FUTURESTATES Episode Caps PBS Online Shorts Festival

In the fifth and final week of the inaugural Online Shorts Festival, PBS will be wrapping up with Play, a mind-bending short film from the ITVS web series FUTURESTATES.

Play, written and directed by David Kaplan and game designer Eric Zimmerman, imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. It was a fan favorite when it was first released online in 2010 on FUTURESTATES.TV. We hope it will be just as much of a hit this time around and be a contender for the shorts festival's audience award. If you'd like to vote for it (hint, hint), follow this link to PBS.org and "like" it with the Facebook like button.

We were honored to have three other ITVS films selected for the shorts festival, including Bullet Proof Vest, Sunshine: Single Dads, and Women and Girls Lead: Meet Beverly. You can vote for all of them on PBS.org. The festival consisted of 20 high-quality short films produced by independent filmmakers in partnership with organizations such as  POV, National Black Programming Consortium, Center for Asian American Media, Latino Public Broadcasting, Native American Public Telecommunications and Pacific Islanders in Communications. We applaud PBS on an outstanding job of producing and curating this first-ever online presentation and for bringing new audiences to diverse and independent film from our public media family. We are looking forward to next year!