Special (Creepy) Talents

This was the shorts program I saw at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival here are some details about the 4 different movies:

Bad Dreams:
This Swedish short was about a man who loves scary movies but lives in his nightmares. "Your nightmares are like film sequences" the doctor says at one point. You never know when he is dreaming and when he is not. The film does a great job of making you scared and it was relatively unpredictable. Very well done, but confusing, I will have to watch it again sometime

4U:
This super short film (4mins) was unexpectedly funny. It is about a lonely man in a cabin with a hit list. The movie is pretty much a continuous POV shot of the man beginning with him dragging a body to his cabin and chopping it up and putting it in a grave. You later find out that the body was his mom's, the seemingly last person on his list. It ends revealing that YOU are actually the last person on the list, and that DVD the director handed out before the movie was actually meant to kill you. It was really well done!

Chickenfut:
The short film my brother was in. This is my second time to see it and I still loved it! Its about a boy who loves his chicken Giselé and when some bullies at his school kill her, the chickens soul takes over the boy (Gunter) who ends up getting his revenge. My brother is the "next" Chickenfut, the boy that the woman telling the story about Gunter to. It is an absurd horror, that everyone played serious very well and it turned out to be awesome!

Cherry Bloom:
A story of a little girl who has psychic ablities to see the future, her mom ends up using her to get money and in the end the girl sees her death with her mother's continued abuse of her powers. The cinematography was excellent. The girl's charater needed to be developed a little more to really make us sympathize with her, but overall it was a good film.

Afterwards there was a Q&A with the directors of all except Bad Dreams. The most interesting thing was that the director of 4U did 2 months of preproduction on it and went so far as to film it all himself and then hire a crew and shoot it again.

More than anything, going to this festival reaffirmed my love for shorts programs. There are so many great stories you can tell in 15 minutes that make better movies than full length features. When you put a few together with a common theme, you get a really unique and enjoyable experience. I recommend that everyone attend a film festival and go to a short film program at some point in their life. It's quite fun!