The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival (TFF), presented by founding sponsor American Express, today announced its lineup of 60 short films, 30 of which are world premieres—a record number for the Festival—and a special screening.
The recipients of the Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Narrative Short award and Best Documentary Short award will qualify for consideration in the Short Films category of the Annual Academy Awards๏ฟฝ without the standard theatrical run, provided the film otherwise complies with the Academy rules. The 2012 TFF Narrative Short Winner Asad and competition short Curfew were nominated for best Live Action Short at this year’s Annual Academy Awards, with Curfew taking home the coveted honor.
Curated from more than 2870 submissions, the 2013 roster represents 19 countries, including Australia, Canada, China, Cyprus, Finland, France, Hungary, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Palestine, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom.
The 2013 shorts program will be presented in 8 thematic programs — 5 narrative categories, 2 documentary categories and 1 experimental category. One documentary section, “History Lessons,” consists entirely of world premieres – a first for the Festival. The always anticipated New York program makes a return as “Unlimited Ride,” and audiences will embrace “Deadbolt” — a vampire and werewolf-filled genre-specific program.
“It’s wonderful to be able to introduce so many new films to an audience for the very first time,” said Sharon Badal, TFF Director of Short Film Programming and Initiatives. “These short programs run quite the emotional gamut and we look forward to surprising our moviegoers with some very unique stories this year.”
The lineup features powerful performances by a range of emerging and established talent such as Lauren Ambrose, Kevin Corrigan, Elle Fanning, Jessica Hecht, Nastassja Kinski, Julian Sands, Jay O. Sanders, Dominic West and Elijah Wood. Shawn Christensen, Academy Award-winning director of Curfew, returns to TFF with Grandma’s Not a Toaster. Christensen is among a number of returning filmmakers including Keir Burrows, Matthew Bonifacio, David Darg, Gerardo Herrero, Myles Kane, Josh Koury, Bryn Mooser, Michael Scalisi, Ryan Spindell and Jonathan VanBallenberghe.
Works selected for the 2013 TFF shorts slate are eligible to compete for combined cash and value-in-kind prizes totaling more than $10,000 for Best Narrative Short and Best Documentary Short, sponsored by Persol, and the Student Visionary Award.
A list of the short film selections within the eight programs is as follows:
CHARACTER WITNESS – Documentary program
These documentaries present first-person perspectives that ponder events affecting life, death and in-between. In Yamamoto, Japan, eighteen months after the Tohoku disaster, survivors left with nothing hold onto their existence through pictures found and restored from tsunami rubble in Recollections. Grave Goods explores the fetishism of the “beautiful things” collected by a grandmother during her lifetime and what happens to these prized possessions after she is gone. When the Song Dies weaves a captive spell of stories, songs and memories from across Scotland, in counterpoint to the country’s richly evocative landscape. Wilt Chamberlain: Borscht Belt Bellhop reveals a chapter in the life of one of basketball’s greatest players when a different era of the sport met the borscht belt at the peak of its Dirty Dancing-style fame. A slot machine junkie records his psychotherapy sessions and confronts the consequences of his twelve-year addiction in Lapse: Confessions of a Slot Machine Junkie. We Will Live Again looks at the unusual operations and caretakers of the Cryonics Institute, a mom-and-pop style warehouse that maintains ninety-nine deceased human bodies stored at below-freezing temperatures in cryopreservation. Timmy Brennan, a Freedom Tower ironworker and surfer who lost everything
