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For their 9th annual edition, the Atlanta Underground Film Festival will be assaulting the south from its Goat Farm Arts Center screening center on Sep. 13-16 with four days and nights of independent feature films, shorts and documentaries.

Some of the feature films screening include Lisa Duva’s multi-dimensional Cat Scratch Fever, Jason Lapeyre’s thriller Cold Blooded and Brady Hall’s hilariously named Hello, My Name Is Dick Licker.

This year’s Auff is also packed to the gills with short films with multiple blocks of shorts screening per day. Some of the special ones to look out for are Neil Ira Needleman‘s A Few Words in Favor of God, Jim Haverkamp‘s When Walt Whitman Was a Little Girl and Mike Salva‘s award-winning animated short Pound Dogs.

The full film lineup is below, but please visit the official Atlanta Underground Film Festival website for more details and to buy advance tickets.

The above embedded video is more of a TV trailer than a film trailer, but it’s all hilarious. Mike Salva‘s Pound Dogs follows the minimalist adventures of dogs locked up at the local pound, desperately waiting to be adopted. To relieve the boredom, they resort to fun dog activities such as rubbing one’s butt along the floor, wearing sombreros and confessing their love of eating cat poop.

Salva has animated a 13-minute pilot episode for a potential series for Pound Dogs. The short film features the voice work of comedians Ryan Williams and Sean Parrott; cartoon voice actors Andy Merrill (Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Aqua Teen Hunger Force) and Samantha Newark (Jem); and singer/music producer/filmmaker Steve Taylor.

Pound Dogs, the full short, will be screening at the upcoming NY Television Festival on Wed., Sep. 21 at 6:15 p.m. and Fri., Sep. 23 at 9:00 p.

The 7th annual Atlanta Underground Film Festival is like having four different fests crammed into an exhaustive three days on Aug. 27-29. It’s an outrageous underground fest, an animation festival, a documentary fest and a horror movie festival: The culmination of a month of fests run by Atlanta’s Festival League. There’s tons of short films, documentaries, features and more.

There’s lots of great stuff to recommend, too. On the last night of the fest, there will be a screening of Chris Hansen‘s second feature film, Endings, which tells the touching story of three people spending their last day on Earth together. The film was reviewed on Bad Lit a few months ago. On the short film front, there’s Loretta Hintz‘s wild lesbian bestiality (sort of) tale, The Sheep and the Ranch Hand and two films by the perpetually awesome Neil Ira Needleman, Meeskit...

Nestled in the foothills of northern California, the Nevada City Film Festival has evolved from a locals-only fest into a four-day international smorgasbord of short films, plus a couple of features thrown in for good measure. There’s also filmmaking panels, award ceremonies, a live comedy show and some very special guests.

This year, Ncff welcomes Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of the Adult Swim hit Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! On the 21st, they’ll be screening a very special selection of shorts and music videos from the show.

The features they’re screening are Brett Haley’s The New Year, which stars indie breakout actress Trieste Kelly Dunn (Vacation!); Stuck! by underground bad boy director Steve Balderson; and the innovative animated film Mars, directed by Geoff Marslett, who way back in the day (1999) directed the underground music video Monkey vs. Robot for James Kolchaka.

Ncff is...

Just because you’ve been sentenced to death doesn’t mean you can’t look good doing it. Animator Mike Salva made the very funny embedded short film Death Row Diet with Jonathan Katz as the inmate looking to pick up a Weight Watchers endorsement contract while waiting to be put to death, and Tom Leopold as the lawyer helping him achieve his goals.

Katz is, of course, the same Jonathan Katz of the late, lamented Comedy Central “squigglevision” animated series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. Although Death Row Diet isn’t squiggly, the audio director and editor is Tom Snyder, co-creator of Dr. Katz. Tom Leopold is a long-time comedy actor and writer, having written several episodes of Seinfeld and Cheers, amongst writing and acting in a ton of other things.

This all gives Death Row Diet a slightly higher profile than many other animated shorts that I post to Bad Lit.

Typically lost amongst all the big media hoopla of panels, booths, celebrity appearances, etc., is that San Diego’s annual Comic-Con hosts an International Independent Film Festival that runs concurrently along with the convention, which will be this year on July 22-25.

This is a full-fledged fest with short and feature-length films from all over the world that are typically either genre or comic book related. The full lineup of films screening this year is listed below. Screening blocks are broken up by genre: Action/Adventure, Animation, Comics, Horror, Documentary, Humor and Science Fiction.

Not listed below are the assorted panels that will be held specifically for the festival. Plus, on Sunday there will be an Awards Presentation followed by repeat screenings of all the winners.

The festival is doing something a little bit differently this year in that it’s not going to be held in the actual convention center.