All is Gold

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. We Buy Gold Wins ‘Short of the Week Award’ at Ouray - Rob went to Colorado to jury at the Ouray International Film Festival and present the first Short of the Week Award. Congrats to David Huang and Albie Smith-Chang on their win! Rob sat with the two filmmakers for a Q&A about their short (full film embedded above). Other winners available to watch include Long’s Long Lost & Mini Mart and Homemade Gatorade. Read about them and more in this write-up from Moviemaker.

2. Fest Roundup: Palm Springs and Annecy Winners - I was in sunny Palm Springs for Shortfest and to watch longtime S/W team member Céline Roustan preside over her first fest as Director of Programming. It was a blast, and the fest produced a fine lineup of winners. In France, Annecy concluded, and THR has the award recipients. A sampling: Don Hertzfeldt took home the Short Film Cristal, and Anna Mantzaris grabbed the Jean-Luc Xiberras Award, while S/W alums Louis Clichy and Alberto Vázquez received important feature film awards, with the former also getting acquired by Sony Pictures Classics. Iron Boy now has a planned award-season theatrical launch in the Fall. As predicted in our last newsletter, though, Hisko Hulsing’s ambitious new short faced an organized protest, with dozens of walkouts and booing throughout the film, prompting a rebuke from Artistic Director Marcel Jean. For a general wrap on animation’s main event, read Jamie Lang in Cartoon Brew. What are we looking to next? Fantasia starts in two weeks. Here is their shorts lineup.

3. A24 Wouldn’t Tell Hollywood How It Works. It Told Google - News about a $75M deal between A24 and Google’s DeepMind division rocked the internet a couple of weeks ago. As usual, Indiewire’s Editor-in-Chief Dana Harris-Bridson does well to tease out what the implications are.

4. One of Europe’s Biggest Short Film Acquirers to Shut Down - Movistar Plus is the biggest telecom in Spain and, as a leading acquirer and pre-buyer of international co-productions, has served as a key institution within short film for close to three decades. News leaked out this week that the telecom is axing its short film division and letting go of its influential executive, Guadalupe Arensburg. REC, a consortium of French sales agents representing companies like Miyu, Salaud Morisset, and Autour de Minuit, provided a statement of support for Arensburg and decried the cut, citing the “vital role in financing European short films” that Movistar Plus plays. Cartoon Brew reached out to Spanish director Alberto Vázquez for comment, fresh off his win at Annecy for Decorado, a feature adaptation of a 2016 short that Arensburg had championed. His producer calls the closure the end of “an era that shaped the history of Spanish short filmmaking.”

5. The Short Film That Launched the IMAX Era - With The Odyssey nearly here, and IMAX triumphant as the premium cinematic option of choice, I enjoyed this retrospective piece from Gold Derby that spoke with Christopher Nolan and others about the legacy of To Fly!, a short film that, more than any other work, cemented IMAX as a viable format. A 27-minute short film history of aviation innovation, the film was supposed to play for one year, and has now instead run for 50—it was the first IMAX film I saw back in 1993, and it is estimated to have sold over 100M tickets!

6. Finding Your Short’s Forever Home - First, I love the title of this advice piece published by Mark Brennan in Festival Formula, but also it’s good advice from Short of the Week’s own Rob Munday, as well as Sarah Smith of Director’s Notes and Sadhbh Murphy of Ireland’s famed NITV.

7. Top Shorts From Cannes Lions - Facially, the annual advertising event appears to be getting more relevant with the growing presence of creator/influencers and current revival of branded film as a concept. But, I didn’t really hear a lot about the event this year! In fact, what I did hear were brutal putdowns from the likes of Matt Belloni and The Verge’s Nilay Patel. Still, I feel it’s good to pay attention to what the ad industry chooses to celebrate itself for, so here are the winners in the relevant-to-us categories of Entertainment, Film Craft, and Film. Spotlighting some key shorts, check out this Case Study for the emotive Xolo animation Gold Winner Who’s Waiting For You. A pair of Spike Jonze projects we’ve highlighted in this newsletter- a star-studded 30min Gucci short and Shape of Dreams for shoe brand ON also took Golds, but the short film star of the event might be former Short of the Year winner Oscar Hudson with a 3-minute piece for Coinbase.

8. The Unglamorous Financial Realities of 5 Indie Filmmakers - Hershal Pandya, writing for Vulture, emailed 20+ filmmakers to talk candidly about money. 5 said yes. S/W alums Sophy Romvari, Daniel Lombroso, Dustin Guy Defa, and Penny Lane, alongside Joel Potrykus, shared real talk about how to scrape by and their struggles and anxieties around making a living in film.

9. New Vimeo Owner Goes Public at $18B Valuation - Bending Spoons, the Italian company that buys and rehabilitates distressed internet companies, went public yesterday on the NASDAQ exchange. The NYTimes ran a small feature on the company this week in advance of the IPO.

10. What to Watch This Weekend - I missed this one when it came out a couple of weeks ago, but will be rectifying that tonight at NYC’s IFC Center. Magnolia’s latest release, Maddie’s Secret, is a must-watch. If you know it, you don’t need me to sell you—the feature debut of John Early, his partnership with Kate Berlant is one of internet comedy’s most beloved creative relationships. Across dozens of skits, shorts, shows, and specials, the pair’s absurd, catty, and melodramatic stylings have become familiar mainstays of American comedy. We only featured John and Kate one time, for the 2019 short Rachel, from writer/director Andrew DeYoung, (most recently spotted directing episodes of Widow’s Bay), but they’ve been omnipresent in our internet circles for years. What’s Maddie’s Secret? Watch the trailer below, but Early suggests the framing, “What if Bon Appétit felt like Showgirls?”

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