Thousands are submitted…only eight are chosen….Showcasing a wide variety of story and style, the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour is eight short film selections from the 2014 Sundance Festival. Over the course of its 30-year history, Sundance has been widely considered the premier showcase for short films and has served as the launchpad for careers of many now-prominent independent filmmakers. With both fiction and documentary, the diverse 2014 shorts program ranges from beautiful insight and the struggle to understand the meaning of life to a hilarious, all-too familiar government deposition.

Each year, the Sundance Film Festival has over 8,000 short films submitted and selects between 60-80 to show in the Festival. Further narrowing the program to a 90-minute selection, the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour then travels to film lovers across the US. A staple of the Festival since its start, a wide variety of emerging talent got their start in the short film format, including filmmakers Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sophie Barthes, David O. Russell, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Tamara Jenkins, Jamie Babbit, Tim Blake Nelson, Alexander Payne, Andrea Arnold, Jason Reitman, and many others.

It’s fun to be surprised by something new, but if you absolutely must have a further preview of this year’s shorts, we have provided summaries after the jump.

2014 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour
Comedy, drama, musical, documentary – NR – 94 min – Tickets $10
Get tickets online
Fri, July 25: 7:00 p.m.
Sat, July 26: 5:00, 7:00 p.m.
Sun, July 27: 5:00 p.m.
Mon, July 28: 7:00 p.m.
Tues, July 29: 7:00 p.m.
Wed, July 30: 9:00 p.m.
Thurs, July 31: 9:00 p.m.

Afronauts
Written and directed by Frances Bodomo. USA, 12 minutes.
It’s July 16, 1969: America is preparing to launch Apollo 11. Thousands of kilometers away, a group of Zambian exiles are trying to beat America to the moon.

The Cut
Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction
Written and directed by Geneviève Dulude-Decelles. Canada, 15 minutes.
The Cut tells the story of a father and a daughter, whose relationship fluctuates between proximity and detachment, at the moment of a haircut.

Dawn
Directed by Rose McGowan, Written by M.A. Fortin, Joshua John Miller. USA, 17 minutes.
Dawn is a quiet young teenager who longs for something or someone to free her from her sheltered life.

I Think This Is the Closest to How the Footage Looked
Short Film Jury Award: Non-fiction
Directed by Yuval Hameiri, Co-Director: Michal Vaknin. Israel, 9 minutes.
A man with poor means recreates a lost memory of the last day with his mom. Objects come to life in a desperate struggle to produce a single moment that is gone.

I’m a Mitzvah
Directed by Ben Berman, Written by Ben Berman, Josh Cohen. USA, 19 minutes.
A young American man spends one last night with his deceased friend while stranded in rural Mexico.

Love. Love. Love.
Short Film Special Jury Award: Non-fiction
Directed by Sandhya Daisy Sundaram. Russia, 12 minutes.
Every year, through the endless winters, her love takes new shapes and forms.

MeTube: August Sings Carmen “Habanera”
Written and directed by Daniel Moshel. Austria, 5 minutes.
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.

Verbatim
Directed by Brett Weiner, Screenwriter: Court Document. USA, 7 minutes.
A jaded lawyer wastes an afternoon trying to figure out if a dim-witted government employee has ever used a photocopier. All the dialogue in this short comes from an actual deposition filed with the Supreme Court of Ohio.