We did a confused circle around the first floor of the Women's Building Saturday night, until we noticed the sign which you see at your right, telling us to go upstairs for the SF Women's Film Festival documentary shorts screening, featuring movies all directed by women.

We got to a classroom-sized room and settled into a folding chair just as people were starting to trickle in and, more importantly, right as the Trader Joe's snacks were being unpacked. Clearly the SFWFF runs on hummus! Mmmm.

The shorts they'd selected for this presentation were scrupulously diverse: in time period (from the 1890s to the modern day), issues (animal rights, anti-war, pro-choice), style (digital, experimental, biographical), race (American Indian, Jewish, many women of color), and length (from 4 minutes to 25). Impressive.

Like with any shorts series, some are always better than others -- we particularly liked the one on the politics of camouflage print and are intrigued to see what happens with the woman biking around the world in the 1890s. We must confess we didn't really get the experimental film about reproductive rights, though, and we spent the whole profile of Moby hoping the filmmaker knew about his reputation with the ladies before agreeing to go over to his apartment.

Given our short attention span, we really appreciated the opportunity to see so many little snippets of so many interesting stories. They should screen more documentary shorts around here -- it's the perfect length for nonfiction film!