Lake Travis FF 2021 Interview: Shorts #2 – Five shorts directors find what connects us all when we make short films

Five shorts that span the gamut show us how much we have in common as filmmakers beyond what we are actually putting on film.

Christopher W. Graham’s AIDA follows a young mom as she deals with her own mother’s loss of memory and the weight of the recognition we need from those we love.

Duncan Putney’s mockumentary MACY’S GOES TO WAR imagines a WWII effort to overtake North Africa we somehow had never heard about even though it involved the use of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons to assist the initial invasion.

Malibu Taetz’s THE SUBSTITUTE is an Indiana Jones-style adventure truncated to a substitute teacher’s first day assigned to take over for an instructor on a sabbatical which we learn was to find a rare artifact that could be dangerous if handled improperly. (Also included in the interview is producer David Mora Perea)

Laura Galt’s THE REUNION introduces us to former schoolmates having a conversation several years later at their high school reunion, where a woman confesses to a friend how her boyfriend’s devastating reaction to a pregnancy led to her decision to have an abortion those many years ago. What she doesn’t know is that the former boyfriend from long ago, now unrecognizable has heard the entire story.

Melissa Kirkendall’s documentary YOU ARE ME & I AM YOU looks at the indigenous midwives in Ecuador, how they practice their birthing assistance and their ongoing struggle to be “recognized” for the service they provide, as well as get compensated for it.

This is quite the group of films and filmmakers (from the Lake Travis Film festival) to wrangle into one interview space (four narrative, 0ne narrative/doc hybrid, and one documentary), but it highlights the vast range that short films can demonstrate both as entertainment, in style, ambition, approach…everything really. In the interview, we talked about the question that is always my go-to with shorts filmmakers, and that is “Why did you make a short film, let alone this one?”. We also talk about the discipline that goes into making shorts, due to time constraints, including learning to cut things that we love, but need to lose for the good of the film overall.