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Aspen Film’s 32nd annual Shortsfest will commence this week, with 79 short films from over 33 countries to be screened across 11 programs.

As one of only four Oscar-qualifying festivals in the United States strictly dedicated to shorts, the prestigious festival this year looks to introduce viewers to a vast array of fast-rising filmmakers and powerful storytelling.

“We were going through a stack of nearly 3,000 submissions this year and that’s, you know, every conceivable kind of film from everywhere in the world,” said Jason Anderson, the Shortsfest director of programming. “And I think it’s a really, really fantastic program this year, maybe one of our best ever.”

This year’s Shortsfest features 74 premieres in total, 10 of which are world premieres, and 48% of the titles were either directed or co-directed by women. The programmed screenings at the Wheeler Opera House will begin on Tuesday and continue through Sunday.

Of the 11 programs, each runs around 90 minutes, Anderson said. The programs group together films that vary from one another in genre, length, style and emotional tone, he explained.

“You’re always sort of conscious of how much you’re asking of an audience when you’re bringing them in and out of stories over the course of an hour-and-a-half, so we try to make it enjoyable,” Anderson said. “You know, definitely even when you’re putting the films together, you want things to be very different from each other, so they all kind of pop and you’re not like keeping somebody in the same emotional pace for too long.”

In addition to post-screening Q&As with some of the visiting filmmakers, there also will be panel conversations, featuring industry special guests, held throughout the week at the Aspen Film Isis Theatre and the Aspen District Theatre.

Daily happy hours and late-night après screenings will commence at different venues around town this week, and Aspen Film’s FilmEducates program is putting on a wide variety of youth-focused programming and events in schools throughout the valley during Shortsfest, as well.

This year’s films are competing for nine prizes, including the Oscar-qualifying categories — Best Animation, Best Comedy, Best Drama, Best Documentary and Best Short Short — as well as an Audience Award, a couple of youth and student awards and the annual Ellen Award, which is presented in honor of Aspen Film’s founder and first executive director, Ellen Kohner Hunt.

Notable Shortsfest jurors this year include filmmaker and author Justine Bateman, Emmy-winning co-producer and POV shorts producer Opal Hope Bennett and Kiva Reardon, who is the vice president of film at PASTEL.

All Shortsfest winners will receive cash prizes of either $1,250 or $2,500 based on their award category, and there will be an awards dinner and ceremony at the W Aspen hotel on Sunday evening.

As a festival that’s focused on new and emerging talent in the industry, Aspen Shortsfest has long been desirable for filmmakers and film teams around the world, said Anderson — who joined the Shortsfest team in 2019 and has been the lead programmer since the 2020 festival.

Anderson noted how in the past few years since he’s been involved, many of their Shortsfest winners have gone on to make it to the nomination round, or at least the shortlist round, for the Academy Awards, he said.

Anderson is based in the film-infused city of Toronto and serves as the programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival’s annual program of short form cinema. A tenured figure in the industry — he was a film critic and journalist for years before he segwayed into the programming side of things — Anderson emphasized how Aspen Film’s Shortsfest holds prominence internationally. He said the week-long festival is a rich, engaging experience for the filmmakers from all over the world who come together in Aspen.

“It’s unique in that it’s a sort of premiere festival that just does shorts,” Anderson said. “And there really aren’t hardly any in the U.S. that are just specializing in shorts and having that high standard of work and not treating shorts as kind of an afterthought or something else, but really celebrating the form.”

Anderson went on to praise the art form of a short film. He said he believes it’s actually more challenging to create a powerful short film than it is a longer feature because shorts are less forgiving when it comes to the tightness and effectiveness of how the story is told, he explained.

“I think that a good feature can have a scene that doesn’t work that well or maybe have moments that you’re kind of like, eh you didn’t really need that, you could’ve tightened that up,” Anderson said. “But I think with a great short, certainly with the stuff I’m looking at and what my team is looking for, it’s stuff that really doesn’t waste any time, you know, everything in the film has purpose and intention and really has its own rhythm — it’s like, every beat of this film has been considered and needs to be here.”

The program director then said that from the two-minute animations to the 30-minute documentaries, and all the others falling in between, the 79 shorts selected for this year’s festival master that storytelling medium. And, he said, many of these filmmakers have done so in a way that makes the viewing experience “intoxicating.”

“When you feel that from a filmmaker — especially, you know, an emerging filmmaker — it’s so impressive and so exciting,” Anderson said, “because you feel like, wow, the kind of confidence that that filmmaker and that film exudes is really kind of intoxicating, and I think that’s a real common thread with these films.”

In terms of the actual narratives among the films coming to Shortsfest this year, Anderson said there are a couple of common themes that arise and are notable. One that stood out to the programmer involves parent-child relationships or children and parents relating to each other in new ways, he said.

He mentioned Crystal Kayiza’s film, “Rest Stop” — which follows a young Ugandan-American girl as she realizes her place in the world through a bus journey with her family — and Duván Duque Vargas’ film, titled “All-Inclusive,” which is set in Colombia and centers around an 11-year-old kid witnessing tensions between his parents as they travel to a countryside resort.

Other films aligning with this theme include some of the brand new shorts, noted Anderson, like Noam Argov’s “Sulam” and Ifeyinwa Arinze’s “August Visitor.” Both films will be making their world premieres this week at Shortsfest.

Another prevalent theme among a handful of the films surrounds the concept of immigration — being new to a culture and a place, Anderson said — and the impact of cultural dislocation, adjustment or difference within a new country.

Anderson also noted that while there weren’t too many stories about COVID-19 in this year’s submission pool, there are a couple of pandemic-related comedies in the Shortsfest lineup that stand out. He mentioned Kulap Vilaysack’s “Open and Shut” about a woman in isolation who becomes preoccupied with her mysterious neighbor and Mike Donahue’s “Troy,” which is about a neighbor constantly having loud intercourse.

“Those kinds of stories, like that kind of forced proximity to people, is certainly a theme that’s emerging,” Anderson said. “Both explicitly in the films we’re seeing, sort of during COVID and after COVID, and implicitly too — anything to do with human connection, that is something we’re seeing quite a bit of, too.”

Aspen Film’s Shortsfest will run through Sunday, with screenings taking place at the Wheeler Opera House. Single tickets to individual screening programs are $20 ($15 for Aspen Film members) and free for Roaring Fork Valley students and teachers. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit aspenfilm.org.

Jacqueline Reynolds is an arts & entertainment reporter for the Aspen Daily News. She can be reached at jacqueline@aspendailynews.com.

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