Many Worlds, Little Time: With 71 short films, festivalgoers should be able to find something they like ... or at least worth talking about

Good things sometimes come in small packages. In addition to 37 feature-length films, the 11th RiverRun International Film Festival, which will start Wednesday and run through April 29, has 71 short films. They are often works by up-and-coming directors, or stories that just didn't need more than a few minutes to tell. Most of them are collected in themed groups that will be shown repeatedly during the festival. There are also pre-feature shorts on several of the feature films being shown. At the end of the festival, there will be a screening of Award-Winning Shorts (6:30 p.m. April 29 at UNCSA-Gold), with encores of the shorts that win jury awards during this year's festival

Ratings

Most independent films shown at RiverRun have not been rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. Those films not rated by MPAA have special ratings that RiverRun officials have devised. Here they are:

TN -- Intended for teen-plus

MT -- Intended for mature audiences

FM -- Intended for 8-plus

You are still advised to use your best judgment when taking younger folk to the movies.

The shorts

Narrative Shorts 1, , 101 minutes. MT for adult themes, language, violence. Showing at 3:45 p.m. April 23 and 9:30 p.m. April 25, UNCSA-Gold.

Short films don't have the luxury of time in which to make us care about the characters, so they have to pack either an emotional or a visual wallop pretty fast. Some in Narrative Shorts 1 succeed -- and some fall short -- but at just a few minutes each, they are all worth a peek in their own way.

In this batch of films, themed "Behind Closed Doors," Family Therapy, Gaining Ground, Next Floor and Ten for Grandpa are the most effective. Therapy uses violence and tight shots to create the claustrophobic intensity of an old, strained relationship and its redemption. Gaining Ground wins through sweetness and sacrifice. Next Floor -- with its slavering gluttons laboring rapidly over huge piles of exotic meats -- succeeds through excess. Grandpa is the cleverest and most fun to watch. In it, a young man has 10 questions to pose to his mysterious dead grandfather, and this fabulous line: "You can't guilt-trip a dead man."

Others in Narrative 1 are: 411-Z, which involves a freighter at sea; Moon Palace, which uses interesting stop-action photography to tell a melancholy tale; Waste, about a philanderer who gets a comeuppance; and The Watch, in which aimless young men wander about in jockey shorts. -- Lynn Felder

Narrative Shorts 2, , 102 minutes. MT for adult themes, language. Showing at 6:45 p.m. April 23, UNCSA-Gold; 8:30 p.m. April 24, UNCSA-Babcock.

"Growing Pains" is the apt theme of Narrative 2. Six short films about growing up or growing old serve to remind us of the vulnerability -- and the resilience -- of the very young and the very old. A certain amount of loneliness touches all of these character-driven films.

In Pinchas, the best of the batch, a lonely little boy looks for comfort in religion. He gets attention from the devout Jews upstairs and the kind butcher down the street, but the attention that he really wants is from his mother.

Premature explores the anguish of a pregnant teen living in crushing poverty with no one to turn to. Jerrycan looks at preteen boys and peer pressure; it has some humorous moments. Princess Margaret Blvd. shows an aging woman's slow descent into dementia, but not without redemption. Pop Art is about a boy's friendship with an unusual classmate.

You, Me and Captain Longbridge follows the flights of imagination of a boy whose father has recently died. It was filmed in South Yorkshire, England, and the scenery is breathtaking. -- Lynn Felder

Documentary Shorts, , 117 minutes. TN for mild adult theme. Showing at 3 p.m. April 23, UNCSA-Babcock; 1:30 p.m. April 25, UNCSA-Gold.

This year's crop of documentary shorts includes seven films that focus on people who are chasing their dreams in one way or another.

The best of the bunch is the excellent, Oscar-nominated The Witness -- From the Balcony of Room 306, a look at the last days of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. It's a beautifully crafted film with an intimate feeling, as the story is told by some of the people who shared King's final days. It's powerful and poignant.

Other highlights are The Archive, an intriguing look at the man with the world's largest record collection; Unattached, about the singles crisis in the Modern Orthodox Jewish community in New York; and Irinka and Sandrinka, a charming family history told using a combination of animation and family photos. The other films in the group are Lessons from the Night, about an Australian office cleaner; Nutkin's Last Stand, about a group of British people who are trying to protect their native red squirrels -- by rounding up and killing North American gray squirrels; and Shikashika, about Peruvian flavored-ice salesmen. -- Susan Gilmor

Animated Shorts: Against the Current, , TN for mild violence and adult situations. Showing at 1 p.m. April 25, UNCSA-Main; 2:30 p.m. April 26, UNCSA-Babcock.

The centerpiece of this year's adult shorts is I Am So Proud of You, the latest work by Don Hertzfeldt. It is a sequel to Everything Will Be OK, which played at RiverRun in 2007. This one continues the existential story of Bill, a melancholic fellow with a troubled family history. The story is told with stick figure animation and photographs, and surreal narration. It's mesmerizing. Keith Reynolds Can't Make It Tonight has a similar stick figure-and-stream-of-consciousness tone, telling the story of an office romance gone awry. Hot Dog is the latest cartoon from Bill Plympton, a RiverRun staple whose feature-length animated film Idiots and Angels is also playing this year. This short tells the story of an exuberant, roly-poly little mutt who wants to be a fire dog but can't seem to impress the fire department. The Control Master is a visually stunning pop-art superhero parody. Adventures of Ledo and Ix follows Nintendo-style computer game characters who become self-aware. Other films include several musical animations, among them Last Time in Clerkenwell, with an infectious beat and dancing militaristic birds, and Symphony, with Vivaldi music set to twisting shapes. The final short is one of the best, This Way Up, a droll British comedy about two undertakers whose hearse has been destroyed and who must carry a coffin across the countryside by hand. -- Tim Clodfelter

Midnight Shorts, (out of 4). Not in competition. MT for sex, language, violence. Showing at 9 p.m. Friday and 11:30 p.m. Saturday at The Garage, 98 minutes. MT for nudity, sexual situations, violence and profanity.

These are often the edgiest and most unusual of the short films. One of this year's offerings is Love You More, a racy British film from the writer of the controversial feature film Closer. This one tells the story of two teenagers in 1978 England, a nervous boy and a rebellious girl, who grow -- um, let's say closer -- as they listen to a new single by punk band The Buzzcocks. Another highlight of this year's batch is Casting Session, in which Austin Jennings, a student at UNC School of the Arts, has 76 people play two roles in a two-person play, switching actors with every line of dialogue. Sapsucker, from Greensboro filmmaker Christopher Holmes, is a dark comedy about a redneck hunter chasing a woodpecker and hearing strange noises. Swashbucklers is a lively French film about people dressed as pirates for a fancy-dress party who end up in a duel on the nighttime streets of Paris. Multiple Choice follows bickering twins, an anal-retentive brother and his pothead sister, on an eventful night before the SAT tests. Ralph is another story of teenage love, this one following a British youth who has traveled to France to find the girl of his dreams but has the wrong phone number and can't communicate with the locals. Other films are the twisted animation Gary & Mildred; At the End, about an oblivious jogger being stalked by a sniper; and 2) Secret Machine, which was not available for review.

Saturday Morning Cartoons, . Not in competition. FM. Showing at 10:30 a.m. April 25, Stevens Center; 11:30 a.m. April 26 at UNCSA-Gold.

This is the child-friendly program, and it comes at a child-friendly price: Admission is $8 for adults, but $1 for anyone under 18. Almost all of the cartoons have no dialogue -- and one of the few that does only has two spoken lines -- but they are universally understandable themes. Several in this year's group, Cirkus Spectacular and The Clocktower, follow colorful characters who visit drab villages, with different results. Then we get a reversal of the theme in Emily in the Clouds, with music by Richard Cheese, about a character who prefers rain and dreariness to bright sunny days. A yodeling cowboy song is featured in Great Ambition, and several cartoons show influence from classic Looney Tunes: Coyote and the Tortoise is evocative of the work of Chuck Jones, and Finders Keepers is a computer-generated update of the Marvin the Martian versus Daffy Duck cartoons in which characters from rival planets compete to plant their flag on a newly discovered world. Frogs play a big part in Roadkill, which starts out grim and turns triumphant and The Visionary. Other cartoons feature a girl inventor trying to fix her giant robot (the appropriately titled Girl and Robot), paintings come to life (Matan), watercolor bears (Bare), household objects turned into food (Western Spaghetti) and a computer-animated dinosaur playing hide and seek with a little boy (Gotch Ya). -- Tim Clodfelter

Tickets

Tickets to most screenings are $8, $6 for students with ID. There is a special deal for the child-friendly Saturday Morning Cartoon (See review above.) All-access festival passes cost $350. Certain special events and screenings, such as the opening-night premiere and gala, have different prices.

Tickets are available at the Stevens Center, 405 W. Fourth St., at www.riverrunfilm.com and by phone at 721-1945.

During the festival, a second box office will be at the ACE Cinemateque Complex at UNC School of the Arts, 1533 S. Main St., for walk-up sales only.

Tickets for films at Reynolda House and The Garage will go on sale one hour before the shows. For more information, visit www.riverrunfilm.com or call 724-1502.

Parking

Free parking for all films at RiverRun's primary venue, the UNCSA film village, is in the parking lots of the Southeast Gateway YWCA, Talecris and Novant Health, 1300 S. Main St. Free shuttle buses will run every few minutes between the parking lots and the UNCSA campus, starting 45 minutes before the first screening of the day and ending 45 minutes after the last screening. You cannot park on campus.

Parking for the festival headquarters, 500 W. Fourth St., and the Stevens Center, 405 W. Fourth St., is available on Fourth, Spruce and Marshall streets (the meters take quarters) and in the Cherry/Marshall streets parking garage.

For screenings at The Garage, 110 W. Seventh St., and the Millennium Center, 101 W. Fifth St., parking is available on the streets and in the parking garage at Liberty and Fifth streets.

There is plenty of free parking at Reynolda House, 2250 Reynolda Road.

There's more

For more RiverRun coverage, including a map of venues, descriptions of the films and reviews, links to film trailers and, during the festival, daily podcasts, go to www.journalnow.com. Reviews of most of the feature-length films appeared in Thursday's relish and are now available online.