Highly recommended comedy shorts…
Written by Jess Sweetman
I live to pick the brains of people with excellent (and often weird) taste. So when the opportunity arose to ask a few amazing festival programmers and a genius comedy director which comedies they recommended for me to watch, I was straight in there.
I’d recommend grabbing a cuppa and sitting back for some awesome films.
Which films are you obsessed with at the moment and why?
Chris Aitken (Festival Programmer at ShortCom:
I don’t want to talk about any shorts in particular, which we are going to programme for our forthcoming festival. But we’ll be championing those films when we announce the programme.
But I do want to give a shout out to some of our alumni who are in the process or have just made a feature. Which is super exciting. Louis Paxton with The Incomer, Ballard C. Boyd’s Jack Rabbit, and Tom Nicoll’s Salvation.
Eli Lewy (Co-Founder and Programmer at Final Girls Berlin Film Festival):
Some shorts that immediately come to mind are Laura Moss’ “Allen Anders: Live at the Comedy Castle – Circa 1987“ about a stand up comedian having a harrowing and deeply uncomfortable existential crisis on stage, Kimmy Gatewood’s “Control“ (TW suicide) about a suicidal woman with OCD who meticulously plans her last day, and Sam Fox’s „Fck’n Nuts,“ a wacky and ridiculous short about meeting the parents. Sam Fox also directed “Blue Diamond“ so she’s definitely on a comedy horror hot streak!
Sara Neidorf:
It’s hard to pick faves, and to remember all the highlights from the last ten editions. We just re-screened “Entropia” by Flora Ana Buda, at a Beauty Horror curation we did for Freilichtbühne Weissensee (an open air cinema) recently, so that one’s fresh in my mind, with a gross-out, hyper-delusional tone regarding aging and rituals for keeping young.
I also loved “Mouse” by Celine Held and Logan George, from back in the day, which is a drug-addled, hyperactive look at addiction, co-dependency, and quick-money schemes, with plenty of over-the-top extremity. “Blue Diamond” by Sam Fox, was a recent fave— a trauma-riddled, mother-daughter relationship, a cult of ski fanatics, lots of close-ups of salacious cheese-eating. It feels like an elaborate nightmare.
The comedy horror films I love mostly have a sort of hysterical and hallucinatory vibe to them, in that they break from reality in really inventive ways, yet still feel poignant and pack a punch.
Ben S. Hyland:
Since my short film has just started on the circuit, and played as the only real comedy in a block at Frighfest, I don't know what is currently on the circuit that I would recommend. If you allow me to go back a few years, I would say that I love “The Diamond” by Vedran Rupic and also “Norteños” by Grandmas. Both brilliant and weird comic treats.
