HollyShorts Film Festival Include Films from Academy® Award Winners Ben Proudfoot & Rayka Zehtabchi
[Los Angeles, CA- August 1st] This year the documentary shorts race at HollyShorts has heated up, for the first time at the festival the winner will take home an OSCAR®-qualifying prize. There are 36 documentaries covering subjects like trauma, cults, queer photographers, and a skateboarding trans woman. The festival will take place this year from the 10th-20th of August.
The incredible line-up includes They Came from All Over directed by Academy® Award winner Rayka Zehtabchi highlights the plight of an American small business owner, OSCAR® winner Ben Proudfoot’s Forgiving Johnny which focuses on developmentally disabled people who are sent to prison, and Jordan Matthew Horowitz’s Jack and Sam which shares a story of two friends who survived the holocaust together and meet decades later, this important film is produced by Academy® Award winner Andrew Carlberg.
This year’s diverse selection includes Elisa Gambino and Davis Lui’s Every Day After which provides a nuanced look at the complexities of healing from a birth difference that we don’t often see, in Courtney Sposato and Mark Sposato’s The Blake an elementary school art teacher converts an old bus into a replica of the Challenger space shuttle and uses it as a science laboratory to teach kids about space. Sean Wainsteim’s intensely personal short film Demon Box about trauma, suicide, and the Holocaust, and transforms it into a painful, blunt, and funny dissection of the film and his life. We follow two indigenous brothers in Josh Leong’s Trenton: To the Moon & Back who hail from the Solomon Islands and escape a cult posing as a leadership training organisation, they find refuge in a small town in Georgia. Ben Galster’s The Hidden Dimension is a cinematic portrait of queer photographer Leo Maki. An intimate journey into his mind that explores the artist’s life. We explore the life of a 58-year-old man as an emergency nurse in Sterling Hampton IV’s Merman. To Be Frank by Anna Wilder Burns explores authenticity and community in surfing via Frank Paine, a 73-year-old South Bay icon and humble local legend.
Some more phenomenal standouts include the Cinematic experience of the NYC subways, featuring the commuters, panhandlers, and performers that populate it in Joe Zakko’s Subway Stops. We follow Alexa’s journey as a trans woman, navigating the toxic culture that encompasses skateboarding, and what it means to transcend fear through community in Transenders by Diane Russo Cheng. Ariel Mahler and Radha Mehta short documentary explores the journey of Florida’s first transgender Homecoming Queen, Evan Bialosuknia, and her confidence and impact on youth faced with discrimination in Evan Ever After. We dive into Bristol Bay Alaska in School of Fish where Indigenous people and salmon have been intertwined for thousands of years with the knowledge of harvesting, preserving, and sharing fish. Almudena Toral and Mauricio Rodriguez Pons’ The Night Doctrine explores an Afghan journalist’s journey to find out who murdered her family 30 years ago. Visual artist Daniela Torres creates colorful ceramic dick sculptures inspired by the men who have been dicks to her in Dicks That I Like, by Johanna Gustin and Nick Brumfield’s It’s Not the Critic Who Counts which follows “Epic” Bill Bradley as he endures bone-chilling temperatures and desolate landscapes when he enters the Arrowhead Ultramarathon, a 135-mile footrace held in the far reaches of Northern Minnesota.
The annual Academy Awards-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival (HSFF) brings together top creators, industry leaders and companies and has launched many filmmakers into the next stages of their careers. HollyShorts, regular on MovieMaker Magazine’s “Top 50 Festivals Worth the Entry Fee list”, also engages its community and spotlights short films year-round through monthly screenings, panels, and networking events.
HollyShorts Film Festival will take place in-person between August 10–20th, 2023 at TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, with the annual Awards Gala set to take place on August 20th, 2023. For more information, visit the festival website.
Originally published at https://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on August 1, 2023.
