Rebecca Barry: Short films pack in originality and wit

Eat Pray Love was a harrowing two hours, 13 minutes long. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - part one only - clocks in at two hours, 26 minutes. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is an extra 60 seconds.

These days it feels as though directors, perhaps unable to hack into their precious babies, are keen to test the comfort of the cinema seats. So it was refreshing to sit through a bunch of short films at the fifth annual Show Me Shorts Film Festival on Friday night - for 78 minutes.

The festival started on Thursday with an awards evening at which the top films from New Zealand and Australia were named, including overall winner, comedy This is Her, directed by Katie Wolfe, which screened at the New York Film Festival in 2008. It continues until November 28 around the country.

All film-makers start out making shorts, and although there isn't much of a market for them, they're worth acknowledging because they demand such a high level of creativity to impress. And as Taika Waititi showed with his 2003 short film, Two Cars, One Night, you can even win an Oscar out of it.

Nor are they easy to do well. Grabbing a viewer's attention and getting them to invest in characters and a story compelling enough to last for the time it takes to devour an icecream is no mean feat. Each of the festival films had a rolling list of credits that just went to show how a mere 10 minutes could demand so much professional input.

Friday night's session fell under the odd umbrella of Imagination (surely an ingredient in any film), and featured 10 films, each about 10 minutes long, by a host of emerging film-making talent from here and Australia.

While a few illustrated the difficulty of communicating a worthwhile story in a short space of time, others shone with their originality and wit. It's just a shame the Academy Cinema was virtually empty.

The highlight was the "world premiere" of Joe Hitchcock's The North Pole Deception, a clever, stop-frame animation satire of workers' conditions at Santa's factory.

Hobbits don't have anything to complain about compared with the working conditions the elves have to put up with: the freezing cold, lack of toilet breaks and a tyrannical boss who appears to be the missing link between the workers and the big man himself.

The film had all the makings of parody gold, particularly the broad Kiwi accents that peppered the dialogue with street slang, and blasé yeahs, nahs and y'knows.

Some of the films felt as though they'd come from the student edit suite cutting room floor but others indicated they were on the road to breaking into features.

Prove yourself in 10 minutes and you might get a better shot at NZ On Air and Film Commission funding for something meatier. Many of the directors and writers are well versed within the industry, having worked on international projects such as Avatar, 30 Days of Night and Power Rangers.

Perhaps given the youth of those involved, the break-up of longterm relationships appeared as a recurring theme, even within the bleakly apocalyptic Locked In by Australian director Nick Fernandez, in which a young couple contemplated separation in a world that called for the constant need for survival skills. I almost shed a tear at the end.

Tundra explored young friendships and how they can become strained and alien when one young teen accidentally gets pregnant, just as her best friend is contemplating the next big stage in her life.

It also appeared in the intriguing tale of Bridge in which an estranged couple, played by Sara Wiseman and Will Wallace, try to cling desperately to one another both physically and figuratively, contemplating the fraught nature of their relationship and the prospect of letting go.

It was probably the weirdest one on the bill - Wallace was suspended in the air upside down for much of the film as Wiseman clutched in vain to pull him down.

Vampires also bared their bloody teeth in Australia's funniest contribution, Sacrifice - the Directors' cut.

* The Show Me Shorts Film Festival is on around the country until November 28. Screening details at www.showmeshorts.co.nz