Palm Springs International ShortFest announces winners

By John Horn

June 25, 2013 12 AM PT

“Delicate Gravity,” a French story about two people brought together by a call to a wrong number, won the Best of Festival prize at the just-concluded Palm Springs International ShortFest, called the largest short film festival in North America.

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The Panavision Grand Jury award, presented Sunday with the other honors, went to another French short, “Stranger Brothers,” about the complicated relationship between stepbrothers. The Future Filmmaker award was given to the German love story “Rhino Full Throttle.”

The audience award for most popular live-action short was the United Kingdom’s “Walking the Dogs,” with the American “Not Anywhere: A Story of Revolution” named the winner of the documentary audience honor. The audience prize in animation was given to Canada’s “A Girl Named Elastika.”

More than 300 short films were culled from more than 3,000 submissions. A total of $110,000 in prizes, including $16,000 in cash, was awarded in 19 categories.

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Running from June 18 to 24, the festival reported record-breaking attendance from ticket buyers, filmmakers and the film industry.

“Our spectacular increase in filmmaker and industry attendance brought an extraordinary breadth of creative talent to ShortFest 2013 – encouraging our belief that visual storytelling not only thrives, but is indeed an increasingly vital part of the human condition worldwide,” Kathleen McInnis, the festival’s curator and director of industry programming, said in a statement.

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