A Name as a Style

🥁 The Nominees Are…

The 97th Academy Award nominees are here. Announced in an online presentation Thursday morning, you can catch the full list in many places, but our eyes are only for the shorts categories.

I doff my cap to the Academy—this is a good lineup! Just over half the films from our recommendation list made the cut, and six of the fifteen are streaming for free right now. An additional two are available on SVOD platforms. Catch them quickly as that ratio is likely to shift in the coming weeks.

While sentimental favorites like Don Hertzfeldt missed out, we’re overjoyed that S/W selections Instruments of a Beating Heart and A Lien are official nominees, alongside site alums Nicolas Keppens and Nina Gantz. In the acquisition race, The New Yorker takes the top spot with three films followed by Netflix with two. Some odds and ends:

• The full list with links to coverage and where to watch is on Short of the Week.

• Here is a handy Shortverse Collection of the nominees

• Netflix came in late with a successful bet on Anuja in Live-Action. Date TBD.

• ShortsTV has bumped the popular theatrical release of the nominees to Feb 14th due to the Los Angeles fires.

• Cheers to S/W alums Gints Zilbalodis, Greg Kwedar, and Wes Ball for the nominations their feature films Flow, Sing Sing, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes received (ok, Denis Villeneuve too).

• Coralie Fargeat is the freshest name in the hallowed Best Director category. Have you seen her 2015 short which loosely inspired The Substance?

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🌞 Sundance!

Sundance is the kick-off to the annual festival calendar and, as America’s most vital film festival, it is always worth close inspection.

Under the leadership of long-time steward Mike Plante, the festival’s short film programming has been notable—the festival generally has its pick of the 2025 class and, with no premiere restrictions, its programmers can follow their hearts.

This is extra important because the shorts program is a direct pipeline into the powerful Sundance Institute with its myriad of grants, mentorship programs, and labs. Many of the short filmmakers you see this year will return to the fest with buzzy 1st features on their way to becoming household names. So, with that in mind, let us guide you to what we find interesting in this year’s edition.

• Check out Short of the Week’s annual Shorts-Centric Guide to the festival, with a special eye on celebrating our alums in the Feature and Shorts programs.

• The full shorts lineup is up on Shortverse in an easily explorable collection with press links and trailers for many of the films.

• We watched all the shorts in advance and compiled a list of our favorites.

• The favorites collection is extra useful because US fans can watch the shorts by purchasing virtual tickets to the individual programs or by purchasing an all-inclusive Shorts-pass for $50.

• While we await the winners in roughly one week’s time, congrats to friend of S/W and site alum Kibwe Tavares for his inclusion on the shorts jury!

• One of the satellite events I’m most interested in is the Brand Storytelling Conference. Here’s a recent Q&A they did with the creatives at Voyager.

• The Sundance Labs also just recently announced its upcoming Screenwriting class. Congrats to alums Alexandra Qin, Ward Kamel, Leo Aguirre, and the duo of Andrea Ellsworth and Kasey Elise Walker.

• Late drama in the program film program as BLKNWS, a new feature from S/W alum Khalil Joseph, has been pulled from the festival by its financier…👀

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Matty Brown’s Feature Debut Hits Netflix - Brown is a two-time S/W alum and a legendary filmmaker in the Vimeo community as a DiY videographer of influential travel films. We know he’s been working toward feature film directing for many years and are excited to check out his debut, The Sand Castle, which premieres on Netflix today. The logline: Stranded on a deserted island, a family of four scavenges for survival as their past unravels, sending them into a downward spiral.

2. 8 Shorts Receive BAFTA Nomination - It’s not fair to only cover the Oscars during award season. Here are the films in the running for Best British Animation and Short Film.

3. Meet Canada’s “Top Ten” - The latest edition of Canada’s annual Top Ten list of features and shorts arrived earlier in the month, spotlighting leading talents like Torill Kove, Bec Pecaut, and Alexander Farah.

4. Explore the Short Films of David Lynch - We’re all mourning the passing of the film legend in our own ways. I rewatched Blue Velvet, others are returning to Twin Peaks. Lynch has a sizeable reputation in features and TV but less well known is that he was an incredibly prolific short film creator throughout his career. We’ve created a collection of some of his most notable shorts, with several available to watch now.

   

   Lynch’s 1970 short masterpiece is available on Criterion Channel

5. Every Frame a Painting Original Short is Online - Fans of the influential video essay series can rejoice. We mentioned over the summer that Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos had returned from a long hiatus with fresh essays and news of an original short, The Second, which premiered at Fantasia. The short is now online, alongside a new BTS video that compares the animatic to the final film. Congrats Tony & Taylor!

6. Posthumus Mac Miller Album Receives a Rad Short Film - Titled Balloonerism, the 22min short is from Samuel Jerome Mason, the talented animator behind Miller’s acclaimed Colors and Shapes music video. We dig it a lot. Balloonerism is streaming on Amazon Prime.

7. New Coldplay Short Film a “Patchwork Quilt” from over 150 Artists - The visual accompaniment to Coldplay’s album, Moon Music, is titled A Film For the Future and is out now on YouTube. The 44min final product, released across 10 videos and orchestrated by exec producer Ben Mor, is the result of the combined efforts of 150 artists from 45 different countries who crafted visuals to snippets of the album. It includes S/W alums like Mdhamiri á Nkemi, Jenny Jokela, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and many more.

8. Festival & Distribution Masterclass for Your Doc Short - Opal H. Bennett, executive producer at POV Shorts and former jury member of our Short Awards is running virtual classes early next month through Gotham. Honestly, if you have a documentary short, we can’t think of someone better to learn from.

9. WebComic Feature Adaptation Announced - 1st of Many? - A very interesting headline in Variety. Ben Brewer, featured by S/W for A Folded Ocean and famous for his music video and VFX work, is to direct a feature adaptation of the webcomic Stagtown. The film is to be produced by Wattpad WebToon Studios and Margot Robbie’s Lucky Chap production company. Careful readers may know I’ve been intrigued by Wattpad and WebToon for a long time as user-generated IP platforms and wrote about WebToon a bit in this 2023 piece on the webcomic-turned-short film Lackadaisy. Since then, the a24-backed animated series Hazbin Hotel from notable webcomic creator VivziePop has become a big hit on Amazon Prime. A trend may be brewing…

10. Longread: Matthew Ball on The State of Video Gaming - Every time Matthew Ball publishes it is a must-read. The former Amazon Video executive and author of the book The Metaverse is an incredibly clear and insightful analyst of whatever subject he tackles and we’ve learned a lot from his insights into the streaming wars and VR. His latest release is a massive slide deck of analysis on the video game business. Games are less clearly analogous to film, though they compete in a similar attention-marketplace. However, there are analogies to be found in the relationship between blockbusters versus indie, tech company investment, and the challenges of a diminishing cultural footprint.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week