Bean Cake won the the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film in 2001. The language is Japanese (with English subtitles) but it was made by the American filmmaker David Greenspan. Greenspan spent a year of his USC degree in Kyoto, Japan. It was there that he made this simple tale about a young boy's indoctrination into both the Japanese Empire and the world of girls. Filmed in black & white, it has a purposefully old-fashioned feel to it (consider Ozu's Tokyo Story).
Small Deaths was the first short film from Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsey, who went on to make feature films such as We Need To Talk About Kevin. Like many of her early films, it is based on personal memories and experiences of childhood, set in a Glasgow housing estate. It is an intimate exploration and reflection of loss in one girl's life.
Winner of the Palme d'Or in 1996, Wind (Szel) by Marcell Iványi has become one of the classics of European short film. During a course at the Hungarian Academy of Drama & Film the director students were shown a still image by Jewish photographer Lucien Hervé and given the task of making a short film based on it. Thus Wind begins with three women standing at the outskirts of a village, looking out of picture. The film imagines a disturbing extension...
Entitled Somewhere In California, but known as Coffee & Cigarettes III, this was the third of the original three vignettes that would become part of Jarmusch's collection centred around the partaking of coffee. Most are fairly forgettable but this and Cousins? stood out due to the cringe-inducing blurring of reality and fiction. It stars Iggy Pop and Tom Waits and won the Palme d'Or in 1993...