This year’s festival features three award-winning short films, each of which has garnered first place recognition in three local contests. These films are engaging, smart and come from the studios of astute and quick-witted filmmakers. I was able to interview these filmmakers and got an inside look into their films. I learned about their inspiration for these films, how they got their starts in film and what makes a successful film.
Joel David Santer is the writer and director of Mirror Image, a film that follows a man, Aaron, and his very animated reflection in the mirror. The film also holds the distinction as the winner of the 2011 DC Shorts Screenplay Contest. Santer is a DC local, who works as a writer, director and actor. A part of his inspiration for the film was the fact that “Americans work too much;” a debate Aaron and his reflection have in the mirror. Santer sought out to depict this qualm in a “humorous and surreal way” and did so successfully. He credits acting as his first found passion in the arts, and discovered playwriting in his early years as an undergrad at Hanover College in Indiana. Mirror Image, in fact, was conceived as a play, one, which would have been “an ambitious undertaking,” Santer concedes. The project’s incompatibility for the stage had to do with Santer’s vision of a single actor playing both “roles”—a performance perhaps only feasible on screen. Santer discloses, “I didn’t know how I was going to pull it [the film] off,” yet that made it all the more “inspiring and challenging.” Santer’s challenge took a mere five days to shoot, yet he was left with three months of editing, not surprising with the abstraction of the film.
Santer’s finished product is an entertaining one-man show, as Aaron and his reflection throw back-to-back quips and debate some of life’s humdrum frustrations.
Advancing Age, a comedy-horror short was made by Austin Bragg as part of the Washington, DC: 48 Hour Film Project. Bragg creates and stars in the film, about a man who is haunted by a balloon on his 30th birthday. Bragg was deftly able to implement his comedic background into the short after “horror/thriller” was assigned as the genre. When asked what was his inspiration for Advancing Age he told me, “Advancing Age was made as part of the Washington, DC 48 Hour Film Festival, so the biggest inspiration was being told ‘Your genre is horror/thriller.’ We’re most at home with comedy, so it started as a discussion of innocuous things to feel threatened by. Once the visual was in my head, we were off and running.”
Bragg faced some hindrances when making the film, coupled by the fact that he and his team had no more than two days to make the film.
He says, “There are always challenges during a 48 Hour Film Project, the most obvious being time. Beyond that, our camera was stolen four days prior, and we had to scramble to find a replacement. As time really began to slip away, we were forced to pare back our ambitious ending and make a number of script changes on the fly – trying to maintain a cohesive story while frantically cutting scenes was a challenge.”
Bragg certainly seemed to overcome all difficulties faced in those 48 hours, and attributes the film’s success with the same self-deprecating humor he employs in his film; “I suppose I could talk about the universal fear of aging and the juxtaposition of horror and comedy, but I think people just like watching me suffer.”
The final contest winner appearing in the festival is Mary McGrory with The McGrory Clan; the winner of the Phillips Collection Home Movie Contest. McGrory’s film takes a 3-minute snapshot of her own family’s daily life and customs; the 3 minutes we see on screen were edited from a week’s worth of footage. McGrory comes from a photojournalism and multimedia background, which makes her more comfortable with a documentary style of shooting. “It is difficult for me to ask someone to do or re-do something. In journalism, you would never ask someone to ‘pick up that cookie’ or ‘look more distraught’, I feel like I am breaking the rules when I direct.” It is no surprise that The McGrory Clan possesses this documentary style of filming, which also serves to enhance the intimacy in the film. McGrory attributes the success of her film to its candidness and relatable material.
“I think it’s pretty raw and honest. It really is what it was meant to be, a snapshot into one family’s life for a short period of time. This family, in my humble opinion, happens to be pretty great. The topic, what its like to come home after being gone for a period of time, and the way you connect to your family through food and family meals, I think is also pretty relatable.”
Santer, Bragg and McGrory each faced their own set of challenges, notably editing and/or time restraints, yet they share a common thread of success, resilience and impressive filmmaking chops. All of the films present material that an audience is able to empathize with, which makes the films that much more impressive and compelling.
By: Hadley Fielding
Jonah Ansell directs a creative short, titled 
