by Allison Yakulis, Staff Writer & “Doc” Hunter Bush, Podcast Czar

Forty-five short films, two featurettes, and one music video. Spread out across the four days of this year’s Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival, interspersed between the eight features, we took in 45 shorts, 2 featurettes, and 1 video. A lot of hard work went into, well definitely most of them, and it would feel wrong not to shed a little light on at least a few that really stood out.

The majority of the shorts at PUFF are segmented into different blocks, presented on different days: The BIzarre Block (films which defy easy categorization), The Local Block, The International Block, and the Horror Block, with a few stragglers settled in between the features as palate cleansers. The featurettes (Killer Cup (2002), Zombie Love Slave (1999)) were a bit longer than the traditional shorts but not quite feature length, and the music video, for those curious, was a surfy instrumental - “Harper’s Bizarre” by Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.

Programming a short film block is a bit like making a mixtape, I imagine. You have to control the tonal flow from one to the next, as well as consider how close together you plan similar-seeming entries. We have to give a big, grateful shout out to Maria Colella from PUFF who programmed all the shorts blocks this year, and sifted through 150-ish shorts to find those that made the cut! Great work!

Below are a selection of our favorites:

Ambitus (dir. Louise Mejstelman) - 15 mins
This bittersweet character sketch filmed and set in Paris follows an elderly trumpet player as he struggles to finish composing a piece of music to honor his late lady love, a pianist. Ambitus highlights the pain of love and loss, the fragility of our ever aging bodies, and the immense effort involved in honing a talent and creating something beautiful, and the short itself is beautifully crafted and quite moving. It was selected by PUFF 7 attendees as best short, I’d say deservedly. - AY

From Water Comes Melon (dir. Micah Vassau) - 13 mins

I don’t really know how to accurately describe the vibe of From Water Comes Melon, or really honestly what it’s saying, but I enjoyed it from start to finish. A young lady on a beach finds a watermelon floating ashore but doesn’t know what it is, so she takes it to …a goddess perhaps? The setting and their modes of dress seem almost post-apocalyptic - the young woman is nude but for an elaborate headdress of flowers and n-95 masks over her eyes; the goddess is bedecked in a wedding dress, and an even more elaborate floral headdress with three melting ice cream cones in her hair. It’s chaotic, but I love it so - but then the young woman leaves the beach and enters a modern restaurant kitchen where an older woman, recognizing the watermelon is at its peak ripeness, cuts it into 4 quarters. The long, half moon grin-shaped kind that you hold with two hands to eat or (as the young woman chooses to do) sit down slowly upon in what is definitely someone’s fetish. The short ends with the woman lamenting the lost melon on the beach only to see a dozen new melons have washed up. Is director Micah Vassau commenting on loss, or scarcity; dating or sex? Is this a new creation myth? I have no idea, but I loved it. - HB

Billy Kills The Internet (dir. Lon Strickland) - 25 minutes

The universe is in danger from a viral or perhaps fungal threat known as The Internet, an insidious pestilence that once appeared to be a positive technological progression but has since given rise to terrible nonsense and strife. The very young Billy and his compatriots (a couple of puppets and an actual baby) must brave the heavily green screened vacuum of space to obtain the only weapon that can kill the internet from the god Vishnu, and then go do the dang thing. With that frenetic-but-underfunded aesthetic reminiscent of Adult Swim or even more prototypically something on public access cable, Billy Kills The Internet knows its strengths and its limitations and navigates them expertly to deliver a charmingly weird adventure story. Also William Strickland (the titular Billy) delivers an excellent performance that is convincing and earnest despite his young age. It’s a joyful and fun watch. - AY

The Woodsman (dir. Kyle Kuchta) - 13 mins

Bernie is a 3rd generation Christmas Tree salesman and his family’s lot have a streak going: selling every tree on the lot by Christmas each year for 93 years running. With the camera in the perspective of the customers, we see Bernie sell off 2 of his remaining 3 trees with offhand, rumpled charm until only Gertrude (yes, he names the trees) is left. Things get tense as midnight nears and Bernie makes a generous but ultimately futile gesture and pays the price. I would have loved another 10 minutes or so of this, to build the backstory a little, to imply why what happens to Bernie indeed must happen, but the jovial-yet-desperate lead performance from John R. Smith Jr. adds a lot of heart and comedy to the slim narrative. As a bonus, with its horror/comedy/xmas mix, it would pair perfectly with a screening of Gremlins. - HB

The Order (dir. Eric Swiz) - 8 mins

In this age of Grubhub, UberEats, GoPuff, Instacart, and likely a few others I’m forgetting, it’s pretty dang easy to order food from wherever to wherever without having to do much more than tap on the screen of the phone in your pocket. So why not mobilize all the power of the delivery gig economy to do something just a shade more evil than claiming your drivers to be “independent contractors” so you don’t have to provide benefits or guarantee base pay while you levy hefty service fees on small business restaurants? Perhaps to tweak a few ones and zeros to allow for something unusual to be delivered. Something…sacrificial? With decent effects and a confidently executed concept, The Order delivers a wicked punchline to its very mundane and familiar setup. - AY

Greed (dir. Amber Danger Johnson) - 4 mins
This is what’s termed a micro short for being under 5 minutes long, but in that time, Amber Danger Johnson and star Joy Dolo deliver a very interesting piece. Dolo, in abstract geometric face paint sits at an elaborately set table. A banquet lies before her; all golden plates of food and goblets of wine (presumably). She speaks, addressing all women with a message to no longer settle for allowing others to tell them when they have had enough, encouraging them to decide for themselves. Interspersed with this, and punctuated by deep rattling bursts of music (think: that one big “BWOMP” note that’s in almost every movie trailer) is text on screen, telling the men that their time is up. It ends with the audio and visual messages nearly harmonizing to communicate one thing: An era of chaos begins now. I loved it. The addition of the text took something that could otherwise seem preachy pr pretentious and made it genuinely funny. I imagined this as the cold open to a gender-divided version of something like The Purge, and now that’s kind of all I want to see. Why not? - HB

It is a point of pride for the Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival’s crew to highlight local talent and look for hidden gems among the year’s festival submissions when deciding what to show - and the shorts blocks exemplify this intent. If you want to see who’s making films in Philly that are worth watching, PUFF’s got them. If you want to see little snippets of weirdness from overseas, PUFF’s got them. If you want to see things that are too extreme for VOD or mainstream distribution and this might just be your only chance to watch, PUFF’s got them. Not only that, but they keep getting better every year with more mind blowing finds and stronger submissions. Passionate people run this fest, and we all know passionate people make the best stuff. Thank you for reading. Hope we see you at PUFF next year!