These films brilliantly–and often hilariously–explore artifice, performance, and subterfuge in all their variations. Actors audition for roles and agonize over callbacks, crime victims recreate their traumas for reality TV, secrets are hidden, attractions concealed. The ten extraordinary shorts in this program compel the viewer to watch actively, to look behind the masks.
Screenings
Q&A with Lisa McElroy (co-writer and illustrator, The Callback), Madeleine Coghlan (writer/director/producer/actor, The Other Girl), Zander Hawley (composer, The Other Girl), and Daniel Collins (co-director/writer, Trauma Bonds) to follow the screening.
Films

Azi
USA | 14 MINUTES | English
During a weekend vacation with her best friend’s family, seventeen-year-old Azi gets caught up in an unexpected game with another guest many years her senior.

Beefmastor Inn
MT Premiere | MTFF Alumni | USA | 4 MINUTES | English
Two siblings try to sell a mounted deer head.

The Callback
MT Premiere | USA | 13 MINUTES | English
Fiction, animation, humor, and poetry blend into a comedy, calling out a film industry in which women are underrepresented and underwritten.

Candy Bar
MT Premiere | MTFF Alumni | Australia | 6 MINUTES | English
A young girl thinks a man in the candy bar line looks like her dad. Their sweet interaction makes him long for fatherhood.

i want to go to moscow
MT Premiere | USA | 12 MINUTES
When disillusioned actor Mara is thrown into a classroom of kids rehearsing a sanitized version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters–her favorite play about existential longing–she swan dives into her own crisis of aging, nostalgia, and the loss of childhood dreams.

No Hands
MTFF Alumni | USA | 6 MINUTES | English
Over drinks with a friend, a young woman reveals a secret skill that must be experienced to be believed.

The Other Girl
MT Premiere | MTFF Alumni | USA | 20 MINUTES | English
In the 1960s, a young actor gives her all at an audition.

The Pic
MT Premiere | MTFF Alumni | USA | 8 MINUTES | English
Single mom Jen gets an unexpectedly provocative pic from her friend Steve. Through the course of a phone conversation, she discovers that context changes everything.

Randy As Himself
MT Premiere | MTFF Alumni | USA | 11 MINUTES | English
A Hollywood production crew comes to West Texas to recreate the grisly murder of a local woman. Using locals to re-enact the crime, reality TV meets reality in this bizarre romantic comedy about the (show) business of murder.

Trauma Bonds
MT Premiere | MTFF Alumni | USA | 16 MINUTES | English
The morning after a kidnapping, a detective’s investigation tests the bonds of a marriage.