The feature films get most of the attention at High Falls and pretty much every other festival in the world. But that doesn't mean you should ignore the short films. Look at it this way: The packaging might be smaller, but the quality is just as good. Look at John Stockton, or Napoleon, or even Tom Cruise.
There are three programs of short films screening at High Falls (Thursday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon --- see the schedule on page 21 for more details), and overall, they're just as eclectic as the features (which range from hardcore nuns, to killer siding, to Don Quixote). If you missed the mammary-obsessed double feature of Size 'Em Up and the June Foray-narrated Boobie Girl at the ImageOut Festival earlier this month, High Falls gives you another crack at ogling them. Others share similar subject matter despite being very different films, like Who Hangs the Laundry: Washing, War and Electricity in Beirut and The Gentle Cycle. The former is a documentary that shows a housewife explaining the ridiculous process of cleaning clothes without reliable sources of water or electricity, while the latter portrays an unlikely friendship between two people at a laundromat.
Some just have damn interesting titles, like LoqueeshaAshleyFranklinJoséBrown and How to Tell Your Friends From Japs. Others sound like must-see prospects once you do some digging into their backgrounds, like Noël en Famille, which was co-directed by Aruna Villiers (a script supervisor for giants like Luc Besson, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Brian DePalma, and Mathieu Kassovitz), and 2+2, an experimental documentary about John Forbes Nash, Jr. (better known to you as that guy Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind).
You can even catch a program of shorts made by RIT film students. It's screening Saturday, November 2 at 1:15 p.m.