“Birds” was selected as a finalist in this year’s ShortList Film Festival, presented by TheWrap. You can watch the films and vote for your favorite here.
Austin, Texas has proven the cinematic groundswell for filmmakers from Richard Linklater, to Robert Rodriguez and Terrence Malick (more on him in just a sec). Los Angeles native Katherine Propper joins the fray with “Birds,” her supremely elegiac short about teens discovering themselves under the hot sun of an Austin summer.
“I definitely wanted to showcase some of my favorite spots, and it really started with me finding [actor] Payton Washington on Instagram, a cheerleader and tumbler,” Propper told TheWrap. “I DM’d her and asked if I could meet her, and if she was interested in maybe being in a student film?”
(If her name reads somewhat familiar, Washington was also the unfortunate victim of a violent incident in Elgin, Texas that made the news this year in which she and a friend were wounded by gunfire by a man in a supermarket parking lot after a misunderstanding. Their assailant was quickly arrested and thankfully both women survived the incident.)
This led to drafting a large number of youths to fill out her 14-minute short about flirting, foraging and fraternizing amongst a diverse lot in a series of spirited and observational scenes, including Washington, who was born with one lung and has a tense moment with an asthma attack in the film “that was scripted,” the writer-director assures us. There’s also more young people, many of whom went to school with her younger brother, who shared their stories and experiences with Propper which went directly into the film.
“[Those conversations] sort of sparked in me the idea of wanting to do something with young people that was about fragility and beauty coexisting together,” said Propper. “I know it sounds kind of abstract, but that was sort of how I was thinking about all the vignettes. I wanted it to be a joyful, romantic film that had some fragility, and risk and danger.”
The scenes in the film have a sun-blessed, innocent, unrushed sense about them, and even moments that feel like they will be tension-filled (as when an older squatter approaches a pair of boys looking through backyard trash), the outcome is often the opposite. They’re reminiscent of beloved American filmmaker Terrence Malick, who Propper actually worked for in his editing department.
“What I learned from him is that he is very playful,” said Propper, who worked on his long-gestating religious epic “The Way of the Wind” about the life of Christ. “He doesn’t come to the edit with a preconceived structure or plot regarding how it has to come together. That was really inspiring to me, because it inspired me to be really free about how I went about the edit. Being tethered by structure and plot can sometimes be very limiting in a short film.”
And Propper’s full-length narrative ambitions have already been achieved with her hip-hop-fueled debut movie “Lost Soulz,” which recently played at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, and continues her interest in depicting thoughtful young Americans in Texas. Said Propper, “It’s also a coming-of-age film and I think it also is a more sort of optimistic, joyful portrayal of young people that doesn’t lean in too much on the angst. I would say that it’s just the worldview I have for humanity.”
The 2023 ShortList Film Festival runs online from June 28 – July 12, honoring the top award-winning short films that have premiered at major festivals in the past year. Watch the finalists and vote for your favorite here.
