Damah Film Festival

May 21, 2006 by Dennis Baker 

I volunteered at the Damah Film Festival this weekend. It is a festival dedicated to short films with some sort of spiritual theme. With this being the 5th year for the festival, I heard about it, but never had the opportunity to go. It was held at Culver City Studios with three different screening locations. Two locations at the studios and one at the Culver City Hotel which was next door.

As a volunteer I did not get to see many films. In fact I did not do too much more than sit in front of one of the screening rooms, showing people in. I was hoping to be able to connect with film directors and producers, but there were not a lot of people there. If there were, it was hard to tell because the locations were so spread out. People were either in a screening or a seminar, or walking to one.

I did see about four shorts of ten that were nominated best short film. My favorite was Dead End Job. The blurb about the film says, “Obituary writer Abigail Slay’s uncanny knack for spotting the next “scoop” guarantees that she will always makes her deadline, that is until she becomes the next scoop. Dead End Job asks the arcane question, ‘who writes the obituary for the obituary writer?’” I was able to see it with director and fellow friend John Schimke (he had two shorts screening earlier in the day).

We had time to sit at Starbucks and discuss the films we saw. What we loved about this film was that is was so much more mature than the other films. Even though it was about life and death, people were not over acting and crying like it was the end of the world. Instead, the directors and actors did not show emotion, but let the internal struggle come out. We also attributed the maturity of the film to the director. Samantha Davidson Green was a 35 year old graduate student from UCLA. You could tell that she has some experience telling stories. John called it sensibility, which I think is appropriate. This film did not try to make more of itself than it was. It kept is simple. Simple Sensibility.

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