Haunting Short Doc Wins Best Short at Texas Festival
If These Walls Could Talk, the short Reality Bites documentary directed by Anna Rodgers, took home the prize for Best Short Film at the Thin Line Film Fest which took place in Texas from the 15th-20th February.
The film was produced by Siobhán Ward for Yellow Asylum Films and premiered at the Corona Cork Film Festival in 2009. It has since been selected to screen at the AFI/Silver Docs Film Festival in Maryland, US, and picked up the Best Short at the IFI Stranger than Fiction Festival last year.
ABOUT IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK
If These Walls Could Talk takes a look at the closed units of Irish psychiatric institutions as they approach their demise and stories of the people who spent the best part of their lives committed in them. If walls can hold memories, and buildings can have ghosts, what sort of echoes linger in the units of our old style psychiatric institutions as they near closure? Throughout, these people remain invisible as they were in Irish society, as we move through the empty place of their past.
The film was financed through the IFB Reality Bites scheme which enables the making of short documentaries and aims to encourage experimentation and the realisation of fresh approaches to non-fiction filmmaking.
ABOUT THIN LINE FILM FEST
Thin Line Film Fest is the only international documentary film festival held in Texas, bring the best and newest documentary films to the area each year. The program committee strives to showcase the full breadth of the documentary genre, screening all types of documentaries. In total, Thin Line screened 29 projects - 14 Features and 15 Shorts; most of which have never screened in Texas before! One of those films is the music documentary Troubadours fresh from its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival while two other were off the 2010 Oscar shortlist: This Way of Life and Enemies of the People.