THE COLOR WHEEL

A brother and sister road-trip to New York with dryly humorous results in this film from Oberlin grad Carlen Altman (one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film for 2011) and co-director (and co-star) Alex Ross Perry. "They play off each other well," Lucas says. "Even from the first few minutes of the movie, I was really sucked into the characters and the performance."

WHAT WE GOT/FOUND

The festival held a competition among local filmmakers based on the Internet time suck Craigslist's Missed Connections. Each short film uses an actual missed connection as its starting point, and What We Got/Found won the jury award. This one, says Lucas, "explores the roots of a middle-aged couple's relationship with humorous and touching results."

WAY

You'll also find video games and their developers at the festival. "The Northeast Ohio area actually has a very vibrant [video game] development community," says Lucas. California developer Chris Bell created Way, an online game in which two players are placed at vastly different locations somewhere on earth with the aim of somehow getting to one another.