In these gogo fast times full of personal brands and tweeting your way through breakups and movies, our attention spans just aren’t any good for carefully crafted two-hour feature films. Apocalypse Now? More like Apocalypse Zzzzz, grandpa. Tell your two-hour stories at the nursing home, we’re the short film generation! Nitehawk Cinemas knows that, so this week they’ll be honoring the best in the world of short films, with a three day festival featuring award winning-short films movies from local and international filmmakers. Not one movie longer than 20 minutes, guaranteed!
The Nitehawk Cinema First Annual Shorts Festival will take place on Thursday night, Saturday morning and night and Sunday morning this week (November 21, 23 and 24). For those of you interested in what kind of filmmaking action is taking place right here in our backyard, the shorts shown on opening night are the ones for you. That’s a night devoted to nine short films from filmmakers who live in New York City. One film, Times Square of the 80s: A Short Documentary will explore the lost era of the seedy Times Square, and another is Green Death (featured above), which is about aliens invading a lovely beach wedding.
Saturday and Sunday will focus on brunch-time screenings of both nationally and internationally acclaimed short films, ranging from feature to documentaries to animation. Saturday night will also feature a show called Labrat Matinee XII: Visions Unveiled, which will be comprises of music videos, comedy and other out-there short films.
Opening night tickets cost $15, the Saturday and Sunday morning’s screenings will run you $11 and the Saturday night madness tickets cost $12. All in all, not only a good way to spend a night at the movies, but an economically advantageous way to do it, since you get six to seven movies for the same price you usually pay for just one.