Juried shorts are sweet at MKE Short Film Fest

Meningitis isn’t funny most evenings, but Saturday was a memorable exception. The disease took center stage in the short comedy “Love and Germaphobia,” a clever farce of a film that took several of the top honors in the juried selection of the 14^th Annual Milwaukee Short Film Festival, including the Audience Favorite and Best Film awards.

The 11-minute film, by L.A. writer and director Tyler Spindel, was one of the highlights of the juried session, which included eight other films for consideration and the world premiere screening of Ross Bigley’s “Yellow Hill: The Stranger’s Tale.”

Those ten films were merely a drop in the bucket. The entire roster tallied over 275, from 23 different countries. To make those numbers manageable, the MSFF broke the catalog into six sessions over Friday and Saturday, ending with the juried sessions.

“Love and Germaphobia” won the audience’s hearts easily with its tale of a fastidiously clean man imperiled when he discovers his girlfriend might have meningitis – or, more likely, the flu – and does everything in his power to stay away from her. My personal favorite was a more serious flick: the 10-minute Australian short “Peekaboo,” featuring a mother who loses her young daughter in a parking garage and pursues a man who showed interest in her on the train prior. A predictable plot arc, but the sheer terror displayed by the mother (Justine Clark) was enough to win me over.

Moreover, “Peekaboo” displayed director Damien Power’s skill in making his story fit the format, not the other way around. Most of the session’s other standouts did the same. Wisconsin filmmaker Craig Knitt’s “The Best Present,” a morality tale of a perpetually drunken father (Knitt himself) who finds the strength to get clean one Christmas, doesn’t waste a second of its eight minutes. “Split Time” is eyecatching for its MSFF Artistic Achievement-award-winning format – an intuitive split-screen showing two characters’ lives playing out simultaneously – but what’s more impressive is how succinct its near-wordless story is.

“Missed Connections,” by Milwaukee co-writer/directors Susan Kerns and Kara Mulrooney, deserved its Best Wisconsin Film award. Set in an fantasy diner where the writers of Craigslist “missed connections” postings can meet their beloveds, the film went surreal quickly, with a team of synchronized dancers and potentially creepy lines that somehow seemed less so in context. Resisting the temptation to make their characters anything less wholesome than lonely, poetic souls paid off for Kerns and Mulrooney.

Other shorts didn’t glow in comparison, often a side effect of shoving too much story into a little package. That plagued both the world premiere film “Johnny & Die Leichtigkeit” (“Johnny & the Lightness), about a writer whose story starts to run away from him, and the chaotic horror short “Until Death,” about a woman who turns down a proposal and suddenly finds herself fighting for her life in a parallel universe. That said, the latter seemed more impressive after I realized it was the winning film from this summer’s 48 Hour Project – so in that limited context, it was an excellent showing.

The session’s two Swedish offerings didn’t connect with me either. The remarkably brief “Underpass,” about a woman who stumbles upon a traumatic situation, and “Act I Scene I,” about a playwright struggling with jealousy as he writes a play starring his girlfriend and brother, were artful, well-filmed shorts. But while “Act I Scene I” may have picked up the judges’ Honorable Mention, I didn’t find enough tangible story in either to grab onto.

And then there was “Yellow Hill: The Stranger’s Tale,” making its world premiere following the juried films. I’m torn here. “The Stranger’s Tale” tells a great story, about a Chinese woman (Bai Ling) on the 1860s frontier seeking her lost father, and the moments where the film sits down to play with the nuances of that are simply brilliant. But it’s hard to overlook sound editing so sloppy that the noise of the Stranger’s footsteps don’t match her actual pace and the confusing opening scene. Director Ross Bigley put together the short as a teaser to build up interest in a “Yellow Hill” feature film, though, so if additional length and focus can hone the story, “The Stranger’s Tale” might serve as a perfect jumping-off point.