Sundance Short Film Tour 2021 - Movie Review - The Austin Chronicle austinchronicle.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from austinchronicle.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Searchlight Pictures has picked up the Sundance short film Wiggle Room for their Searchlight Shorts program.
From director Julia Baylis and Sam Guest, the short follows Daisy (Deanna Gibson), a teenage paraplegic who is determined to save her wheelchair ramp from repossession and confronts the shady insurance agent who owes her money.
Gibson, who made her acting debut in the short, won a special jury award for her performance.
Searchlight Shorts have included shorts from directors like Martin McDonough and David Lowry, and are housed on the studio label s YouTube channel.
Stories centering on disability were among those front-and-center at this year s Sundance.
Must-See Shorts from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival
Snowy
After providing coverage on nearly every feature film premiering at Sundance Film Festival this year, today we turn the spotlight on our favorite shorts. With 50 short films accepted from nearly 10,000 submissions, check out our thoughts on a handful of the premiere below, courtesy of Dan Mecca and Shayna Warner.
BJ’s Mobile Gift Shop (Jason Park)
Heartwarming, clever, and well-paced, filmmaker Jason Park builds a fully-realized, hyper-real Chicago in which BJ (Johnnyboy Tellem) is a hustler on the streets with a traveling bag of problem-solving gifts for his many clients around town. He’s strategic in his timing, catching any and every manner of city-dweller at the moment they need a quick snack, a phone charger, a new shirt-and-tie, or something of the sort. Bookended by a precarious skyscraper interview for a “real’ job, Park captures the spirit of his lead nicely. The entire narrative is lifted by a pitch-perf
European productions take home the majority of the Sundance 2021 short film awards
Lizard has scooped the Grand Jury Prize, while the French animation
Souvenir Souvenir was crowned Best Animation
On the left, a still from
Lizard, and on the right, director Akinola Davies Jr accepting his award over Zoom
The 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has proven to be a good one for European short films, with almost all of the awards in the festival’s short film section going to European productions and co-productions.
The winner of the Grand Jury Prize was UK film
Lizard by
Akinola Davies Jr. Backed by BBC Films and production company Potboiler Films, the film is set in Lagos and follows a little girl who – after being thrown out of her Sunday School lesson – wanders around the grounds of a ‘mega church’. There, she witnesses the duplicity at the heart of those who claim religious piety, while a later violent event exposes the schism between the haves and have-no
Top row: CODA, Courtesy of Sundance Institute; Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised), photo by Mass Distraction Media; Flee, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Bottom row: Hive, photo by Alexander Bloom; Writing With Fire, courtesy of Sundance Institute; Ma Belle, My Beauty, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Park City, UT After six days and 73 feature films, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival’s Awards Ceremony took place tonight, hosted by actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, with jurors presenting 24 prizes for feature filmmaking and seven for Short Films. Honorees, named in total below, represent new achievements in global independent storytelling. Bold, intimate, and humanizing stories prevailed across categories, with Grand Jury Prizes awarded to