Seven shorts from the 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival make it down the slopes via The Sundance Institute Art House Project, including one of my favorite shorts I saw last year. (The best short I saw from Sundance, David Lowery’s tale-spinning bedtime story of the American empire, “Pioneer,” isn’t in this selection, but it elevates issue 14 of DVD “magazine” Wholpin.) Ruben Östlund’s Swedish “Incident by a Bank” (12m) is a single-take reconstruction of a failed bank robbery in Stockholm in 2006, the camera taking a Altman-cum-Asperger’s route around the story’s particulars, and it only gets better by the moment. Trevor Anderson’s “The High Level Bridge” (5m) is a deadpan history of those who have jumped from Edmonton’s High Level Bridge into the Saskatchewan. Dour, picturesque… eminently Canadian. Ariel Kleiman’s “Deeper than Yesterday” is a peculiar fable about Russian sailors losing their bearings about three months underwater, shot in a range of brooding blues and grays, cold as arctic water. 88m. (Ray Pride)
“Sundance Shorts 2011” opens Friday at the Music Box.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
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