Richmond filmmaker Lucas Krost is taking his movie "Feels Like Drowning" to the Cannes Film Festival.

"Feels Like Drowning" is less than six minutes long, including credits. But the Cannes Film Festival is the Cannes Film Festival.

Krost was the local winner of the 48-Hour Film Festival, in which teams of filmmakers are given just 48 hours to make a five-minute movie. As winner on the local level, he was offered the chance to compete on the national level with a new movie shot over 48 hours last fall.

That film, "Feels Like Drowning," was selected as one of the five national finalists, but it did not win. Then, earlier this week, he got an e-mail stating that he would be showing it at Cannes in May.

"It was pretty amazing. We didn't expect it at all. We had moved on, because we hadn't heard in so long. We thought we had not been selected. To get that e-mail, we were overjoyed," Krost said.

"Feels Like Drowning" tells of a couple, played by Jackie Lamptey and Tyhm Kennedy returning from an airport and heading to a hotel, interspersed with scenes of an Arabic prisoner (Shahan Jafri) being waterboarded. It was written by local authors David Robbins, Dean King, Jim Daab, Hector Stockton and Krost, and former Richmonder Charles Slack.

The short film will be shown at the festival in France with about 10 others from around the world. Krost, who is producing and creating the visual effects for the locally filmed movie "Border Town," will be at the screening and a reception, and hopes to catch some of the other featured movies at the festival.

"There is a filmmaker section we can go to. That's what I'm really looking forward to -- meeting filmmakers and learning."