In order of Jack's and my mutual preference:
1. The Record Breaker (2012) was by far our favorite. A 28 minute live action documentary by Brian McGinn, it chronicles the career of Ashrita Furman, who holds the record for number of Guinness World Records and is, in the words of his father, the happiest guy he knows. Ashrita is the name given to him by his guru Sri Chinmoy, to whom Ashrita dedicates his Queens NY health food store, Guru Health Foods. We want to visit his store next time we're in New York. I would tell you where to see the short if I knew, but watch for it. There's nothing not to like. Here's his website and the imdb page.
2. Life Doesn't Frighten Me (2012) is a charming 14 minute scripted story about a pubescent girl in a land of clueless men. Gordon Pinsent (starred with Julie Christie in Away From Her (2006) and was in The Shipping News (2001), among many roles) plays the grandfather/guardian. This has won a few awards for director/writer Stephen Patrick Dunn and has an imdb page, from which I get a new winner in the Producers Plethora Prize. Because there are 37, mostly Associate, Producers, I suspect Dunn awarded the title to most of his contributors. Here's his fundraising page and here's the trailer.
3. Have You Got a Minute doesn't have an imdb page so I don't have data with which to refresh my memory. It has subtitles and involves a man asking for driving directions from a verbose passer-by. Cute. Much shorter than the other two as I recall.
4. Thumb (2012) is a farce about a competitive guy playing thumb wars with his girlfriend. Directed by Sarah Gurfield (I believe she is the only woman director in this group) and written by Kevin W. Walsh, it was funded on kickstarter and has an imdb page that doesn't remind me of its length. Noteworthy that the music is by Ben Toth who scored Liberal Arts.
5. Making It (2013) is a three minute animated short with narration taken from a StoryCorps oral history interview, in which a young Latino man, Noe Rueda, describes how he earned money to support his grandmother and himself. Absolutely charming. Here's its imdb page and an article about the filmmakers' continuing work with StoryCorps.
6. Punched shows a man and his young son on a light rail train helping a suspicious stranger get his ticket punched. Intriguing. No imdb cheat sheet to help me remember it but we liked it.
7. Double or Nothing (2012) has a script written by Neil LaBute, whom I know for his work exploring man's inhumanity to man. I loved Your Friends & Neighbors (1998) and The Shape of Things (2003), both of which he directed and wrote, as well as Nurse Betty (2000) which he directed from someone else's script. I mentioned his mean-spiritedness when I wrote briefly about Lakeview Terrace. And this 11 minute short, directed by Nathaniel Krause (his debut) is mean-spirited to the max (I found it uncomfortably so, unlike the four preceding), starring Adam Brody (most recently in Damsels in Distress), Keith David, and Louisa Krause (I don't know if there's a relationship). Here's the imdb page and the website, on which you can watch the trailer.
8. Closing Bell (2012) was nominated for a number of festival awards and won one for editing. We weren't all that impressed, but at least it was only five minutes long. Not a narrative, it has to do with Wall Street and greed. I think. Director / writer / producer / cinematographer / editor / production designer Janek Ambros has clearly been given a boost by it, as he has two more shorts and two features in the pipeline, one of each documentary and fiction. Here's the imdb page and here's the trailer.
9. Peter at the End (2012) stars Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Blades of Glory (2007)) as a guy with a big secret and a particularly obtuse set of friends and family. It's 23 minutes long and left us cold. Here's the imdb page.
We got to see this collection at the same festival where we saw First Comes Love in April.
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