Shadows Shorts Competition - Extreme Imagination | TIFF

Shadows Shorts Competition - Extreme Imagination

30.04.2010 03:00

As usual, Transilvania IFF's second competitive section is dedicated to 12 thriller, fantasy & horror short films, chosen from the over 200 submissions from all corners of the world. Following the tradition started last year, the Shadows shorts and the Competition features will be screened in pairs, the shorts preceeding the features.

“I can say that this year, the competition's standards have risen: I have been looking for the best made and most accurate shorts that could fit in the Shadows Shorts concept. That means that this competitions concept does not refer exclusively to films containing violence and blood: it also includes dramas, shorts who talk about relations, or films who deal with psychological matters. Of course, we have a real zombie film (Zombies and Cigarettes, by Rafa Martinez and Iñaki San Román), but also a very experimental short, Dusk - done by the famous Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf. I think that the TIFF audience have every reason to watch every Shadows Shorts film: these films speak for imaginative and provocative forms of cinematic language and ambitious genres of cinema” says Mihai Mitrică, programmer of TIFF's themed short film competition.

The competition includes also film selected and awarded in important film festivals, such as horror Sci-Fi short Lazarus Taxon (d. Denis Rovira, Spain, 2008), presented in the official selection of the most important horror film festival in the world, Scream Fest, imagining survival in a world shattered by global warming; Norwegian film Alle fugler (d. Sara Eliassen, 2009), presented in the Venice Film Festival, showing a universe in which the only human life forms that exist are children who have lost their ability to communicate, and FlourTown (d. William Slichter, USA), the only American film in this year's line-up, presented in the 2009 San Sebastian Horror & Fantasy Film Festival.

Spanish short La Casa Brown (d. Isaac Berrok) is certainly the most violent film in the competition, almost entirely a quote of the cult film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The other films in the line up are Precut Girl (d. Eric Dinkian, France, 2009), Bak lukkede dører (d. Aleksander Nordaas, Norway, 2009), Harmsaga (d. Valdimarr Jóhannsson, Iceland, 2008), Le tonneau des Danaïdes, (d. David Guiraud, France, 2009), Vigilancia (d. Gonzalo Zona, Spain, 2009) si Les bessones del Carrer de Ponent, (d. Marc Riba si Anna Solanas, Spain, 2010).