The take-away from Friday's DC Shorts 7 p.m. Showcase is that you can get away with a lot more in a short film; it can be that much more raunchy, bizarre, offensive and opinionated. And I was a happier viewer for it.

Here were my thoughts on the films in Showcase 3, which will screen again Sunday September 13 at 6 p.m. at the E Street Landmark Theater.

Rite: A young girl faces a sick and violent ritual her family members say will bring her into adulthood.  Pros: The film serves as a strong commentary on organized religion and the actions we take for the sake of the people around us. Cons: This film is not for the squeamish.

Made in Japan: A man tells his girlfriend a tall tale for why he missed a date—it's an elaborate story about searching for his Japanese father after learning the man he thought was his father was not. Pros: This flick is never short of humor as the main character's story is brought to reality. We see him searching the streets of Japan for his real father even though he admits he has not a trace of Asian features. His girlfriend is unconvinced, yet listens with a smirk. Cons: The production is documentary-style, which attempts to lend authenticity to a tale that is clearly not authentic.

The Response: A panel of US military judges decide the fate of a suspected enemy combatant in this courtroom drama based on true events. Pros: The military judge's dearth of evidence against the Guantanamo detainee is especially arresting in that the story's true. Cons: The film takes place solely in the courtroom, so the audience is left little evidence of their own to judge the suspect themselves.

Hillel's Angels: A documentary about clans of Jewish motorcyclists. Pros: The best part of this film is the self-deprecating humor of the motorcyclists, who, clad in leather and Harley-Davidson insignia yarmulkes, are proud of both their Jewish heritage and of their love of the open road. Cons: This nearly twenty minute film could have said as much in 10 minutes without audiences having to fidget in their seats.

Paul and His Wall: A recluse falls in love with his neighbor through a hole in the wall. Pros: A cute story, and aptly titled.  Paul's wall represents both his fear of the outside world and the wall of his own apartment, where a chance meeting opens his eyes to love.  Cons: This film looks more like a play than a movie with its overly apparent visual symbolism, stage-like lighting, and unconvincing props.

Papiroflexia: A skillful paper-folder shapes the world with his hands in this 3 minute animation. Pros: This film is so visually entrancing that it catches one's attention with just the actions on the screen and the sound of crinkling paper and quirky music. Cons: It has the look of an American Express commercial, not an indie film, perhaps a good thing for the director who could easily transfer skills into a commercial future.

Interpretation: Encountering a gang of thugs, a couple uses a 6th-century Chinese book on warfare to plan their attack strategy. Little do they know that the man they encounter also knows a thing or two from the same text. Pros: This film cleverly uses an attention-grabbing action scene to demonstrate how two different people can interpret the same philosophy in opposing ways.  Cons: The beginning of the film focuses a little much on the flirty banter between the couple, a stroke with no bearing on the rest of the film.

The Hollerings: Three Stories In Wood: Common human anxieties are expressed in three short acts by faceless wooden figurines. Pros: Static shots of doll-house settings set to quirky narration make for a creative look at common human interaction, whether between a frustrated teacher and her hyperactive student or a couple in a now loveless marriage.  Cons: So little happens visually that it is sometimes difficult to follow the story solely through narration.

Clamp and Grind: A superhero wannabe takes to the streets against parking enforcement.  Pros: A set of headlights enter the darkened frame. A booted man exits a van, armed with goggles and a chainsaw.  He approaches an apprehensive businessman. The setting is that of a horror movie, until the goggled man proceeds to cut the boot off the business man's sedan.  It's a perfect surprise for this simple story. Cons: The setting is a little unclear—it's nearly pitch black with nothing else in sight. Are we in a parking garage, a city street?  While it's always good to keep viewers figuring out things for themselves, its never good to leave them in the dark, literally.

William's Christening: An image-conscious couple go to great lengths to recover a child after their own goes missing. Pros: The gothic mansion setting is absolutely beautiful and lends to the intrigue that carries the viewer throughout the film. Cons: Viewers learn so little about the characters that their morally reprehensible actions carry little weight.

A Christmas Carrot: When Ramona seeks to cure her holiday boredom in the privacy of her bedroom, she opens the door to an embarrassing new problem that happens to bring the family closer than ever. Think about the title and use your dirty minds. Pros: I love that this film takes the story THAT far.  A great script and superb acting makes this comedy one of my favorite shorts of the year. Cons: Maybe they take it a little too far; I found it difficult to swallow my dinner after the screening.

Photos By Ben Crosbie

The sixth annual DC Shorts Film Festival kicked off its week of screenings this Thursday, with a two-hour showcase of 11 short films that surprise with their depth of story, creativity, and entertainment value. I've been going to the fest for the last four years, and while there's always reason for me to come back year after year, DC Shorts always has its share of lackluster flicks.  But Thursday's screening demonstrated that one or all of following are true:

• Opening night is always the best.
• There are more and more indie filmmakers and they're only getting better.
• The selection committee is particularly savvy this year.

Here are my thoughts on the films in Showcase 1, which will screen again Saturday,  September 12 at 9:00 p.m. at the US Navy Memorial, and Sunday, September 12 at 1:00 p.m. at the E Street Landmark Theater.

Pigeon:Impossible: A Secret Service agent armed with a ravishing donut inadvertently locks a pesty sugar-seeking pigeon into his go-go gadget nuclear briefcase.  A second Cold War nearly ensues.  Pros: With the look, feel, and near-technical prowess of a Toy Story film, this 7-minute animation demonstrates the now Pixar-famous feat of being able to capture a viewer's undivided attention without any dialogue.  Cons: Despite bombs dropping and bullets flying from a pigeon-driven suitcase, the D.C. streets alongside the Mall appear strangely empty and havoc-less.  Chalk it up to time and budget, I guess.

Nodutgang (Emergency Exit):  In this short drama from Norway, a bank robber and a sick man looking to empty his bank account encounter each other and become bound up in one other's problems.  Pros: I was intrigued until the end to learn about why a sick Norwegian man was emptying his bank account in US dollars, wearing aviators indoors, and keeling over with strange stomach pains.  Cons: I never actually learned in the end who this man was, or what his motives were. Nor could I figure out why the sick man wanted to help the bank robber, and why the two decided to casually sit and chat while being pursued by the authorities.

Taco Mary: An atheist discovers the Virgin Mary in his taco and becomes bewildered by the religious and commercial following that ensues. Remember that piece of toast with an image of Jesus that sold on ebay? This is something like that.  Pros: The characters are well drawn, from the angry Asian restaurant owner to the bored and humorless counter boy to the stink-eyed homeless woman at the corner booth.  Cons: While the first site of the Virgin Mary is hilarious in all of its over-the-top glowing glory, the film tries unsuccessfully to make statements about religion and consumerism.  Also: it's always a bad thing when the description of the film explains what the film did not.

And What Remains: A father explores his relationship with his son and his memory of his own father in this narrated collection of old video and scenic shots of America's heartland.  Pros: The ethereal and nostalgic feeling created by the old super 8 home videos used throughout this film warm the soul.  Cons: Viewers can easily feel excluded from what seems to be an intimate family portrait and may yearn for something with more of a narrative spine.

Sebastian's Voodoo: A voodoo doll makes the ultimate sacrifice to save his friends from being pinned to death in this haunting animated tale.  Pros: The images were beautiful, more like a painting than an animation. And the dark nature of the story demonstrated that animation is a profound medium no longer exclusive to children's stories.  Cons: I'm not sure I understand how voodoo dolls work anymore.

On the Road To Tel Aviv:  A young woman and her boyfriend confront the reality of war and  racial tensions within Israel as they select a public bus back to the city.  Pros: This 19-minute drama is even-handed in its careful portrayal of the Israeli struggle and never shies away from two difficult truths: our own racial consciousness and the fragility of life within a warring nation.  Cons: That "foreshadowing" from the first scenes? It gives away the ending! Also:  In addressing so much in such a short amount of time, the film risks being overly simplistic.

Strange Fits of Passion That We Have Known: This 2 minute experimental film depicts wait staff in awkward motion, falling, jerking about, pulling their hair.  Pros: Once you get the point of this strange little ditty, the memory of your own waiting days brings a smile.  Cons: I wouldn't really call these fits of passion, rather fits of absolute discomfort. And they were discomforting to watch.

Preschool's a Bitch: In an effort to get their child into the best preschool, these parents will try just about anything.  Pros: Unfailingly funny, the film satirizes the near-clichéd obsession of US yuppies—that if their offspring don't get into the best preschool, they are bound for mediocrity.  But the best part of this film is a cunning (and unforeseeable) twist at the end.  Cons: I think we've seen this narrative before.  Mercifully, the twist at the end saves the film from itself.

Forever's Not So Long: It's the end of the world—or at least of the Eastern seaboard. With only hours to live, George discovers that it's a perfect time to find someone with which to spend the rest of his life.  Pros: This apocalypse narrative reaches beyond the genre's typical gloom with well-placed humor.  The take-home: that once past the superficiality of initial courtship, spending one's life with someone can happen in only a number of hours: the unglamorous yet pleasing sex life; the simple but precious experience of reading together; the quarrel over a little too much spice in the stir-fry.  Cons: The characters never really digest the reality of the end of the world.

The Colors of Veil: A documentary about a former US soldier, who was not raised in the Muslim religion but chooses to wear the veil because it helps to mark her identity as a woman of religion.  Pros: The story is a fascinating one, expecially in a time when the muslim veil is often equated with a woman's lack of choice and control.  Cons: The film consists nearly entirely of sit-down interviews and little action.  Too much telling; not enough showing.

Porque Hay Cosas Que Nunca se Olvidan (Because There are Things You Can Never Forget): Four young boys playing in the streets accidentally kick their soccer ball into an elderly neighbor's fenced patio.  She responds by popping it with her knitting needles, a sin not so easily forgotten.  Pros: Plenty of good foreshadowing keeps the viewer's attention until the end.  Cons: The boys' exaggerated response seems a tad dark for a film that ought to carry itself on humor.

Set in Bangor, Maine, the film follows three elderly individuals – Bill, Jerry and Gaudet's mother Joan – who go to a small airport every day to greet the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite facing failing health, depression and mounting debt, the three are committed to greeting the troops as they first step back on American soil, even if it's as early as three in the morning.

I had the opportunity to chat with Director Aron Gaudet. Here's what he had to say:

Q. What was the impetus for making the film? How did you come upon these characters?

Gita and I both worked in local television news around the country and when we met I think we both agreed that there were so many great stories that got passed up in local news just because it would take more than a day to tell the story. And it was really frustrating to us. We'd see all these great personal stories go by and we'd say: we don't have time for that, let's go to the town hall meeting. It wasn't very fulfilling. I had always wanted to make documentaries and when I met Gita and I told her about that, she took the ball and ran with it. She was like, we'll start a company and we'll find a subject. When I went home that Christmas and got her to meet my mom, we saw that flight come in and we said: this could be at least a great short documentary. And then we went home with Bill that first time and saw his living conditions and we had already known that he had been battling prostate cancer and saw how he was living and he told us about his wife dying. We just realized this guy is going through a lot and he's out there all the time. He's a compelling character for a movie. It all kind of started with him and then we met Jerry.

Q. What was your biggest challenge in making the film?

We were first time filmmakers and I think we went in thinking this would be easy. I shoot everyday, I edit every day. We'll just get the equipment and we'll do it. We weren't thinking of fundraising and getting the money and all that. This was our film school. Over the four years we made the movie, we learned so much. We didn't start fundraising until we were almost done shooting three years into it. It got to the point where it was like: if we don't get money, we won't finish this. It was at that point that we got funding from ITVS. We got it just when we needed it.

Q. Were you working on other projects in the meantime?

We were working full time jobs for the first three years of it. At first we were still working in Michigan and we would drive to Chicago, fly to Boston, drive Bangor. Or, if we didn't have money to do that we would drive from Michigan to Maine which was like a 19 hour drive, stay there a couple of days and drive back. Eventually we said we've got to do something to be closer, so we moved to Boston, so it was a four hour drive. So that made it a lot easier. And having my mom call and say, the 500,000th troop should be coming in on a flight tomorrow, we could drive up and be there. We would start at my mom's house and when she got a call, we'd go in with her at the airport. And then at the airport, we'd pick Bill or Jerry and follow them.

Q. What has the response been to the film?

We premiered at South By Southwest and in the last three months, we played at over 20 film festivals and the response has been great everywhere. When we had a chance to have one of the subjects there with us, the response has been even greater. By the time I was done editing the movie, I didn't know what we had. I walked out of the editing room and I remember saying to Gita, I don't know what this is. It's because you're so close. And it wasn't until we saw it with audiences and saw them respond that we knew what we had. People would always come up after and say l loved the movie and then launch into this personal story, like my dad had prostate cancer. It always became how it related to them personally. One woman was saying that it had a lot of universal themes and that's what we're starting to take away from it. Everybody is connecting to it on a really personal level. It's been really overwhelming.

Q. Bill says in the movie that he feels like he's outgrown his usefulness. Has the film changed that feeling for him?

The best thing out of everything so far to me has been watching him when we are able to bring him to a screening and then watching people come up and talk to him because of what he says in the film. To see these people come up to him and say what he's doing means to them. The most fun of all of it has been to experience the film through him.

The portrayal is particularly intimate in that it follows Mosher's own family.  He is the eldest of three to a mother who admits to forfeiting her dreams to motherhood at an early age and having a knack for picking bad men.  The same trait seemed to pass to her daughter Daneal, now the single and unemployed mother of a beautiful toddler named Ruby. Littlest is Desi, a sharp-minded but devastatingly sweet girl who despite being privy to child and domestic abuse and teen pregnancy, shows promise for breaking out of her family's cycle.

I had the opportunity to meet with Palmieri and Mosher this weekend. Here's what they had to say:

Q.  When did you start the film?  And what was your creative approach?

MP: We went back and visited Donal's family in October 2006.  Before we started making it, we thought it would be interesting to frame it from a Halloween perspective, from one Halloween to the next. Thought it would be interesting to explore the ghosts that haunt every day lives. We also thought it would be best to contain it inside one year, so knowing that we went back seasonally for six or seven days.  Donal's family is very open so they just immediately let us dive in.

Q. Why Halloween?

MP: Halloween is the best framework for examining the idea of every family has their ghosts. Everybody has ghosts in the closet that keep rattling around and keep people in these cycles they can't get out of.

DM: And also visually... all the stuff that's seething under the surface of American life gets celebrated in Halloween, so its a perfect setting. The seasonal metaphors are out in the open; people are doing it for you. And people reveal something inner about themselves.  Its a perfect way of negotiating identity.

Q. I noticed a vivid representation of American symbols.  Can you explain that creative choice?

MP: At heart, I think the film is about a working class family that no one would really ever consider turning a camera on and this is the hidden majority of our country.

DM:  It's just that region. A lot of rural America, there's this huge pageantry.  Everyone is wearing flags and patriotism.  To me that's a kind of Halloween. That's the mask that America puts on. And so we thought we'd juxtapose that with Halloween imagery.

Q. The film does not follow a traditional three-act structure in which there is a built-in beginning and ending. What were some of the challenges in this more layered approach?

MP: The challenge in making a film like this is you are trying to tell multiple stories at the same time. But I think people actually like when there aren't all the answers there; that people have to think a little bit. There is closure but the closure is that there isn't closure in our lives.   And that's why we capped it off at the year because we could have kept going on forever.  The drama keeps going and going. It's more about what are the cycles inside of those dramas that keep it going.

Q. Did you have any ethical concerns, Donal, about going into your family and revealing their secrets to the world?

DM: There's a serious issue in the film: child molestation. We had no idea that had been going on.  So we were kind of stunned by that.  But the family themselves don't really hide it; they aren't really shameful.  The hardest part was talking to Desi about how she felt about this being shown to people. And she said: well, when my sister said these things were happening to her, nobody believed her but now they will because it's in a film. To negotiate all the personal information, we just had to have a constant dialogue with the family.

Q. Do you think the family trusted Michael more because of Donal's presence?

MP: I don't think the film would have been the film it is without the triangulation of access.  One filmmaker is simply a member of the family so you have that immediate sort of trust in place. As an outsider, there's a certain thing that happens where the person is willing to confide more.  A lot of times Donal would be out of the room and his family would tell me things that I don't think they would normally ever say to him because he's already a part of the history of the family; he knows their stories. They have to articulate the entire story to me.

DM: Especially Daneal, because she knows I have loyalties to her mother. If she was angered or felt alienated by the family, she would talk to Michael.

Q. What was it like co-directing and co-editing a film?

MP: I've directed a lot of stuff before this and I've always directed on my own. This is the first time I've ever engaged in a co-directing process on this sort of level. And from my experience, I think it makes me a better filmmaker because we have such shared ground but then we have such a difference.  Donal has such a tremendous history in film theory and criticism and photography and I have my own strengths elsewhere and it just makes us a better single person. Sometimes in the editing process, its easier for me to instead of trying to explain what it is I am thinking, I need to show it in the imagery.  It's easer for me to just make it and say, here, this is what I mean. Whereas Donal is capable of articulating that verbally.

Q. What was your visual approach?

MP: One of the key ways the film is shot is drawn from visual photographs. Donal shot his stuff on a T4 camera with a flash (point and shoot) that had a certain kind of flash photography look that I wanted to try and recreate in a simple way with the camera. At night time, the way that light is very white and hot in the center of the frame. In terms of the rest, its more about looking for what is a appropriate for a given scene in a situation. But when you are making a film, when all you are doing is looking for how to articulate this idea of ghosts and hauntings, things naturally arise. The image of the smoking... to me that looks very ghostly.

Director Marshall Curry certainly bet well when casting three tween race kart drivers for his latest doc, Racing Dreams, which picked up the award for Best Documentary at Tribeca and screened this past week at Silverdocs.   Annabeth (11), Josh (12) and Brandon (13) “popped out” in screen testing, said Curry, who sensitively documented  their earnest, sometimes sad, and often humorous childhood travails all the while competing in the year-long World Karting Association Championship.

Curry last swept the festival circuit with his first documentary, Street Fight, which picked up an Oscar nomination in 2005.  His latest features sharper production values but no less compassion.

I was able to meet up with Curry after his screening at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring on Saturday. Here's what he had to say:

Q: How did you select the characters for the film?

I read an article about the World Karting Association and found it to be interesting and thought, well I'll go and see it. So I took a camera and went to a couple of races and just started asking people: “who do you think I should talk to?”  A couple of people said you should really talk to Josh Hobson.  So we went to the Grand National Race a year before we started shooting and I finally found Josh as he was pulling off the track and he had just won his fourth Grand National Race over the weekend.  I talked to him for twenty minutes and I just thought, wow, if there are other kids out there like this, then we have one hell of a movie. And so I took the footage home and I edited a trailer and showed it to Bristol Baughn, who was working at one of the finance companies for the project.  She saw it and said, great, let's do it. So we went to that year's karting convention award ceremony and just started fanning out and talking to about 75 kids.  There we met Annabeth and Brandon.  We met a lot of kids there that we really really liked, but those three kinda popped out. So we took a chance with those three, and all three turned out to be great.

Q. Would you consider documenting these kids again, say, five years down the road?

One of the things that attracted me so much to this age was that its such a pivotal age and its an age that a lot of people really don't pay that much attention to.  Amazingly, you see Annabeth at the beginning of the movie and at the end of the movie and in one year she's a young woman. I'm sure we will do a short followup as a DVD extra or something like that.

Q. How did you achieve such a level of intimacy with your characters?

Intimacy is something that is super super important to me. We really wanted to shoot the movie HI Def, with great cameras and give that sense of pageantry of racing.   But at the same time I didn't want to roll in there with the big camera and the lights because I just know how that freezes people up. And to me, I would always prefer and intimate slightly less high production value scene than a slick hollow moment.

Q. How was making your second film different than making your first?

My first film was really film school for me. I had never shot or edited before so it was an incredibly slow long process for me.  I basically read the manual of the camera before I went on my first shoot and shot you know, 200 hours and the first 50 are lot worse than the last 50.  And then editing took me two years.  I edited everything myself, logged everything myself, transcribed everything myself.  There were no interns or anything like that. This time we had really good shooters that were working with us and I had another editor I worked with full time and another editor we brought in three quarters of the way through. So definitely that made it a lot easier. But it was also a challenge because with Street Fight, if I saw something that I thought we should be shooting, I would get it. And when somebody else is holding the camera it is harder to do that.  But then again, I'm working with people who have been shooting for 20 years and they are never having to find the aperture on the camera in an important moment.

Q. Were there any ethical dilemmas that you faced, especially with the more sensitive elements of some of the characters' lives?

There's nothing worse than pointing a camera at a person in a painful situation and treating them like a subject, when all you really want to do is put the camera down and hug them. That's the part of my job that I hate the most – to see somebody you care about suffering and to be thinking about whether you've got it in focus. But I also know that if you want to make movies, that's what you've got to do. So I would talk to them beforehand and say: during the course of this movie, there are going to be some uncomfortable times and your kid is going to lose a race and be crying and I'm going to shoot it. And its not that I'm a vulture, but that's part of the story, and I feel like they all pretty much understood that. After we screened the film to the families, Brandon's grandmother turned to me – and she'd been crying throughout the movie – and she she said: It's really hard to watch and its completely true and I wouldn't change a thing. And I think that they realized the value of telling their story.

Q. Why documentary?

I guess I'm just curious about things and it gives you an opportunity to go around and poke in other people's lives. I like just the craft of it too. I like just the serendipity of it. You'd shoot a fiction film, and everything was put there. And then you shoot a documentary, and all of a sudden the kid picks up the phone and starts calling and this whole thing happens and you're like, gee, I hope the battery doesn't run out. And I'm not a fisherman or a hunter, but I'd imagine its similar to that. You go out and you spend all day on the water and somedays you don't catch anything.  But once in a while, you get a big one and it's so thrilling.

Q. What are you working on next?

I have a film that I've shot and I'm going to start editing that is about a radical environmentalist who burned a couple of timber facilities in Oregon and is now in prison.