OKLAHOMA CITY — It’s time again for one of the most anticipated annual events in the OKC cinema calendar, as the Manhattan Short Film Festival once again takes over the Sam Noble Theater at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Each year, OKCMOA, along with countless other theaters and venues worldwide, runs through the fest’s ten “finalists,” the lucky ten short films that were most highly ranked by the festival’s organizers.
But unlike most film festival experiences, where a panel of judges debates and decides the winners, perhaps with local venues voting on an “audience award,” for Manhattan Short, it’s only the audience that decides, and that audience is spread across every corner of the Earth.
From Thursday, September 26th through Saturday, October 5th, OKCMOA will be just one of the more than 500 venues worldwide that will be screening the ten finalists for a global audience of more than 100,000 filmgoing fans.
Following each screening, every audience member gets the chance to cast their own ballot for the festival’s awards, including Best Short Film, Best Actor (gender-neutral), and Best Screenplay.
This year, the ten competing finalists carry a particular pedigree, including the winner of Cannes 2024’s Short Palme d’Or (the highest honor for a short film at Cannes,) two favorites from this year’s deadCenter Film Festival in OKC, and even some major stars like Emma D’Arcy and Zoe Saldana.
“A key element which I believe has made it a success is the venues that have gotten involved, places like the Oklahoma City Museum of Art,” said Manhattan Short Film Festival founder Nicholas Mason last year, when Free Press reached him by phone. “Those venues, they’re like cultural nerve centers. They really are community venues.”
So let’s take a look at what you can expect to see when you step into this year’s “nerve center” at OKCMOA for the finalists of the 2024 Manhattan Short Film Festival.
‘The Talent’
The first of two shorts in the program to be featured at this year’s deadCenter Film Festival, “The Talent” stars “House of the Dragon” breakout Emma D’Arcy as a lowly production assistant on a car commercial shoot willing to take a big risk to get noticed.
First-time writer/director Thomas May Bailey knows a bit about tense productions, coming from a background in theatre direction.
‘Mother’
One element that Mason said Manhattan Short often gravitates toward is timeliness and current relevance, and “Mother” from Ukraine fits that bill.
Director Mariia Felenko shows us a glimpse of the urgency at the beginning of the current Ukraine/Russia war as a woman attempts to flee her home with her mother. But her mother has something more important to worry about: getting her nails done.
‘Dovecote’
From Italy comes this deeply emotional look into the final, lingering hours in a woman’s life before she’s released from a women’s prison in Venice.
Alongside an anchoring lead performance from the always-remarkable Zoe Saldana is a cast comprised of real inmates of the Italian prison where the film shot, lending the short a pained realism rarely seen on screen.
‘Pathological’
From the good ol’ USA comes writer/director/star Alison Rich’s “Pathological.”
This Sundance selection follows a compulsive, pathological liar who wakes up one day to find that her off-the-cuff, barely thought out lies are coming true, leaving her to navigate a world shaped by her own random, fleeting fibs.
‘I’m Not a Robot’
Another standout short from this year’s deadCenter Film Festival, “I’m Not a Robot” hails from The Netherlands and boasts one of the more creatively hilarious setups in recent memory.
An average, seemingly normal office worker attempts to access a website, but repeatedly fails the simple CAPTCHAs to prove that she’s “not a robot.” Is she? Could she be? Is it just a stupid computer glitch making her question her own life and reality?
‘Alarms’
French filmmaker Nicolas Panay brings us this story of a construction worker supervising a major project, the kind that could go wrong if he’s not careful and not focused.
Panay said that he wanted to really bring the audience into the headspace and psychology of the short’s main character, digging into his home life, his feelings of fatherhood, and the preoccupations that bleed over from a worker’s personal life and having distracting consequences in their job.
‘Favourites’
A harrowing, edge-of-your-seat comedy in a way that probably only Australia can produce, “Favourites” sees two parents on a camping trip with their children when a terrifying accident forces them to make exactly the kind of decision that every parent claims they could never make.
A good short can often function like a good joke, with a wild setup resulting in a rug-pulling final punch, and at just barely over five minutes, this one looks to fall easily into that category.
‘The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent’
A joint production hailing from France, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovenia, this simple and powerful true story took home the Short Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
This 13-minute short is set on a train in Bosnia in the year 1993, during the Bosnian War and the ethnic cleansing and genocide perpetrated against the nation’s Muslim population. When military forces board the train to search and inspect, only one man out of the 500 passengers speaks out against their atrocities.
‘Room Taken’
An offbeat story of a homeless man moving secretly into an occupied home, but the resident turns out to be a lonely blind woman who has no idea that he’s there.
This Irish offering from director TJ O’Grady-Peyton examines an unexpected bond as it forms between two members of the nation’s marginalized and often overlooked communities.
‘Jane Austen’s Period Drama’
A genius subversion of the always prim and proper mentalities of uptight 19th-century British romance, this American entry from Julia Aks and Steve Pinder drops a little blood into the story in a comically novel way.
When the highly educated, but still woefully ignorant Mr. Dickley sees that the modest Miss Talbot is bleeding, he wants to tend to whatever her injury may be, not realizing that the reality is something that his education never bothered to prepare him for.
The finalists of the Manhattan Short Film Festival will screen as a single program (with an intermission) for a single ticket price at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art Thursday, September 26th through Saturday, October 5th, with audience ballots distributed for voting on-site.
For showtimes, tickets, and more, visit okcmoa.com and manhattanshort.com.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
