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🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Favorite Short Films of 2024! - A terrific playlist to kick off the new year, each S/W team member picked a favorite short from our 2024 curated selections. This is notably not a “best of” list—though there may be overlap—instead, the prompt was to select a personal favorite short that tickled our pleasure zones in a way that was perfect for us individually. See the list, with blurbs on each selection at S/W, or browse the collection on Shortverse. w

2. Two New Shortlist Films Online - Voting to decide which shortlisted films receive an official Oscar nomination is coming soon, so fresh contenders are popping up on the web. The Spanish short Paris 70 is online for a limited time, while Arte TV has made the Palme d’or and freshly anointed European Film Award winner, The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, available for European audiences.

3. Talking Shorts Top 3 of 2024 - This long survey is a fun tradition that polls dozens of prominent festival programmers and critics on their favorite shorts of the prior year. Originally conceived by Tallinn Black Nights programmer Laurence Boyce who would publish it in Cineuropa or Kinoscope, the list now has a home at Talking Shorts. Both Céline and I took part this year, alongside 50+ other short film luminaries.

4. Clermont-Ferrand Lineup Is Out - The French event is the world’s most important shorts-specific festival and has released its selections for the end of the month. Browse the international and national competition lineups as well as this year’s spotlights on Lebanese film and the use of Sound in short cinema.

5. Ruairi Robinson Releases AI Teaser for a “movie that does not exist” - Robinson is perhaps the greatest maker of sci-fi proof-of-concept shorts: Blinky™, Corporate Monster, Leviathan, and this year’s ambitious anthology, A Thousand Suns sit on his resume, so to see him playing with AI is interesting.

6. TCL Continues to Make Terrible AI Shorts - As a counterpoint to the promise of a talented and meticulous artist like Robinson using AI, we have a new batch of fairly terrible AI shorts from television manufacturer TCL for their TCL+ streaming service. The Verge watches so you don’t have to.

7. Case Studies on 6 Sundance 2024 Features - We love Anthony Kaufmann’s work at Filmmaker Mag and this type of post is why. While not granular, he provides great big-picture insight into the strategies of an interesting range of projects from last year’s fest. Anyone who aspires to work in indie film can learn something useful from this piece.

8. In Theaters: Short film Omnibus, From Ground Zero - Fresh off of being shortlisted for Oscar in the Best International Film category, the Palestinian anthology is now out in US theaters. We spotlighted the project in December, and highly recommend checking out this unique and moving work.

9. Listen: RaMell Ross on The Big Picture - Perhaps my favorite director interview of 2024 was this conversation with RaMell Ross, director of the new feature film Nickel Boys. It’s not short film related, but Ross exemplifies many qualities that I associate with short film—a total creative commitment to a point-of-view, a championing of an outsider perspective, and a boldness to innovate formally. I had seen the director’s breakthrough documentary experiment, 2018’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, but I had not heard him discuss his work before. I listened to this episode, went out and saw Nickel Boys, then came back and listened to it again.

10. The Complete “Piss Saga” Now Out - S/W Alum Derek Milton’s investigation into Los Angeles’ mysterious “Piss Bandit” is finished! A bizarre story that found its way into the LA Times, the filmmaker seeks to unravel the mystery of an electrical box that is continually stacked with bottles of urine. A mystery series for the social media age, the short, 7 part series is out on YouTube now.

🥳 Recapping 2024

I published a simple Year in Review post at Short of the Week on New Year's Eve. Check it out for some extended reminiscing on my part, but for your convenience, I will reprint this bulleted rundown of some of what our team at Short of the Week accomplished in the past year.

• 🎖️ S/W featured 187 official selections from over 6000 submissions

• 🆕 We introduced editorial to video with the Short Films Explained series

• 🏆 The Seine’s Tears was “Short of the Year” according to our Jury

• 📈 We hit 1M subscribers on YouTube, did a Livestream to celebrate, then hit 1.5M!

• 💯 Our first film to hit 100M+ was Anne Thoren’s Diagonale (Take that Taylor!)

• 4️⃣x the Views on YT in 2024 with 200M+ views

• 👥 22,000 new accounts on Shortverse

• 🔓 Shortverse PRO features, like messaging + screener links are now unlocked for all!

• 🗂️ Unveiled big new Shortverse features like customizable User Collections

• 🎼 Designed a new Scoring System

• 📞 Introduced New Products: Scores and Feedback Calls

• 💌 Nearly doubled our Newsletter to 50k+ subscribers

• 🤣 Content Partnership with LOL Network, licensing shorts for exhibition on FAST channels

• 🤝 Brand partnerships with Locarno, M&Ms, Red Bull, Cards Against Humanity + more.

• 🛵 Longtime Senior Programmer Chelsea became a selected filmmaker!

• 👩‍❤️‍👩 Jennifer and Rekka became full-team members!

• ✍🏽 First S/W Reviews for Rekka (Layla) + Irina (Anu)

• 🧢 New Shop / New Swag

Thanks for following the work we do! We have some fun stuff planned for 2025, so I hope you continue to follow along.

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