Gay Boyfriend

USA, 2003, 2 Minutes

Back by popular demand. We’ll start the evening of films with this music video about the joy of, well, having a gay boyfriend. He’s everything a girl could hope for. He likes to shop, cuddle and watch romantic comedies. At just two minutes, the fun goes by fast.

The Passenger

Australia, 2006, 7 Minutes

Storm clouds gather as a timid bookworm braves his daily walk to the bus stop. When he discovers what awaits him on board, he realizes he’d have been better off outside in the storm. 

The Passenger is the result of about six years one man spent in a bedroom with a computer. Entirely self funded and self produced, the project was originally conceived as a showreel piece, but later upgraded to short film status. All sound, music and vision were created by Chris Jones with commercially available hardware and software. 

The Passenger premiered and won Best Animation at the 2006 Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, ahead of 38 other selected shorts including the 2006 Oscar winner.

In God We Trust

USA, 2000, 17 Minutes

Many people first discovered Jason Reitman in 2005 with his feature film debut Thank You For Smoking. And even more people discovered Reitman with the 2007 film, Juno, which was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and won Best Screenplay.

In 2000, he directed an award winning short called In God We Trust. The film follows Robert, who is killed by an on-coming SUV while standing in the middle of the street contemplating the motto on a quarter. In the waiting room of the afterlife, the desk clerk tells him that his combined life score is negative, and he is going to hell. When Robert somehow escapes back to Earth, the desk clerk and his colleagues must bring him back to the afterlife. Jason Reitman’s film is about how the little things in life add up.

Tanghi Argentini

Belgium, 2007, 14 Minutes, Subtitled

The winner of multiple major awards at festivals worldwide, including the Audience Award and Best Comedy Award at Clermont-Ferrand, this sublime delight introduces us to André, a man who convinces a reluctant co-worker to teach him the tango in order to win the heart of a woman he’s met online.

The Danish Poet

Norway, 2006, 15 Minutes

In The Danish Poet, filmmaker Torill Kove asks whether our lives are just coincidence – or do little things really matter?

The film follows a poet whose creative well has run dry, on a holiday to Norway to meet a famous writer. As his quest for inspiration unfolds, it appears that a spell of bad weather, an angry dog, slippery barn planks, a careless postman, hungry goats and other seemingly unrelated factors might play important roles in the big scheme of things after all.

Intermission

The Tonto Woman

United Kingdom, 2007, 36 Minutes

Based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, this brilliant film recounts the fateful meeting of a cattle rustler and a singular woman on the harsh frontier of the American West.

The white woman had once been kidnapped from her home by Apache Indians. Traded to the Mojave Indians, she lives as a squaw for 11 years until she is found by her husband. Seen as unfit for society, he keeps her in a shack in the desert. Her solitary existence is transformed with the arrival of an understanding man.

I Met the Walrus

Canada 2008, 5 Minutes

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon’s "bed-in" phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace.

Thirty-eight years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries traditional pen sketches by James Braithwaite with digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.

Fortune Hunters

Seattle, USA, 2007, 22 Minutes

Arthur Yu has problems. His girlfriend, Megan, is leaving to study abroad in China for a year, leaving him to waste another college vacation working at his dad’s fortune cookie factory. Instead of telling Megan that he’ll wait for her, Arthur makes the biggest mistake of his life and dumps the girl of his dreams.

As he suffers through another summer at the factory, writing fortunes, Arthur’s cookie messages become more and more depressing: You will die alone. Two words: colon cancer. It doesn’t take him long to nearly ruin his father’s business. Finally, at wits end, Arthur decides that the only way to get Megan back is to write her a love letter before she heads overseas. But when his e-mail gets mixed up with his fortunes, suddenly every cookie at every restaurant reveals a piece of Arthur’s broken heart.