Shorts filmmakers are festival's hidden gems
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
The majority of moviegoers attend a film festival for the fulllengths. That's just a fact - there's no reason to put on the white gloves and dust around it.

But as anyone who has been watching Fox's "On the Lot" can tell you, good short films are the cinematic shorthand for passion, creativity and talent.

"Good shorts are like perfect little gems," said Nantucket Film Festival programming assistant David Ratzlow, who coordinated the NFF's program of 20 short films, selected out of approximately 250 submissions. "Shorts can be perfect in a way that longer, more complicated films can't be. … Making a short is truly a labor of love. There is no market really for shorts and most shorts never make any money, so the good ones tend to be about things very close to the filmmakers' hearts."

While many of the shorts' creators tend to be young ("Some are indeed still in filmschool"), some, like Jay Rosenblatt (director of "I Just Wanted to Be Somebody") have been making films for years," Ratzlow said. The reasons they make the films are just as variegated as their experiences - some hope to spread awareness for an issue, others to test the waters for a full-length; some make shorts just for the fun of it, while others do it to share a single, beautiful or fascinating or funny story through the medium they love without needing the money and time required for a full-length.

Ratzlow selected which shorts will be screened before each feature according to length ("Features tend to be more than 90 minutes, so to keep the program under two hours, we place our shorter films with the features.") but also, when possible, according to theme.

"I Want to be a Pilot' is paired with "The Devil Came on Horseback," because both share views on Africa, Ratzlow said, and "I-Nasty" is buddied with "The Ten," because both share "irreverent humor."

NFF, like other festivals, includes a shorts program to support emerging filmmakers; Ratzlow offered as an example writer and director Mitchell Lichtenstein, who debuted his short film "Resurrection" at the NFF two years ago, and has returned this year with his debut narrative, "Teeth," which has more than avoided the critical splat of rotten tomatoes.

"Today's short filmmakers often become tomorrow's most celebrated

feature filmmakers," Ratzlow said. I