A THRILLER about a stranded motorist, a comedy about two warring OAPs, a love story set in an elevator and a cartoon about a lonely baked bean - these are just a few of the 375 short films that will be screened in Edinburgh next week as part of the Super Shorts film festival.
The films won't be shown in a cinema but in a pub - the Brass Monkey on Drummond Street - which has a back room kitted out with a movie screen and Bedouin tent-style floor cushions. There isn't a lot of space in this mini-cinema, but the event organisers reckon they should be able to squeeze in 45 people at a time, as long as they're prepared to snuggle up.
The Super Shorts festival is the brainchild of Andrew Hai of the Talent Circle - a national network for filmmakers, production staff and actors. In 2003, he set up a competition for UK-made films lasting two minutes or less. However, he soon realised that there was enough interest to do something bigger.
"We received a huge number of entries," he says. "I felt bad that some of the really good ones didn't get to be showcased, so we turned the competition into a festival, with the aim of showing as many films as we could. They still had to be shorts, though - under five minutes in length."
The response to the new format was overwhelming - Hai and his team received more than 500 submissions for this year's inaugural event. Since opening in London in September, Super Shorts has toured to Manchester, Belfast and Newcastle. In addition to its Edinburgh run (from 5-9 December) it is also scheduled to stop off in Glasgow next February, although the venue for that leg of the tour is yet to be confirmed.
Reading the Super Shorts website, which states that the event is targeted at "filmmakers, production staff and actors", and that its aim is to "inspire and enthuse filmmaking and artistic talent", you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole affair was little more than an industry love-in. However, Hai is keen to stress that the event is very much open to the public.
"One of our other key targets is to introduce new people to short film and broaden the audience for short film," he says. "There aren't many public events that showcase shorts, so one of our main aims is to make them more accessible."
To encourage people to get involved, entry to screenings is free, and there are even rumours that free popcorn will be dished out at some of the Edinburgh shows.
For people who aren't able to attend any of the events on the tour, all 375 of the Super Shorts can be viewed on the festival site at www.supershorts.org.uk. They are also being screened in 30-minute batches on the Community Channel, the UK-wide not-for-profit television station.
As you might expect, most of the films in the programme were made in London. However, Scottish talent is well-represented. There are 15 films from north of the border, ranging from the sinister (Stephen Kilkie's film about a killer website) to the idiosyncratic (Jason Cuddy's documentary about a struggling tie designer).
Most of the Scottish films are factual. Alison Peebles and Lucinda Broadbent's The Removed looks at what happens to some of the 25,000 people who seek asylum in the UK every year, while Stefan Byfield's Persecution Meets Principle highlights the human rights abuses visited upon practitioners of Falun Gong (an exercise technique not dissimilar to Yoga) by the Chinese government, who outlawed it in 1999.
Basil Khalil's Ping Pong Revenge should be worth catching too - the blurb describes it as "a slapstick musical that tells 100 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a three-minute ping-pong game gone wrong". According to Hai, short films are an essential springboard for budding filmmakers who want to go on to make full length features.
"It's hard to think of anyone who has just launched straight into a feature film and been successful," he says. "Pretty much all directors do shorts to start off with - that's where they develop their creative talents and find their styles."
• Super Shorts is at the Brass Monkey, Edinburgh, 5-9 December. For more information visit www.supershorts.org.uk
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