Cinema St. Louis and St. Louis Public Radio Present Free BEST OF SHORTS Program Saturday February 20th

By Tom Stockman | February 17, 2021

Cinema St. Louis and St. Louis Public Radio are proud to co-present a free virtual screening of a selection of the award-winning short films from the 2020 Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF) and 2020 Whitaker St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase. In addition to the films, the event will feature an interview with Jon Alston, director of “Augustus,” which won the Essy Award (which honors films with St. Louis connections) for Best Narrative Short at both the Showcase and SLIFF.

The program will be streamed at 7 pm Saturday, Feb. 20, on St. Louis Public Radio’s Twitch channel.

Twitch is a livestream video platform owned by Amazon. It’s like YouTube, but all the videos are live, so the experience is different at any given time.

More information can be found on St. Louis Public Radio’s Events page: stlpublicradio.org/events. Participants can register for the event here.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has long sanctioned SLIFF’s shorts competition as a pre-screening event for the Academy Awards. The winners in four categories of SLIFF’s juried shorts programming (Best of Fest, Best Animation, Best Live Action, and Best Documentary) are eligible to submit their films directly to the Academy for Oscar consideration.

St. Louis Public Radio is an award-winning news organization and NPR member station, providing in-depth news, insightful discussion, and entertaining programs to more than a half-million people per month on-air and online. With a large, St. Louis-based newsroom and reporters stationed in Jefferson City and Rolla, Mo., and Belleville, Ill., the station’s journalists find and tell important stories about communities across the region and help people to become deeply informed about the issues that affect their lives. Broadcasting on 90.7 KWMU FM in St. Louis, 90.3 WQUB in Quincy, Ill., 88.5 KMST in Rolla, and sharing news and music online at stlpublicradio.org, St. Louis Public Radio is a member-supported service of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

The following short films will be screened during this event:

Always Coming Back (Noah Readhead & Nate Townsend, U.S.,  2020, 9 min., English): SLIFF Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary Short. Webster Groves rallies around a man with a mental disability to support his greatest passion.

Augustus (Jon Alston, U.S., 2020, 16 min., English): SLIFF and Showcase Essy Award for Best Narrative Short. Augustus, a literate carpenter and family man who is living free as a fugitive slave, is faced with a decision to speak or die when denied the wages he’s earned.

Black Goat (Yi Tang, Nepal/U.S., 2019, 12 min., Nepali): SLIFF Best Live Action Short. A new girl at a nunnery has her first period after hearing a late-night ghost story and believes that she has been cursed, requiring her to sacrifice a black goat to avoid further misfortune.

Colette (Anthony Giacchino, France/Germany/U.S., 2019, 24 min., French & German): SLIFF Best Documentary Short. Colette Catherine, now 90, revisits the terrors of her childhood, when she fought the Nazis as a member of the French Resistance.

I Want to Make a Film about Women (Karen Pearlman, Australia, 2019, 12 min., English & Russian): SLIFF Essy Award for Best Documentary Short. A speculative love letter to Russian constructivist women in the 1920s Soviet Union.

Josiah (Kyle Laursen, U.S., 2019, 20 min., English): SLIFF Best of Fest Short. A Black actor auditions for a part in a period television series.

R.A.S. (Lucas Durkheim, France, 2019, 5 min., French): SLIFF Best Short Short. For months now, a group of five bored young soldiers have been stuck on a mission in the middle of the Afghan mountains, but the routine is finally broken during a support mission.

To the Dusty Sea (Héloïse Ferlay, France, 2020, 12 min., French): SLIFF Best Animated Short. Left alone in the summer, Malo and Zoe try their best to catch their mother’s elusive eye.