Sundance Film Fest announces 2017 shorts programs

PanARMENIAN.Net - Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, “Come Swim,” which she created as part of Refinery29’s women-helmed Shatterbox Anthology series, will screen at the Sundance Film Festival alongside 67 other short films announced Tuesday, December 6. The shorts round out a program of competition and Next films, format-bending New Frontier projects, and star-driven Premiere and Midnight titles unveiled over the previous week, Variety said.

Other shorts of potential interest include “Cecile on the Phone,” co-written and directed by Annabelle Dexter-Jones (daughter of Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones, sister of DJ Mark Ronson), and Joe Talbot’s “American Paradise.” Though feature filmmakers haven’t necessarily had time to process the impact of the recent election, Talbot’s satirical short imagines life under a Trump presidency.

Among the documentary shorts, Oscar winner Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour”) unveils her latest, “Project X,” while Lewie Kloster’s “Legal Smuggling With Christine Choy” chronicles a crazy chapter in the life of Oscar nominee Choy (“Who Killed Vincent Chin?”).

Several of the shorts are being included in the festival’s first-ever “The New Climate” programming strand, which is designed to spotlight projects that bring awareness to environmental issues and climate change (such as competition documentary “Water & Power: A California Heist”). By far the weirdest of the New Climate selections can be found in the Midnight Shorts lineup, where “Hot Winter: A Film by Dick Pierre” will make its debut. Billed as “one of the first films in American cinema to address climate change,” this re-edited version of a “found” porno tape from 1982 saves only the non-X-rated bits.