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The call came in the parking lot of Home Depot on Black Friday.

Bridgeport filmmakers Roland and Kelly Becerra were in the middle of a shopping trip the day after Thanksgiving when Roland picked up a muddy-sounding voice-mail message that sounded like a film festival inquiry concerning their animated short "Dear Beautiful."

The film has been circulating to festivals for the past year -- after a well-received showing last year at the Cannes Festival under the auspices of Moviemaker magazine -- so Kelly was pleased but not so excited by the unclear message.

"Give it to me, I'll listen to it," Kelly told her husband.

Kelly quickly deciphered the voice mail and had one of those "Oh, my God!" moments when she realized it was from the Sundance Film Festival, telling them their film was one of 96 animated shorts chosen from 9,000 entries for the highly prestigious annual movie gathering in Utah later this month.

"We had applied forever ago and didn't think much about it anymore," Kelly recalled in a joint interview with her husband on Wednesday.

The couple had to keep their good news under wraps until Dec. 8, when the official annoucements were made.

"That was a challenge," Kelly said, laughing. "We couldn't Facebook it and could only let our closest friends know what happened."

"Dear Beautiful" will receive six screenings at Sundance starting Jan. 16. Roland and Kelly are going with some of the friends who pitched in to help

The Becerras have already received lots of strong feedback on "Dear Beautiful" over the past year or so -- including a very positive piece by this writer when the film won the Moviemaker award -- but being tapped by Sundance as an official entry puts the couple in a whole different league.

Roland and Kelly's dream of expanding their scary and unsettling short into a feature-length film has been given a huge boost by Sundance.

Over the past few weeks, the filmmakers have received offers of agency and management representation, as well as a query from producer Harvey Weinstein's film company. (Weinstein helped establish the power of Sundance with his release of "sex, lies and videotape" 19 years ago.)

"We've always been aiming at the idea of making a feature," Roland said of the story of the effects of a strange new flower on the population of New Haven. The exotic flowers eventually cause the city to be overrun by infected, zombie-like humans amid an increasingly panicked populace.

"Dear Beautiful" carries echoes of such alien takeover movies as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956 and 1978) as well as director George Romero's consumer satire/horror classic "Dawn of the Dead" (1978). Roland directed the film and Kelly co-produced the picture. She also wrote the screenplay with her husband and Meredith DiMenna. The film has exceptionally moody music and sound design by another ArtSpace resident, Keith Saunders.

"We've always been fans of horror, but we like character-oriented films for adults. Not those teen horror films," Kelly stressed.

In addition to the short version, Roland has prepared another 40 minutes of material -- "secret footage," he said laughing -- that could be more source material for a feature-length "Dear Beautiful."

"We're taking a wait-and-see attitude," Becky said of the decision to put off signing any contracts before the Sundance screenings. "We want to make the right deal."

A full-length "Dear Beautiful" could be made as a live action film or an animated feature.

"We know how we could translate it to [live action]," Roland said.

Over the past two years that the Becerras have been screening their material, combinations of live action and animation like the forthcoming "The Watchman" have become popular, and more realistic, adult-themed animated pictures such as "Persepolis" have also found favor.

Both Roland and Kelly are visual artists as well as filmmakers; she has a painting in a current show at Ridgefield's Aldrich Museum and will have a solo show opening at Eastern Connecticut State University next month.

"Right now we are dealing with so many different things, but it is all really good," Kelly said.