During a Q&A session after one of the first short film blocks at this year’s SXSW, an audience member turned the spotlight on programmer Lya Guerra and asked her about the curatorial aspects of her job, and how she organizes the order of the selected films. It was a great question, one that’s not asked often enough, and it put a bit of perspective on the art of programming a festival (and, indeed, programming is as much an art form as making a film). Short films at festivals cannot by necessity function in isolation, and it takes a real love of film to curate a program as strong as the one Lya has assembled this year; a lot of consideration has to go into not just what films make the cut, but which one might compliment another. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and I’d imagine that there are always some pieces that just don’t quite fit, no matter how good they might be.
Here, readers, I must offer full disclosure: a film of mine was one of those that apparently did fit. When I compliment the lineup, though, I don’t mean to be self-aggrandizing; it was truly an honor to be featured alongside these other films. I’ve already written about Glory At Sea; now let me turn my attention to a few of my favorites.
Small Apartment (dir. Andrew T. Betzer)
In a tiny urban apartment, on a bright spring mid-morning, a young couple make love. As one of Wagner’s Vorspiels swells through the tinny speakers of a radio, the man’s aged father watches the couple in the throes of their passion, peering through a small partition in the bathroom wall with a video camera in his hand.
What Betzer’s created out of this conflict of interest is a simple, quietly heartbreaking glimpse at the pure beauty of physical intimacy with another human being. The film is fairly explicit (it played in the Adults Only category when it premiered at Slamdance this past January) but is not lascivious in its intentions: rather, it offers a strong and pointed delineation between sex and pornography, between love and perversion. I was afraid this film would be too subtle to win people over, but no: it wound up winning the Grand Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking. Bravo.
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