My introduction to Spike Lee came through the commercials he shot for Nike starting in the late 80s, featuring Michael Jordan and Lee himself as Mars Blackmon, his motormouth character from She's Gotta Have It. Eventually I caught up with his other work, and over the years I have always admired his ability to switch effectively from narrative features to documentaries to short filmmaking. He's made a flock of commercials for a variety of advertisers as well as numerous music videos, and short films for MTV and Saturday Night Live.

His short Jesus Children of America was one of seven that comprised All the Invisible Children, focusing on children struggling "in the face of violence, disease and poverty," according to UNICEF, which partially funded the project. The film played at Venice, Toronto and many other film festivals in the last couple of years, though it doesn't seem to have screened much, if at all, in the US. Earlier this year Lee struck a deal with online video startup Babelgum to show Jesus Children of America exclusively on the site. He will also serve as honorary judge of the new Babelgum Online Film Festival, as announced recently during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival.

The competition is open to short films screened at international festivals between January 2007 and February 2008. While there is no entrance fee to submit films, note that Babelgum will hold exclusive online rights to all accepted films from March 2008 to March 2009. The Hollywood Reporter notes that $27,500 will be awarded in each of six categories. The Babelgum site is still marked as "beta," but you can find out more information about their plans by clicking around a bit.

I would normally follow the question "Got a short film you've made?" with the suggestion that you email a link to the short to Cinematical to include in the Eat My Shorts column. However, today I have an even better idea: Send your short film or video to the fourth annual SXSWclick! competition. If your short film is 10 minutes or shorter in length, you can submit it to SXSWclick in one of five categories: Old-School Shorts (for narratives), Really Real Shorts (for documentaries), Animate-it, Sound Checks (for music videos) and for everything else, the What the F*#!? category. The winning shorts in each category will screen at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival in Austin next March, and the Grand Jury Prize winner gets a MacPro Workstation and Apple Cinema Display. The deadline is June 15, which may be enough time to make a short film (quickly) and submit it if you're really lusting after the awards.

If you're more of an audience member than a filmmaker, you can watch all of the winning shorts from the 2006 competition -- and since I haven't quite finished my most recent Eat My Shorts column, consider SXSWclick your source for good short films online this week. I haven't yet watched all the 2006 winners myself, although I caught the Really Real Shorts winner art/work recently and found it very inspiring for creative people who also have day jobs. Also, keep an eye on the SXSWclick site in late June, when the 15 finalists will have their shorts available on the web for us to watch, as well as vote on the Audience Award.

Sundance Film Festival director Geoff Gilmore announced the lineup of films that will be screening at the 2007 festival today, and said that choosing the 64 films that will appear in the four competition categories (dramatic, documentary, world cinema dramatic and world cinema documentary) was harder this year than ever before. While that's a bit like someone saying "You guys are the best crowd ever!" they definitely did have more films to choose from for the same number of slots, so who can blame him? They received 3,287 films for consideration this year, the most in the festival's 39-year history.

122 total films were chosen (not all of them screen in competition), and 82 of them will be world premieres. That's a heck of a lot of movies over two weeks. If you've ever attended Sundance in the past, then you know how difficult it is to get tickets. Passes are expensive and sell out quickly (in fact, only one level of pass is currently left, the $2500 Express Pass-B), however individual tickets will go on sale the week of January 9. You can pre-register right now through January 4 on the Sundance FIlm Festival website to receive a random, lottery-style time that will allow you to log in and purchase tickets that week.

Sundance is one of my favorite film festivals because of the sheer volume and variety of films that you are able to pick and choose from. Plus it's a chance to meet the filmmakers, other film lovers, and to experience it in beautiful Park City, Utah. The last two years that I've gone it was with minimum preparation and usually as a last-minute decision, but I've still managed to see at least 15 films in about five days each time. It's well worth the trip and enduring the cold to step out of your own world and into a creative environment, if just for a little while.

You can download a PDF file of all the 2007 Sundance Film Festival selections here. The festival runs from January 18th through the 28th -- time to start picking and choosing!

Though the titles revealed yesterday (apart from the festival's opener, The Black Dahlia), were English-free, the just-announced lineup for the 2006 Venice Film Festival includes thirteen American films, many of which are in competition. In addition to The Black Dahlia, other American films competing for the Golden Lion this year include: The Fountain, Bobby, Hollywoodland and Children of Men. Among other notables competing for the top prizes are the legendary Alain Resnais (Private Fears in Public Places), Johnnie To (Fangzhu), Paul Verhoeven (Blackbook) and Steven Frears, whose The Queen will bow at Venice before opening the New York Film Festival.

As expected, David Lynch's Inland Empire will be screening out of competition, along with a diverse group that includes Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute, World Trade Center, Tales from Earthsea (the debut from Goro Miyazaki), The Wicker Man, Rob-B-Hood (the Jackie Chan stolen-baby movie), Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State, Benoît Jacquot's L'Intouchable, and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's Katrina doc.

This year's festival runs from August 30 to September 9.