Short of the Week
It was competition time on Short of the Week and Shortverse in September, as our inaugural Unsanctioned Shorts contest came to close. The winning film, Fireworks, was announced on Thursday 28th, with S/W co-founder Jason Sondhi describing it as a surprising “exercise in empathy”, with a humanistic message that is both “uplifting and effective”.
With that competition based around one of Shortverse’s core aims – how can we can help those filmmakers who don’t make it onto S/W – here at Short of the Week we returned to one of our key objectives – providing inspiration to our audience. Obviously, we do this through the films we select, but we also do it through a series of interviews we hand-pick on a regular basis. In September, it was all cinematography, as we spoke with Charlotte Hornsby, and festival programming, as we were joined by Fantastic Fest’s director of short Jean Anne Lauer.
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Team Favorites
Selecting the three shorts that make up our Best of the Month selection is always a team effort. Firstly, because internally it provides a prime opportunity for the S/W crew to reflect on our curation process and criteria and secondly, it means the picks are never skewed too favourably to my own personal tastes – if it was up to me, this trio would have been all animations. I did manage to ensure one of my favourite animations made the list (although deciding which one was a painstaking process) and then my fellow programmers ensured we had a varied selection, by also choosing a heartwarming fiction and a moving, poetic documentary. Enjoy! – Rob Munday, Managing Editor.
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Almeda by Paul Hairston
The film – a moving, poetic portrayal of immigrants uprooted by the 2020 Oregon fires – speaks not only of resilience, but of how the most vulnerable communities are often the ones most affected by disaster. You can read about tragedies in the paper, but there’s an argument to be made that video is the most effective way to make stories like this break through the numbness barrier that can form after being oversaturated with headlines about disastrous events on a weekly basis. And in a year where wildfires have scorched the earth (and dominated the news cycle), this subject matter is inherently relevant.
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Swallow the Universe by Nieto
A breathtaking Japanese Emaki manga (hand-drawn side-scrolling animation) telling the story of a boy (Emiko) with a dental superpower, whose face is coveted by the entire animal kingdom, Nieto’s 13-minute film is truly unlike anything we’ve seen before. Backing up its unconventional storyline with a staggering animation style, based on the work of cartoonist Daïchi Mori, Nieto’s short swiftly guides you through a world where tigers tear at your face and flaming turtles deliver words of wisdom.
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You Know Where to Find Me by Sam Davis
Davis has gone back and forth between narrative and documentary in his career and that is very much reflected in this film. With its naturalistic approach, the “shooting, editing and casting lends it a heightened quality of truth and authenticity”, which is what makes the film so emotionally compelling. Principal photography mostly relied on improvisation, and just like in documentary filmmaking, the film was structured during the edit, with Davis confessing “we had no idea that the answering machine scene would be so substantial in the final film”. These very genuine moments end up giving the film its depth and nuances.
Shortverse Best of the Month
Over on Shortverse, our team picked 12 shorts as our Best of the Month for September 2023, including a side-scrolling animation about a childhood monster, an Iranian thriller and a unique take on gentrification.