Film, companionship and (if you make friends with the boss) pizza at this year's Manhattan Short Film Festival (Photo: STV)

After sorting through more than 5,000 votes for entries from seven different countries, Manhattan Short Film Festival founder Nick Mason sent word late Monday of this year's big winner: British director John Williams' kids-in-animal-costumes fantasy Hibernation.

The eighth annual festival's outdoor screening Sunday night drew hundreds of filmgoers to Union Square, where The Reeler found Mason haunting the grounds in high spirits. "It has grown, and it is not going away," he told me between distributing slices of pizza to passers-by who had stopped for a look at some of the dozen films being screened. "We show these across the country, but funny enough, only one is from America. This is more of a European year."

The American selection—Francisco Lorite's hyperactive hallucination Cuco Gomez-Gomez is Dead—played in competition with a few more harrowing films like Colin Hutton's gun parable Gravity and Matan Guggenheim's suicide-bomb-as-gambling-pastime drama Crickets. For his trouble, the victorious Williams earns top-flight sound, light and editing packages for an upcoming feature film. Congrats to him.