From the Nashville Film Festival
A Couple of Shorts, Part 2
Lemon-Aid
This Tennessee horror short is strange and funny. It’s full of vibrant colors, almost no dialogue, weird movements and many sound effects. The story is simple, mysterious, and ridiculous. It begins in a colorful, idyllic suburban setting. A jogger cannot resist an empty lemonade stand with sparkling glasses and a full pitcher. He drains the entire pitcher of lemonade. Immediately his stomach begins to gurgle and he collapses. Suddenly a group of men and women appear: dressed in full suits or dresses with bright tights, all wearing gloves and with no visible skin, their most notable characteristic is that their heads are giant paper mache lemons. They kidnap the jogger and begin a journey that takes them through many different sections of town, moving rapidly to the mysterious climax.
The choreography for these strange lemon people is my favorite part of this short: they move in jerky, unnatural movements and almost always have their shoulders facing the camera, no matter what direction they’re moving in. I enjoy odd humor, and Director and Screenwriter Sumner McMurty provided it in this short.
Tskackaphis
I have fond childhood memories of my father participating in the 48 Hour Film Project, a film festival with a delightful premise: each filmmaker is assigned a genre, character, prop, and line of dialogue, and has 48 hours to create a complete short. Tskackaphis was originally made for the 48 Hour Film Project in 2023. Brief, at around 7 minutes long, the short is (despite its categorization with the Nashville Film Festival as horror) pure comedy. Two women meet with their friend Phoebe, who tells them that it’s “Expose Yourself Day.” At first confused and worried that she expects them to provide some unexpected nudity, they realize that the exposure is of a more profound sort. The secrets they tell are far more shocking than you would imagine. The set is a house I’d like to live in, everyone is attractive and dressed stylishly, and there’s an unexpected use of the Nashville skyline. Fun to watch, this lighthearted sketch made me chuckle.
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G E Tipton was born in Nashville and raised there and in Spring Hill. She graduated from MTSU in 2017 with a degree in German and a minor in piano performance. She spent three years in Boston before returning to Nashville in 2020. She is married and has a baby boy.
