Allshorts ready to roll out red carpet

ALISTAIR HUGHES

Filmmaker Rob Dawson, organiser of this year’s “reimagined” Allshorts short film festival, has sifted through hundreds of entries to make tomorrow night’s show a truly spectacular event.

“This year we opened up entries on an online platform, which allows organisers to promote their festivals globally, and filmmakers to upload their projects for judges to access anywhere in the world,” Rob explains. “The reach is now millions of short filmmakers, as opposed to what we had previously.”

Apart from just keeping things fresh, there are some very good reasons for revamping Golden Bay’s almost decade-old short film festival.

“We had been getting less and less New Zealand entries," says Rob, “and I think a lot of that is because the Top of the South Film Festival came about and is held around same time as our event was, which seems to have locked up a lot of local filmmakers.”

So, changing the date and focussing on a much wider selection opened up opportunities for Allshorts’ reinvigoration.

But despite this broadening of the field, Rob and the judges were heartened to discover that a couple of the eventual finalists were still New Zealand filmmakers, proving once again that as a nation we punch above our weight in international movie production.

Animation tends to lend itself well to the short film medium, and Rob received so many outstanding entries that he briefly considered holding an “animation only” event the day after the festival. However, he quickly found that organising Allshorts itself took up all his time.

He is very happy with the resulting programme, carefully distilled from nominations and notes made by the Village Theatre’s own judging panel.

“There is a really strong cross-section, covering a wide range of subjects. What I will say is that it is definitely worth waiting for