Black(List) Sun, Won't You Come

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Watch Oscar-Qualified Shorts - Ok, ok—one last awards season call. Several additional shorts have come online this week in a last-minute push during the Short List voting window. Over 60 films are available to watch right now at home, and some of these will go offline again in a few days, so this weekend is a last chance to catch many of them. Check out the online films in Live Action, Documentary, and Animation.

2. S/W Alums in the Sundance Feature Program - The lineup has been announced for January’s festival, the final edition to take place in Park City. We’ll cover things more in depth next month, but for now, a quick shoutout to selected director alums: Stephanie Ahn, Liz Sargent, and Adam Meeks in US Dramatic, Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman in US Documentary, Myrsini Aristidou, Suzanne Andrews Correa, and Olive Nwosu in World Cinema Dramatic, Charlie Tyrell in Premieres, Natalie Erika James in Midnight, and Riz Ahmed and Jim Cummings in Episodic!

3. Clermont-Ferrand Lineup Release - Sticking with festivals, Clermont-Ferrand is back at the end of January, and Laurence Boyce previews the lineups at the world’s most important short film festival for CineEuropa.

4. The 2025 Blacklist - The granddaddy of all script lists, this reputable survey of the hottest unproduced screenplays has put out its latest edition. We’re psyched to see Ward Kamel at #2 with Equity. We just recently caught up with him at Gotham Week, where he was pitching a feature adaptation of his S/W-selected short, If I Die in America, so the NYU grad is having a moment. Other alums on the list include Alex Kavutskiy, who just placed his second short on our site last week, as well as Seth Worley, and Greg Jardin, who was last in the news for selling his Sundance thriller, It’s What’s Inside, to Netflix for $17M.

5. Universal Acquires Adaptation of Viral YouTube Horror Short - We looked like we might be light on content this Halloween, so I fired up Reddit to see what horror shorts they had to recommend. At the top of numerous posts was Portrait of God, a short from Dylan Clark, that has hit 8M views on YouTube. I really dug it, and was on the verge of writing about it for the site, before a wave of late submissions filled up the calendar. It’s too late now, but we could have been prescient, as a dream team of Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele is set to produce a feature version. Congrats Dylan! That’s awesome, and it’s cool to see another online success story.

6. A Contrarian Take on Netflix & Warners - The consensus reaction to the big acquisition news seems to be devastation. The latest Sub-Genre newsletter aggregates some notable perspectives to this point, and I can’t really find film-world perspectives that are stoked at the prospect. Film, though, more than any industry, is steeped in a grand sense of nostalgia and has an abiding love of the status quo. We at S/W, being streaming disruptors in our own minor way, have always had a foot firmly planted in tech, and I think you must look to tech for interesting perspectives. This piece from M.G. Siegler, a longtime analyst, writer, and film buff, is a pretty good collection of some of the valid anti-anti-Netflix points, albeit a bit antagonistic in tone! It also doesn’t address the biggest elephant in the room to me, which is that YouTube is stealing market share from all of professional production at an alarming rate.

7.  Disney Strikes Licensing Deal With OpenAI - Another headline that’s not going down well in my feed, Variety reports that Disney has become the first major content licensing partner for OpenAI, allowing over 200 characters to be used on their Sora generative video platform, or as image requests in ChatGPT. This initiative doesn’t have any real impact on professional productions, but the Mouse House cozying up to the AI giant has many on edge.

8. A DP Directs Strangers in Video Games - The finished products here are not mind-blowing, but I found this video to be clever and fun. A professional cinematographer co-opts random players in ARC Raiders into acting out sequences for him. Despite killer robots out for blood, it’s cute how many players are down. A new generation of filmmakers could very well learn their craft via game engines.

9. Vimeo Discovery Set To Return to the EU? - Our European team members noticed that Vimeo is requesting age verification now to use the platform. This is unreported, and simply my speculation, but it could be good news—if regulations around content and child-protection were a major reason for the company to withdraw the public-facing aspects of the platform from visitors in the EU, then this could be a first step in bringing them back. Something to keep an eye on.

10. What to Watch This Weekend - In limited release this week from the specialty distributor, Vertical Entertainment, check out Atropia, starring Alia Shawkat and directed by Hailey Benton Gates. A short-to-feature adaptation of her S/W-selected short, Shako Mako, the film was a prize winner at Sundance this year, and was produced by Jett Steiger and Lana Kim of Ways and Means, who have an extraordinary track record of making cool shorts.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week