Sundance: YouTube to Present Short Film Audience Award

YouTube is increasing its presence at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The streaming site announced Friday a jam-packed schedule of panels and receptions at YouTube on Main Street during the week-and-a-half long festival in Park City. This is the first year that YouTube has set up an outpost during Sundance.  

It is also returning as a sponsor of the Short Film program, which Sundance announced in December. As part of that collaboration, the site will award one of the shorts the YouTube Audience Award during the Jan. 25 award ceremony hosted by husband-and-wife team Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally.

The Sundance Institute has selected 15 short films that will stream on the film festival’s YouTube channel from Jan. 16-24. YouTube will present the award to the film that receives the most views.

Sundance and public relations agency Weber Shandwick have also teamed with YouTube to air a daily one-hour talk show called Live @ Sundance on the festival’s YouTube channel. YouTube personalities Shira Lazar, Casey Neistat and Jimmy Conrad will guest host the show, which will feature news, event coverage, interviews and film clips.

The full list of short films that will stream on YouTube follows:

Allergy to Originality / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Drew Christie) – A humorous animated op doc explores the rich history of adaptation, plagiarism, and other forms of appropriation in art.

The Big House (Al Bayt Al Kabeer) / U.S.A., Yemen (Director and screenwriter: Musa Syeed) — When a young Yemeni boy ventures out of his cramped apartment and finds a key to the empty mansion down the street, he lets himself and his imagination run wild in the big house.

Burger / United Kingdom, Norway (Director and screenwriter: Magnus Mork) —It’s a late night in a burger bar.

EARLIER: Sundance Film Festival Unveils 2014 Short Film Lineup

Catherine / U.S.A. (Director: Dean Fleischer-Camp, Screenwriters: Dean Fleischer-Camp, Jenny Slate) —Catherine returns to work after a hiatus.

Chapel Perilous / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Matthew Lessner) —Levi Gold is paid an unexpected visit by Robin, a door-to-door salesman with nothing to sell. The ensuing encounter forces Levi to confront his true mystical calling, and the nature of reality itself.

Crime: The Animated Series / U.S.A., Canada (Directors: Alix Lambert, Sam Chou) —From bank robbers to cops to victims to observers, Crime: The Animated Series explores how crime affects us all.  The series is dark, compelling, heartbreaking, and yes – sometimes funny.

Cruising Electric (1980) / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Brumby Boylston) — The marketing department green-lights a red-light tie-in: 60 lost seconds of modern movie merchandising.

Dig / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Toby Halbrooks) — A young girl watches her father dig a hole in their backyard. Mystified about his purpose, the neighborhood comes to watch.

Funnel / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Andre Hyland) — A man’s car breaks down and sends him on a quest across town that slowly turns into the most fantastically mundane adventure.

Gregory Go Boom / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Janicza Bravo) — A paraplegic man leaves home for the first time only to discover that life in the outside world is not the way he had imagined it.

Metube: August Sings Carmen “Habanera” / Austria (Director and screenwriter: Daniel Moshel) — George Bizet’s “Habanera” from Carmen has been reinterpreted and enhanced with electronic sounds for MeTube, a homage to thousands of ambitious YouTube users and video bloggers, and gifted and less gifted self-promoters on the Internet.

Notes on Blindness / United Kingdom, U.S.A., Australia (Directors: Peter Middleton, James Spinney) — In 1983, writer and theologian John Hull became blind. To help make sense of his loss, he began keeping an audio diary. Encompassing dreams, memories, and his imaginative life, Notes on Blindness immerses the viewer in Hull’s experience of blindness.

Passer Passer / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Louis Morton) — An animated city symphony celebrates the hidden world of background noise.

Rat Pack Rat / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Todd Rohal) — A Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator, hired to visit a loyal Rat Pack fan, finds himself performing the last rites at the boy’s bedside.

Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns / U.S.A. (Director: Joe Callander) — Love is swapping clips with your spouse in the middle of a three-gun problem.