Narrative Shorts A | St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase 2024

Jessica Ambuehl in “Dolly”

The St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase opens this year at 7:00pm Friday with Lions of Mesopotamia, a documentary on the 2007 Iraqi national soccer team’s country-lifting Asian Cup run, with a post-film discussion by the St. Louis-based post-production team, Bruton Stroube. But the next afternoon, the first narrative films showcase dives in with a set of six shorts that mix drama and comedy to showcase the wide breadth of cinematic skills that the Gateway City has to offer.

Keith Kennedy’s “Hit the Mark” (8 minutes) was originally a 48-Hour Film Festival entry, but the time constraints of that fun experiment don’t come through in the finished project. The short shows a pair of casting directors suffer through a series of weirdos as they audition for an unknown project: Lou (Dan Stewart), the good cop, and Joi (Haley Fahrner), who cuts off most of the actors before they’ve even started—which would feel like a cliché except for Fahrner’s ability to make you feel the chill from the ice coursing through her jaded veins.

Dan Stewart and Haley Fahrner in “Hit the Mark”

Peter Carlos’ “Dolly” (13 minutes) has a simple, potentially even cheesy, premise: a mother copes with the death of her daughter by purchasing a doll in her memory. But there’s no cheese to be found in Jessica Ambuehl’s powerhouse performance as the mother, Emily. The story is told using a therapy session as a framing device intercut with flashbacks that take us through Emily’s grieving process; in these sessions, Carlos films Ambuehl facing straight at the camera. There’s nothing to hide behind, no other actors to bounce off of, just Ambuehl, with an intensity that grabs hold and does not let go.

Stephen Province’s “Down the Cubicle” (29 minutes) stars Kaitlin Gant (who is also credited as “writer & creator” of the short) as Ally, a phone jockey at a stress-driven pharmaceutical company with a “royal pain” of a boss, Regina Rose (Angela Mayer), who divides her sales team into groups by playing card suits and tells Ally if she can’t get her sales up, it’s off with her head. Then she tells Ally about an unexpected meeting with some guy named Robert White and she’s off down the rabbit ho—er, elevator shaft to find the guy and instead finds nothing but a wacky cast of characters. Yep, it’s Alice in Wonderland translated to an office building, and while the film can lay the parallels on a little thick at times, there are some pretty clever twists to the film’s homages. (My favorite: the hookah-smoking caterpillar is now a chain-vaping, basement-dwelling oddball named Carter Pillar.) Oh, and fun cameo alert: Ashley Santana (credited here as Ashley Crane—you and I know her as Mo from the VisitMO Missouri Tourism Board commercials) has a brief but fun spot as the film’s Tweedledee.

Effie Cacarnakis in “Confessional”

Like “Dolly,” Gabriel Sheets’ “Confessional” (15 minutes) also centers largely on one performance. In this case, it’s James (Effie Cacarnakis), a newly divorced Catholic man who goes to confession to seek absolution after hooking up with a man at a nightclub. Cacarnakis plays James in a way where you can feel his anguish and guilt and regret while a tiny bit of exhilaration still bubbles just below the surface.

Kennedy’s second short in the set, “Verisimilitude” (6 minutes), is another 48-Hour Film Festival short, this one a cop drama where the detectives encounter something they never expected: a severed head that’s still alive. It’s got some fun gags, but what’s most impressive is the greenscreening used to create the severed head effect, which is remarkably well done for a film made this quickly.

In Andy Compton’s “Us + One: A Love Story” (10 minutes), a man shows up for a dinner date with a married woman that he met in a dating app who is in an open relationship, only to find her husband sitting on the couch watching the date transpire. The cringe comedy is strong in this one, but warps into something with such a weird, bruised heart that I found myself swept up in it anyway, and the (I think) vibraphone-driven ending theme by Austen McCutchen wraps up the narrative showcase on a wonderful, hopeful note.

The 24th annual St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase runs from July 19 to July 28. The A group of narrative shorts program will screen at the Hi-Pointe Theatre (1005 McCausland Ave.) on July 20 at 2:30pm, and tickets are $15, or $12 for students and Cinema St. Louis members. Multi-film passes are also available. For the full list of feature films, shorts, and master classes or to purchase tickets, visit www.cinemastlouis.org/24th-annual-st-louis-filmmakers-showcase| Jason Green

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *