Jack chronicles their life with a cellphone camera ready at hand, peppering the images with deviously simple animated flourishes. 

The tone is zany, all over the place, and self-deprecating. You may feel old, trying to synch your synapses with the frantic pace of the editing. Is this what post-millennial cinema will be? As the movie careens to its surprising outcome, all is forgiven. We are all united in awe of how fragile and fleeting life is. 

Bug Diner

Short Film Jury Award, Animation

Phoebe Jane Harts's lovingly rendered, stop-motion animated comedy is a buffet of adult provocation. The action occurs at a diner for critters, where everybody wants to get some. A fly waitress salivates over the well-endowed cook - a big-assed sloth, or is it a weasel? A married couple of mantises biker their way to rekindling their passion. A squirrel with impudically exposed breasts tries to fend off the unrequited love of an anteater. The joke is stretched far too long, but this is the kind of work that serves best as a presentation card than a narratively satisfactory short film.

The Looming

Short Film Special Jury prize, Directing

A mysterious presence in his home haunts Chester, a lonely, elderly man (Joseph Lopez). His coworkers oscillate between disengaged concern and scorn. One phone call away, his daughter does not beckon to his desperate cries for help. Things come to a halt in one dark, terrifying night. Director Masha Ko makes great use of the location and milks the tension for all it's worth. 

The cinematography is curiously off-putting. The ambiance is properly threatening and moody, but the beleaguered Chester sometimes looks like a CGI-animated character. Is this a byproduct of seeing the short virtually? Or an intentional stylistic flourishing aiming to suggest something about his mind state? Or is this just subpar lightning? Make-up? The mind wanders as the final twist puts everything in its place. 

Pisko, the Crab Child, is In Love

Short Film Special Jury Prize for Best Director

Everybody can make a movie now, but very few can achieve the masterful tone of craziness and poignancy conjured up by director Makoto Nagahisha. Pisko (Akiko Kano) is a girl convinced she was born out of her mother's love for a crab - that is, an actual crustacean -. Her infinitely patient best friend (Saya) tags along as she tells us her story while dealing with the frustrations that come with her unlikely origin. 

The thing is, Pisko is not making up an unbelievable story to hog attention. She is the daughter of a crab! Her mom (Maki Fukuda) keeps dad in the water-filled kitchen sink. She rages at him - it? - when her teacher-lover unceremoniously dumps her after graduation. He couldn't possibly marry the daughter of a crab! As Pisko learns to deal with the frustration and accept herself, she will find love in an unexpected place.  

Nagahisha's work is of a piece with Jack Dunphy's "Bob's Funeral." A handheld camera offers dynamic possibilities of mise-en-scene - this one looks like it was shot with an old camcorder. Still, the generational connection between the technology and the artist's generation is so natural that the stylistic trappings feel off-hand and unpretentious. You can feel the influence of Wes Anderson and speeded-up anime in every scene. It's a funny, lovely ride once you get in synch with the pace. It feels as if Pisko herself, a rambunctious teenager, set out to do a low budget movie of her life.