The Long and the Short of it: Sundance Shorts That Transformed Into Features

By Shahnaz Mahmud

And the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor goes to J.K. Simmons for Whiplash! That's one among three Academy Awards the film won that night. Whiplash first gained attention in the independent film world as a short film. Indeed, the road to powerful narrative features is sometimes paved by the short version. These days, for up-and-coming directors, cutting your teeth on a short film is a great way to dive into the industry.

Short films are a great vehicle for filmmakers to demonstrate their vision and ambition in storytelling, and give way to the possibilities that may lie ahead. The highly successful horror film The Babadook from 2014 is a good example of this. The feature premiered at the Sundance Film Festival that same year. Of the Australian supernatural horror movie, film critic Glenn Kenny called the film the finest and most genuinely provocative horror movie to emerge in the 21st century.

But, before there was The Babadook, there was what filmmaker Jennifer Kent affectionately refers to as the baby Babadook: her 2005 short film Monster. The horror film was highly stylized in cinematography and shot in black-and-white and successfully created terror, a bit of laughter, and most importantly, a full story arc in a mere 10 minutes.

There's also Obvious Child, another breakout hit, by filmmaker Gillian Robespierre that also premiered at Sundance in 2014. Billed as an abortion romantic comedy, film critics across the board praised it, including Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, who called it a uniquely special film. Obvious Child was born out of a short of the same name that debuted in 2009. Robespierre uploaded the 23-minute long short to the online platform Vimeo, where it was watched by more than 40,000 people.

And we can't forget about Thunder Road, the 2018 American comedy-drama directed, written by, and starring Jim Cummings, based on his short film of the same name. The 13-minute short, which centered on a police officer giving a eulogy for his mother, took the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2016. The following feature film received Sundance Institute's Creative Distribution Fellowship in 2018.

Below we dive into the backstories of three Sundance Institute-supported shorts that morphed into features and reached wide acclaim, launching their directors into the next level of their careers.

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