The BisonBison Film Festival hosted the 2016 Manhattan Short on Sept. 25 in the historic Poncan Theatre.
This annual event is an international competition for short films ( a film is considered “short” when it is 40 minutes or less). Audience members from more than 250 venues, across six continents, including the Ponca City audience, voted for the best of 10 films.
The films were from Germany, Norway, France, Australia, Russia, Netherlands, the United States and other countries, and were of equally diverse genres such as horror, science fiction, romantic comedy, animated documentary or social commentary. Audiences were also able to vote for the best actor from all 10 films.
The winning short film, with 19,210 votes from around the world, was the Netherlands’ “Hold On,” a film about how stage fright almost cripples a young musician, from the simple happenstance of a broken string on her cello.
Actress Charlie Chan Dagelet from this film won as Best Actor.
Second place, with 16,264 votes in the competition, was from Norway, “The Tunnel” in which a family experiences a tense journey home from an outing at the beach, where their lives are almost ended randomly by a death tunnel in a dark futuristic city.
Third place was the Australian animated film “I Am a Pencil” about how a simple pencil is the most important tool in keeping freedom of speech alive. It had 10,505 votes.
These three films are now headed for the Academy Awards competition.
Here in Ponca City, the top three winners were:
- Third place “Hold On”;
- Second place from the United States, “Ella Gets a Promotion,” depicting the hypocrisy in corporate America, when Ella finally gets her long awaited promotion, but in a very comical manner rejects the promotion because of the strings attached;
- First place “The Tunnel.”
Dagelet was also the favored actor in Ponca City.
The mission of the BisonBison Film Festival is to recognize and showcase the work of student filmmakers enrolled in academic programs in the mid-America region.
The 2017 BisonBison Film Festival is scheduled to take place April 7 and 8. For more information visit www.bisonbisonfilmfestival.org or BisonBison Film Festival on Facebook.
