Can't Look Away

Plenty to Watch This Weekend with S/W alums Invading Netflix + Scheduling Arrives to Shortverse

Author

Jason Sondhi
October 04, 2024

Typing this from a train out of the city so I’ll be brief, but thanks to Gotham Week for a fun few days as Short of the Week connected and reconnected with alums and industry friends. Special shout out to the mystery man behind Director’s Library for joining us from London at the SXSW party and to Reggie for getting me into the Brand Film expo. 👍🏽

This week’s newsletter is heavily tilted toward the watching-recommendation side of things with a full week’s slate of S/W Picks, collections on Shortverse for Best of the Month and the 2024 Loading Docs slate, plus a big weekend for S/W-featured filmmakers on streaming services. Let’s get started.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

Igelit (Plastic) by Tomáš Brožek

Six lives. Zero water. One shitty tragedy.

Lifeline by Abdi Ibrahim & Ilhan Abdullahi

Ibtisam Farah, a fish out of water youth worker, confronts her biases when helping a Somali youth accused of a crime he denies.

World to Roam by Stephen Irwin

Mother and Father lay the child in his cot at the same time every night. However, come morning, only a shallow crater remains; a baby-shaped depression. The boy was destined to be a wanderer.

Storm by Lena Tsodykovskaya

A couple wakes on a stormy night to find themselves trapped in the mechanisms of a horror movie.

Layla by Gobelins Animation

Three 11-year-old boys buy a sex robot with the aim of losing their virginity. However, when their innocence means they decide not to use the robot for its "intended purpose", they now have to choose what to do with her.

A full slate this week! On Monday I wrote about Plastic by Czech filmmaker Tomáš Brožek, focusing on the commercial director’s audacity in borrowing the intertwining storyline structure familiar from modern classics like Pulp Fiction and Amores Perros and pulling it off within the smaller canvas of a short film.

Next, Céline highlighted Lifeline from the directors Abdi Ibrahim (Bizarro World) and Ilhan Abdullahi and called it, “a film that, from a simple premise, builds a whole universe full of complexities with incredibly well fleshed out characters.”

Wednesday, we were honored to share the latest from a perennial fave, Stephen Irwin. The UK animator made our Top Ten list in 2009 and we’ve eagerly anticipated each new work since. This one played Annecy and Zagreb and Rob isn’t stinting with his praise, calling it a “modern masterpiece.”

Thursday, Chelsea reviewed Storm, from returning filmmaker Lena Tsodykovskaya. A hit at genre fests like Beyond and Sitges, the short is a fun meta-horror riff as it deconstructs the genre’s tropes. More than even its cleverness though, Chelsea admires Tsodykovskaya’s “badass” nature in bringing her newborn baby to set while shooting.

Then today we were pleased to see that Gobelins has begun its annual release of grad film projects to the internet with Layla. Also, please join me in congratulating Rekka on penning her first S/W review! An animation instructor herself, she was the perfect choice to analyze this student work which evokes Genndy Tartakovsky while summoning nostalgia for youth in its audience.

For our second YouTube of the week we dipped back to selection from the beginning of the year with Maegan Houang’s unsettling historical fiction, Astonishing Little Feet, based on the real story of Afong Moy, the first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States. Here it is, now on YouTube, plus our original review.

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

  1. Greg Jardin’s Sundance Hit Debuts on Netflix - It’s What’s Inside was the phenomena of the year’s festival circuit as the indie horror film — with zero stars and a first-time feature director — landed a $17M sale in Park City. Jardin is not a total outsider though—well-known in the early 2010s for his music videos, we featured the filmmaker’s melancholy exercise in empathy, Floating, back in 2014. The producer of that short, Jason Baum, also produces this feature and it is great to see a Hollywood breakthrough for Baum, who is one of the great music video producers of his generation.

  2. More Weekend Watching Recommendations From S/W Talents - It’s a great weekend to watch new feature and TV work from some of our favorite talents:

  3. An in-depth review of the iPhone 16 Pro Camera - We highlighted mobile phone filmmaking in a collection upon the release of the new iPhone, so now, a couple of weeks in, how does it stack up? No one better to ask than Sebastiaan de With, creator of the acclaimed photography and videography apps Halide and Kino.

  4. UKMVA24 Nominees Are Out - It’s not easy to follow music videos anymore but, even though I haven’t curated them for a few years, I still love the form. The award shows are my time to catch up on the state of the medium and the UKMVAs are, to my mind, the most artistically valid of the major award shows.

  5. Final Deadline for Oscar Submissions - If your short film first qualified for the Academy Awards after July 1st, then you still have time—Oct.10 is your final day. Our Shortverse page for the Oscars has all this season’s key dates, and check the official Rules & Eligibility page for full qualifying information.

  6. Submissions are Open for DOHA Short Script Lab - The Doha Film Institute’s online short scriptwriting lab is designed to assist emerging screenwriters and writer-directors from Qatar and the MENA region to complete a new draft of their original short film screenplay with the guidance of experienced international mentors—including Short of the Week’s own Céline Roustan. Check out the link for full information, the deadline to apply is Nov. 6th.

  7. New Work from Niki Lindroth von Bahr? - The director of The Burden, one of the most acclaimed short films of the past several years teases a new work on Instagram.

  1. S/W Alums in the LA Times - “You’re the piss guy,” is a quote in this piece referring to Derek Milton (Pussybaby). Milton is not technically the “piss guy”, but has become famous for documenting, via a series of viral Instagram posts, the work of the mysterious “Piss Bandit” who has been leaving full bottles of urine on an electrical utility box in Pasadena. All press is good press I guess…

  2. Ok, I’m Off the Fence - AI is a Mistake…

  3. A Filmmaker’s Venting Goes Viral - Natalie Harris James is, to some eyes, experiencing the dream—having successfully crowdfunded her short film Grace, she landed a spot in Sundance earlier this year. However, on X she claims to be ready to quit filmmaking due to the constant moving of goalposts re: the requirements for paid work. This lines up with a lot of what we hear from filmmakers, and her sentiments resonated with many on X. What do you think?

💡 Product Updates

Some new features on Shortverse!

🕑 Schedule a Premiere—You can now schedule a film to go public at a future time & date. Scheduled films will be private until their premiere date at which point they’ll automatically be released to the public.

📅 Completion Date—“Release date” has been more aptly renamed to “completion date” to allow you to filter and sort by when films were made.

🪐 Into the Shortverse

A diverse collection for our monthly roundup of shorts we discover on Shortverse: expensive brand films, lo-fi skits, pain-staking Chinese stop-motion, gut-busting comedy, and poignant dramas. Check them out. 

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The latest season of the ground-breaking New Zealand documentary series arrives online with 6 new shorts that illuminate the island nation’s character.

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