Pol Pot’s Birthday

I tend not to watch films very often but since short film seems better suited to my attention span, I’ve made an effort to go to Seattle’s One Reel Short Film Festival each year. The best film I saw there this year was Pol Pot’s Birthday made by Talmage Cooley.

The film was exactly what it title implies.

Birthday parties are supposed to be fun, right? Pol Pot is about the least fun person you can imagine (to say the least) and his party was not fun. It began with his lieutenants attempting to "surprise" him without giving him reason for alarm and continued through a very tense cake cutting and tasting scene and a brilliant gift giving moment (what do you get Pol Pot for his birthday?) — someone gave him a "Don’t Ask Me, I Just Work Here" desk icon.

Short films like this tend to be hard to get a hold of but you should keep an eye out for it. It’s well done and very funny. There is a writeup at the Brooklyn Film Festival website and an interview with the director elsewhere.

If I might squeeze an rant in here… I really can’t understand why filmmakers don’t distribute these sorts of short films online. There aren’t even the normal Hollywood-esque dubious reasons to not do it. If bandwidth is the concern, there’s always archive.org. And yes, I just emailed to the filmmaker.