EXCLUSIVE: Patton Oswalt has joined Oscar-qualified short film Sardinia as executive producer, along with his wife, actress Meredith Salenger (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, The Journey of Natty Gann).
The dark satirical short, written and directed by Paul Kowalski (Paper Tiger), stars Philip Ettinger (First Reformed, I Know This Much Is True) as a deeply serious man battling a deadly laughing plague alongside Emmy winner Martha Plimpton (The Regime, Mass). Olek Krupa, Breeda Wool and Sorel Carradine also star.
“Sardinia takes less than twenty minutes of your life to watch, but then takes up days and weeks of your brain-space when you’re done. It’s that rich, that stinging, that deep,” Oswalt said in a statement. “What Paul Kowalski does, with equal measures of hilarity and horror, is show the world go quickly off-kilter—and the subsequent ‘correction’ to ‘normality’ makes this worse. If this sounds familiar, keep in mind that Kowalski uses our recent, real-life crash-course in non-reality to zing a million funny riffs on loneliness, on loneliness, conformity, memory and, yes, laughter.”
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Sardinia premiered in competition at Indy Shorts earlier this year, with Kowalski winning Grand Prize Best Director at Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival.
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“I couldn’t think of better champions of a dystopic satire about laughter than Meredith and Patton, one of our industry’s smartest and funniest couples,” Kowalski said. “Patton’s variety of cerebral and irreverent creativity perfectly mirrors the spirit at the heart of Sardinia.”
Sardinia is produced by Kowalski under his PKino Films banner, and Stephanie Furtun; it is executive produced by Trust, Sarah Brannan and Pin-Chun Liu.