More than 100 filmmakers gathered at the Downtown Mall Friday through Sunday for the second annual iteration of the Indie Short Film Festival. This celebrated tradition displayed a variety of incredible new creations from filmmakers throughout Virginia, across the country and around the world. Founded by Ty Cooper in 2024, the ISFF celebrates the unique creative works of these artists in a festival setting. This year, screenings took place at the Violet Crown and Vinegar Hill Theaters — two staples of the Charlottesville film scene.
The event concluded on Sunday with a film festival classic, as the ISFF hosted the Sunday Brunch Awards on the final day of the festival. Awards were presented for Best Screenplay, Best Documentary and Best Narrative Short, among others, with audience members involved in the voting process by selecting their favorite films after each block.
With films ranging in length from three minutes to nearly half an hour, filmmakers took full creative liberty with the medium of “short films.” The short films were broken up largely by theme and premiered in screening blocks of about two hours. Within the blocks, the films contained immense variety, with a single block containing both narrative and documentary features across a myriad of different genres.
Blocks included genre-based topics such as animation, comedy and documentary, along with films united under common themes such as “Life is Funny” and “Personal Connections.” A block entitled “Claiming Your Stake” included everything from “Trouble,” a documentary on MMA fighter Earl “Trouble” Small, to “Trailer Park Queen,” a comedy about a hillbilly woman in her 60s joining a beauty pageant in the effort to regain her husband’s affection.
Another example of the diversity of the blocks came from a mixed-genre block entitled “Realities Rewritten,” which brought depictions of alternative realities as a means of social commentary. Within a two-hour frame, spectators saw films ranging from comedy and satire to drama and horror.
A standout from this category was a film entitled “Dream Boy,” directed, produced and executively produced by VCU arts alumni Marlaena Henry and Abigail Jane Arthur respectively. Combining genre tropes of hopeless romantics and yearning dreamers with magnificent animation and sound design, “Dream Boy” depicts an all-too-familiar love story that perfectly encapsulates the hesitance and trepidation characteristic in the college dating scene.
In a different block, Gwen Cassady, local filmmaker, Class of 1997 College alumnus and 2014 Education School graduate, directed “Traffikid,” a film on child trafficking through the lens of social justice. Cassady depicted the grim realities of human trafficking at the individual level with the goal of provoking social change and giving hope to the victims of a particularly insidious industry.
Each film screening was followed by a question-and-answer session with all filmmakers from the block present in the audience. Aside from getting a deeper look at the creative processes influencing each film, these discussions allowed for filmmakers to share their experiences and strategies with others in the field.
Ty Cooper, the festival director and producer of the short documentary film, “The Price of Resistance: Sala Udin, An American Agitator,” which told the story of Civil Rights leader and political activist Sala Udin, spoke about the power of connection in independent filmmaking.
“I'm big on relationships," Cooper said, standing alongside his co-producer Annette Banks. “Being an independent filmmaker, I have the luxury to choose who I work with.”
In addition to film screenings, the festival included panels of filmmakers, producers and general creatives on the state of modern filmmaking. Topics ranged from the role of women in film to the nature of documentary storytelling in short form.
A panel Saturday afternoon covered Hollywood’s favorite en vogue controversy — AI use in filmmaking. Unlike many other panels, however, this acted as more of a roundtable discussion involving filmmakers, actors and audience members in an open conversation about the state and future of the medium. The two panelists, Alexander Moody and Jameil Player, fielded questions about AI from the approximately 20-person audience while also opening up the floor to comments and responses from those in attendance. In this way, the panel itself brought together individuals from across the industry in an open, accessible forum.
Moody, a musician and filmmaker who has used AI in the production of music videos, spoke about the driving motive to beat the rapidly advancing technology that has sent the entertainment industry into a panic. He emphasized the necessity of human voices and stories in the entertainment industry, despite the rapidly advancing and ubiquitous nature of technology.
“We can stay ahead of the curve and use the most cutting edge technology we can to make the best projects we can,” Moody said. “And unfortunately AI is going to be there. Content is not going to mean anything, but value and legitimacy is going to.”
Sunday morning’s award ceremony was a celebratory note on which to end the weekend. The Best Narrative Short award went to a film from Spain entitled “The Bathtub.” Within its 19-minute runtime, the film tells a story of human connection over the phone, exploring the depths of a budding relationship between an insistent life insurance saleswoman and a prospective client.
Other award winners from the weekend included “A Dancer’s Story,” a documentary following a dancer’s journey through recovery from injury, and “Velo Love,” a stop-motion animated short film about two bicycles falling in love. The top three scripts submitted to the screenplay competition — “Little Steps,” “BA” and “Sticky Judgement” — were shared in a table reading on Sunday morning with a group of experienced actors.
In only its second year, the Indie Short Film Festival has already become a truly singular program, distinguishing itself from other festivals by highlighting projects with genuine passion and a desire to tell stories that deserve to be told.
Cooper himself best represented the mindset of each filmmaker when he described his own motivation for telling stories, a mindset that drives the creative ingenuity and individual voice on display at the ISFF.
“A story has to move me to create it,” Cooper said.
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