Bridge to Host Film Festival
International Venue to Feature 15 Short Films

By Dmitry Kiper

Dominated by hot blue stars, the Pleiades star cluster is 100 million years old - young for stars - and 400 light years away.

The second annual International Pleiades Film Festival, which will be dominated by up-and-coming stars and directors, is much closer. The festival will be screened at the Bridge Theatre on May 15.

"When I first saw the Bridge Theatre, I fell in love with it," said Garrett Woodman, the event coordinator and Bay Area financier for the festival. "I think (the theater) has to strike a certain chord."

In just one year, the festival has more than doubled in size. While six cities participated in 2004, 15 cities all over the world are participating this year and Pleiades is the first and only short-film festival to simultaneously release its selections to more than a dozen cities worldwide. Internationally, the festival will run from May 12 - 19, including the prominent markets New York, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.  San Francisco and Palo Alto will be the only West Coast cities to host the festival.

Bruno Rives, founder of the Tebaldo international consulting agency, is the creator and main sponsor of the festival. His goal was to give talented filmmakers international exposure and to show that short films, which are usually no longer than 15 minutes, could be in the same league as full-length features. 

"The world has become our village," said Paul Gassee, a Bay Area event coordinator for the festival. "Our selection is as international as it gets. By having this extended network, we hope to get the most prominent talents out there and give them the visibility they desire. The upside of the short-film genre is that they cost less and enable filmmakers to make their point quicker."

Worldwide, 3,000 cinema spectators are expected to attend the festival and more than 20,000 are expected to watch via the Internet.

A total of 15 short films will be shown in participating theaters: Ten films will compete for prizes and there will be five non-competing films - one of which is last year's winner. The non-competing films are by well-established multi-award-winning directors.

"They are there to be the measuring stick," Gassee explained. "To show that the gap (between competing and non-competing films) is not that large."

Five judges in Paris will pick a winner and audience members worldwide will have an opportunity to select a recipient of the People's Choice Award. The international award ceremony will be broadcast live on the festival's Web site May 19. (Some of the short films will be available on the Web site starting May 12).

There are several Oscar nominees in the selection, as well as winners at the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles Shorts Festival, Best European Shorts and other internationally acclaimed festivals.

The two most notable things about the films, according to Gassee, are their quality and how different they all are from each other. Most do not fit the typical categories - action, comedy, drama, thriller - films are usually put into. 

In "Two's Company," a beautiful black-haired dark-brown-eyed woman in her late 20s is cheating on her blind, and much older, boyfriend. She is unsuccessful in persuading her lover - who wants to play tricks on her blind boyfriend - to leave before her boyfriend comes home. A surprise ending awaits the viewer.

"Don't count on me to even give you a hint," said Gassee. "To ruin the ending would be a cinematic injustice."

Another surprise ending awaits the viewer in "Prey Alone," which begins like the middle of an action movie. The director controls the pace with pendulum-like scene changes between the interrogation of an uncooperative suspect and digitally animated video-game-like chase scenes.

"Head Breaker" takes place on the streets of Mexico City. A well-dressed man sitting in the back of a taxicab makes two calls on his cell phone while the cabdriver (like the viewer) is unsure if the passenger is joking. One call is to 911 to report a taxi driver whose head has been squashed and the other call is to his grandmother to ask how to get blood off a shirt.

"The close facial shots bring us closer to the protagonists, thereby bringing us intimately into every single one of their emotions," noted Gassee. "The dim lighting gets you quickly immersed in an undesirable and nervous closeness."

"Mailman" is a dark comedy about a small-town letter carrier who takes his job disturbingly seriously. He has a perfect five-year delivery record and his commitment to upholding it causes his stripper-wife to leave him. When she does, he goes a little "postal."

"As an exotic dancer," he says matter-of-factly, "Denise didn't realize the precision my work requires."

"When you go to see a feature," said Gassee, "the cinematography, the dialogue, the directing; it's all done by the same crew. That's like a one-course meal. You don't get the myriad of different intricacies, textures, ingredients and flavors. Our audience will get a 15-course meal.

"We hope they go through the gamut of emotions," he added. "Hopefully we took their breath away for a couple of hours."

The festival will be held at the Bridge Theatre, 3010 Geary Blvd., on Sunday, May 15, from noon to 4 p.m. Screenings begin at 1 p.m. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased in advance at pleiadesfestival.com/sf or at the theatre box office the day of the event. A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit the Peninsula Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.