A mix of social commentary and metaphysical pondering, Michael Dunn's The Bet is a short of simple structure and big ideas, its gritty setting easily reflective of moral decay. As a young women gets tossed back and forth between the kind though detached Henry and ever righteous James, the two men engaged in a bet as to which one of them will kill her, The Bet makes its way into the realm of philosophical horror without much overt violence but with an undertone palpably resonant of evil.

Adam Bertocci is the type of guy who doesn’t drink coffee; chuckles deep at his own jokes; runs self-proclaimed communist sets, where everyone pitches in to create the film; is close to and cares about his character creations “in a frighteningly real sense;” holds to libertarian politics when he gets political at all; rarely follows popular music, even when college dorm mate Will Butler came up the artistic ranks with Arcade Fire; hopes that his mind is a vast imagination where his characters, can in perpetuity, run and play and fall in love when necessary; and jokingly says he loves blaming other people for his problems. He’s not the type of guy, however, who keeps his notes organized, a pernicious habit that, he says, should cause his biographers some aggravation.

This is Jeremy Phillips. "I care about it passionately, the medium," he says. That medium, of course, being film. A University of Southern California graduate, Phillips worked with Naveen Singh on the short 27,000 Days, helping his do-it-all filmmaking friend hone his vision of the experimental narrative during the editing process.

With both his shorts Orphans and 27,000 Days, Naveen Singh plays with the experimental narrative, molding it this way and that to settle in some raw emotion, a conceit that pulls him as far away from the intellectual as his work is inherently that. Where in Orphans Singh explores morality and survival, his masked soldiers predators of vulnerable men, women and children, in 27,000 Days Singh sets his gaze on one father and husband struggling with his memory, his familial bonds and the deterioration of both. However often labeled an experimental filmmaker though, Singh doesn't consider himself one among that class.