IndyShorts Film Festival helps give local filmmakers shot at stardom

By ANNA MITCHELL
anna@readthereporter.com

Indy Shorts International Film Festival is running July 23 through 28. It is made possible by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and presented by Heartland Film. For seven years, the festival has brought together local and global filmmakers.

The short films are 40 minutes or less. The festival presents them to viewers in different themed programs such as “comedy” or “horror.” They are judged within a different set of categories: narrative, documentary, animated, Indy Spotlight, and High School Film Competition.

A jury is designated for each category, and they distribute over $30,000 in the form of cash prizes each year. Amongst other awards, Indy Shorts offers Grand Prizes for the narrative, documentary, and animated categories. Shorts awarded the Grand Prize receive their Academy Award qualification.

In the Indiana Spotlight Program, the festival highlights films involving Indiana. Many feature Hamilton County.

• Bike Story (Indiana Spotlight 1 Program) – Production took place in Noblesville; directed by Rocky Walls.
• From; To (Indiana Spotlight 1 Program) – Film shot in Zionsville; directed by Lee Durham.
• The Invisible Crown (Indiana Spotlight 1 Program) – Director Amelia Kramer is from Westfield.
• The Sugarman (Indiana Spotlight 2 Program) – One of the subjects, Dr. John Abrams of Abrams Eyecare, lives in Carmel.

In the short film The Invisible Crown, director Amelia Kramer tells Hannah Myers Lindgren’s story and her battle with Endometriosis. Although the film handles a heavy topic, Kramer said Lindgren’s story has hope and healing.

“It’s heavy, but it’s not filled with despair,” Kramer said. “There’s a lot of hope and gratitude and those kinds of emotions as well as healing in this story. It does start out with some heaviness of just her journey of being dismissed in the medical industry for so long, and then this story is sort of a story of empowerment and hope in finding healing.”

Kramer said she hopes people with Endometriosis feel seen after watching the film and others without the disease will understand it better and have more empathy for those with chronic illnesses.

The Invisible Crown is Kramer’s directorial debut. She said the work was hard but fun, and she got to work with a great team. Her own film journey started when she was a kid, putting together music videos and playing around with her dad’s recorder.

“”It’s a huge honor because Indy shorts is one of the best shorts festivals in the country,” Kramer said. “That we have it here in Indianapolis is a huge honor. That my first project was accepted to an Oscar-qualifying festival is really exciting.”

On a hunt for typewriters, director of Bike Story Rocky Walls came across some vintage bicycles. He wondered if his friend, Joe Rudy, would be interested in restoring the bikes and giving them a second life.

Rudy agreed, and they started filming in 2022. They set the scene in Cicero at “Rudy’s Bike Shop,” where Rudy showed how he restored bikes and brought the past back to the present.

“The movie doesn’t really become about opening a bike shop,” Wells said. “The movie becomes about how bicycles – and just the idea of some of the things in our past – can still bring us happiness and can still connect us with our community. In the end you get a great sense of that. You get a great sense of ‘wow.’ There are these things, whether it’s bicycles or some art that I used to be interested in doing, or these certain types of books that I used to read, or these people that I used to spend more time with – you get that sense and you want to return to it because maybe you could bring some good into your life.”

Wells said that Rudy’s personality and genuine love for the people around him seeped into the film.

To view these short films, you can buy your tickets at tinyurl.com/IndyShorts2024Schedule. You can then see the films at one of Indy Short’s locations:

• Living Room Theaters, 745 E. 9th St., Suite 810, Indianapolis, from July 23 to 28
• Newfields (The Tobias Theater, The Amphitheater & The Beer Garden at Garden Terrace), 4000 N. Michigan Road, Indianapolis, from July 24 to 28