Film festival accepts Solon and Willbond

Former Perrier winner Laura Solon is heading out to the prestigious Sundance Film Festival this week, after her short film Tooty’s Wedding was selected for competition..

The independent festival, set up by Robert Redford, received 7,675 submissions for the 64 places for short films.

Solon wrote the 18-minute comedy with Ben Willbond, who also co-stars as her husband in a troubled marriage. She told The Independent: ‘We spent about £5,000 on the short and our big plan is to turn it into a feature film.’

The pair had previously made a number of viral videos exploring the tension between a middle-class married couple, and Solon said she was stunned to be accepted to Sundance, to which she applied ‘as a long shot’.

Trevor Groth, the Utah festival’s director of programming, said: ‘As technology allows greater access to short films as well as filmmaking tools, an increasing number of people are turning to short filmmaking as a form of expression and an opportunity to explore creative freedom.

‘The fact that we received 1,200 more submissions in this category than last year speaks to that. Within them we saw a wave of truly original and outrageously distinctive films united by their uncompromised spirit.’

Here are a couple of clips from Tooty’s Wedding:

Published: 16 Jan 2012