And We're Off

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Watch Venice Competition Shorts At Home - Venice partners with Festival Scope to make their Orizzonti selections available to fans. As with previous Festival Scope partnerships, you need to sign up for an account and purchase free, but limited, “tickets” for individual films. However, tickets will be available throughout September. After you watch, share your impressions on SV.

2. Venice Immersive Programmers on Future of Storytelling - While Venice is one of the great historic cinema fests, it is also home to one of festival-land’s oldest and most well-regarded competitions for new formats. Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac curate the program and jump on the venerable FoST podcast this week to discuss where they see immersive formats going.

3. Georg Csarmann Revisits Interactive Masterpiece - Speaking of Immersive storytelling, our longtime S/W programmer goes deep on the 2016 interactive short Possibilia for his Substack. Winner of S/W’s Short of the Year upon its release, I think it’s still the finest interactive film I’ve seen, and presaged the themes that won its creators, DANIELS, an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once.

4. Meet the Student Academy Award Winners - Announced Wednesday, 12 films were announced as recipients of the Student Oscar. Each film is now eligible for the standard Oscars and will be sorted into Gold, Silver, and Bronze places at a ceremony in New York in October. Here is a Shortverse collection of the films, with a handful available to watch now.

5. Short Films featuring Alien: Earth Cast - It’s our current hi-profile TV show of choice, and Rob Munday couldn’t help but experience the shock of recognition in nearly every scene of the show. He put together this Shortverse collection of shorts we remember the sci-fi show’s cast from.

6. Short Film Magazine Calls for Pitches - Talking Shorts is launching a new, annual print publication and is looking for pitches! You’ve got until Sept 8th to send yours in.

7. Nine Tips For Your Next Festival Submission - LA’s Salute Your Shorts festival wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, and it is an event that impresses our team. Rob served as a juror this year, and in this Indiewire piece, the fest’s founder, Erin Brown Thomas, shares solid advice for filmmakers taking shorts onto the fest circuit.

8. Directors’ Notes interviews GM of FilmFreeway - FilmFreeway is omnipresent in indie film and film festival culture, yet is mostly silent, content to be infrastructure rather than thought leaders. That’s why I was intrigued to see MarBelle talk with GM of the platform, Matt Toigo, in this wide-ranging discussion.

9. A Bomb? Or a “Niche Play”? - This piece in Deadline got a lot of flak online, and I get it—people were upset by the weirdly pessimistic and economics-focused coverage of Sinners in the trades earlier this year, so this piece, which sounds like it’s carrying water for a Sydney Sweeney box-office failure, feels like a racist double-standard. But if you ignore that, you find unusual insight into modern film distribution that filmmakers with indie features in mind would be wise to read.

10. What To Watch This Weekend - Normally, I like to highlight the work of an alum, but today I’m going to go with a feature-length work from the legendary short film creators, The Brothers Quay, whose films, like 1986’s Street of Crocodiles, routinely rank highly on lists of the greatest shorts of all time. Their latest film is Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, and is being released in theaters by KimStim. Check out if it’s coming to a theater near you.

We’re coming up on 15 years of Op/Docs, the groundbreaking nonfiction short film series published by the NyTimes. Georg Csarmann talked with Alexandra Garcia about the program, its legacy, and what filmmakers should know, including:

• What Op/Docs editors really value when they greenlight a short.

• Why Op/Docs will back wild formal swings—animation, hybrid, even abstraction—if the nonfiction spine is solid.

• The surprising way the team sometimes re-cuts films with directors to make them land harder online.

• What “digitally native storytelling” actually means to the NYT, and why under-20 minutes is the sweet spot.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week