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The 2016 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour spotlights eight solid shorts, all from the festival's run last January, revealing a fascinating grab-bag of genres and sensibilities.
Actor-filmmakers Bridey Elliott and Ben Petrie spotlight romantic neuroses with anxious humor in, respectively, "Affections" and "Her Friend Adam," while Calvin Lee Reeder's "The Procedure" is an elaborate fart joke that's good for an awkward laugh.
Asantewaa Prempeh's drama "Jungle" captures a moment of crisis for two Senegalese immigrants trying to make it in New York.
Animation is represented by Nina Gantz's stop-motion "Edmond," in which a lonely man flashes back to bad relationships all the way back to the womb, and Michelle Derosier's tenderly realized "The Grandfather Drum," which looks at the ancient traditions and modern problems of Canada's First Nations people with beautiful images and thunderous impact.
Sol Friedman's documentary "Bacon and God's Wrath" is a gem, showing a 90-year-old woman's first experience eating bacon and delving into her journey from Judaism to atheism.
Best of all is writer-director-actor Jim Cummings' "Thunder Road," the Grand Jury Prize winner, a single-take masterpiece in which Cummings' character delivers a eulogy for his mother that includes laughter, tears and Bruce Springsteen's title song.
2016 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour
Opens Friday, Dec. 9, at the Tower Theatre; not rated, but some shorts are probably R for language, sexual content, and disturbing images; 93 minutes.