Breeda Wool in Deb Shoval's âAWOL.â  “It’s the first week of C.S.A.,” she said from her northeastern Pennsylvania farm, referring to the subscription program Community Supported Agriculture. “People become members, and they get vegetables, and this was the first week.”  At the 2011 ShortFest many of the directors have fairly predictable backgrounds, like acting, photography, fine arts, news, advertising and design. Others, like Ms. Shoval, have more unusual entries on their résumés. Astrophysics. Medicine. Law. Professional snowboarding. Like an increasing number of filmmakers who’ve found their way to Palm Springs, Sundance or other festivals friendly to shorts (usually defined as 40 minutes or less) Ms. Shoval has taken a wildly circuitous journey to arrive behind the camera.  “When I was 19, I went to work on an organic farm in Maine,” said Ms. Shoval, 33, whose family expected her to become a lawyer. “I was not into it. On this farm they taught you everything. One day I was canning jelly, the next day I was slaughtering sheep.”  At Hampshire College in Massachusetts she majored in sustainable agriculture, got involved in educational drama for children, wrote plays (including “A Sense of Humus”), toured with a theater group, survived a bout with ovarian cancer and decided she had stories to tell. And that film was the way to tell them.  At Palm Springs, alongside “AWOL,” a drama about a soldier on leave and her married lover, is “Just Be Frank,” a portrait of a blind Manhattan jazz singer. Its director, Elise Bialylew, an Australian, had her own moment of truth about film while studying medicine in Melbourne. She was dissecting a female cadaver.  “I held her brain in my hands in complete awe,” said Dr. Bialylew, 32, who is currently studying psychiatry. “It made my own life feel somehow very fleeting and insignificant. Filmmaking for me is in many ways an anatomical journey.”  For others it’s the logical segue from an entirely different field. “Being a snowboarder, there are three ways to make money,” said Orlando von Einsiedel, a 30-year-old Londoner whose “Skateistan,” about a skateboard school in Kabul, Afghanistan, was shown at Sundance this year. “One is winning competitions, one is wearing a brand of clothing, and the last way is ‘photo incentives’: for whatever media coverage you get, you receive a fee from your sponsors.”  Competitors end up filming one another, he said, adding, “Eventually I learned I liked making the snowboarding films more than the actual snowboarding.”  Now he makes short documentaries for nongovernmental organizations in African conflict zones, where he can exploit both his knack for on-the-fly filmmaking and his master’s degree in anthropology from the London School of Economics.  Whether the incongruous backgrounds of so many shorts makers means an infusion of new blood into Greater Cinema remains to be seen; the traditional route, starting with film school, remains the best-trod path to auteurship. But better, cheaper technology, combined with the increasingly visual nature of our culture, has meant more opportunities.  Kathleen McInnis, film curator and director of industry programming at Palm Springs, said that although she’s received entries from more countries — 50 this year, up from 40 in 2010 — “there’s much more complex storytelling.” She added: “I’m of the belief that complex storytelling comes from some level of maturity. And I’m not seeing as many of those films that feel like immature stories from people without much life experience.”  Not everyone agrees that the non-filmmaker filmmaker will be the salvation of cinema. “The cream rises to the top, and most often the cream is from people who define themselves as filmmakers,” said Sharon Badal, head shorts programmer at the Tribeca Film Festival. “That being said, beyond the film-festival circuit you have all these corporate competitions going on, every company wants original branded content they can own. You’re opening up the field to the public at large. It’s a small investment in time and technology, and you have a lot of people who are not ‘filmmakers’ making films.”  While most filmmakers involved in the virtually commerce-free world of shorts would ultimately like to make features, there are practical reasons to think small.
At the Palm Springs International ShortFest viewers can see work by filmmakers with predictable professional backgrounds â and from those with very uncommon rÃ©sumÃ©s.