It takes a special gift to craft a cogent narrative, to capture a powerful emotion, to convey an idea in a film whose average length is 9 minutes. The beauty of a short film - most of which range from 2 to 20 minutes - is that even if they’re not perfect, they can be easily endured and then you’re onto the next. Gann (see profile, page 20) unearthed 20 LGBT nuggets for us to review, and while, as with any collection of shorts, the quality varies considerably, the collection as a whole captures the entire gamut of the LGBT experience. And who better to curate our mini-festival for us than Gann, executive director of DC Shorts, which, every fall, stages a massive, citywide shorts festival. Since 2009, just prior to the Oscars, we’ve occasionally put together lists of “25 Gay Films Everyone Should See.” When it came time for this year’s list, we thought we’d give feature films a break and turn our attention to an oft-neglected, but much beloved category - the short. In some of the stories, the LGBT portion is very small, but the LGBT component is really critical to how the story unfolds.” Illustration by Christopher Cunetto
I like them because they are about the entire community. “I’m not sure that these are the greatest LGBT films ever,” says Jon Gann.
