A Different Breed

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

Helen Simmons (F*ck) teams up with Julia Cranney in Measure, which tackles themes of teenage regret and parental struggles. We follow a mother with her autistic child at a birthday party which morphs into a revenge plot against her childhood bully. Rob thought highly of it, calling the film “a short that impresses on multiple levels.”

Then Jackie! Zhou (don’t forget the exclamation point!) takes us back to the pandemic vibes of ghost kitchens, essential workers, and isolation in this story of a worker breaking out of a negative cycle. Reef Oldberg produces for the film which was part of the Rising Voices initiative from job-search giant, Indeed.

It’s increasingly rare for me to tackle a review, but I wrote about A Lien Wednesday. A taut thriller that presents as a social-issue drama, I compared the film, written and directed by the brothers Sam and David Culter-Kreutz, to the recent Netflix feature Rebel Ridge as works that prove “dry stories of documents and procedure are not antithetical to gripping storytelling.”

Finally, Céline closed the week by covering Rules from our former Short of the Week colleague Jeanette Jeanenne. Now a hot-shot producer in animation (the Oscar-nominated My Year in Dicks) as well as the founder of the Glas Animation festival, Jeanenne is also a talented writer/animator in her own right as proven by this stylish and absurdly funny series of vignettes that she directed for FX’s Cake TV series and which are now bundled in this 8min compilation.

On YouTube, we featured Measure and dipped back into recent history for our second pick of the week, highlighting one of the most ambitious shorts to come out of the pandemic — Eron Sheean’s The Shore. Read my original review.

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. The Radically Equitable Financing of Sing Sing - For those who like the nuts and bolts of how films get made there is a lot of gold in this conversation. Moderated by our friend Carlos López Estrada, it goes deep with the S/W alums behind the Oscar contender Sing Sing — Greg Kwedar, Clint Bentley, + producer Monique Walton — and describes some pretty radical ideas they’ve put into practice, like pay equity for all crew and transparent profit participation for all members of the team!

2. Round-Up of Filmmaker Grants, Labs, & Fellowships - Another one for the filmmakers reading this, No Film School drops its quarterly listing of opportunities, curated and compiled by S/W alum Laura Moss.

3. Letterboxd Decision Draws Ire of Film Fans - The cinema social network recently dropped the anime film End of Evangelion from its list of the 100 Best Animation Films and 250 Best Narrative Films. While fans of the film (yours truly included) were sad, I found myself interested in the discourse behind the decision. Letterboxd had already been accused of tweaking their algorithm last year to discriminate against non-Western cinema (Brazilian film in particular), but this brought up fundamental questions about what is the point of listmaking and scores and rankings. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these moderation issues as it pertains to Shortverse, and it’s just a tough problem! Right on queue, Letterboxd just walked back the decision.

4. Do You Follow Short of the Week on Letterboxd? - Speaking of which, we’re on the site too, and are thinking of being more active. Here’s a list to check out—over 100 short-to-feature adaptations I was able to come up with off the top of my head. Give us a follow and we’ll do more!

5. Watch My First Film, now streaming - One of the items on that Letterboxd list is S/W alum Zia Anger’s feature, but I’m not sure if it should count! It’s an adaptation, but the original work was a shapeshifting piece of auto-fiction projected from Anger’s laptop during solo performances. Variety has a great piece on the new film which is streaming now on Mubi.

6. Friendship Wins Raves at TIFF - Another piece of alum news, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, is a hit! Indiewire’s David Erlich was a big fan, and our own Adam Banks, who worked on the film, was at the premiere and attested to the acclaim. While the film doesn’t have distribution yet, that seems like only a matter of time.

7. David Lowery Directs Animated Short for Disney+ - From producer Alfonso Cuarón, An Almost Christmas Story is the 3rd entry in a trilogy of Christmas short films for the streamer which has included the Oscar-nominee La Pupille, and The Shepherd. While this series has been meh so far, I’m a huge Lowery fan and his last major short, Pioneer, is one of the iconic short films of the 21st century.

8. A24 Releases Book of Kid-Movie Recommendations - Despite never, to my recollection, releasing a kids movie, the tastemakers at A24 have released a handsome new book to share with the younguns in your life. The senior leadership here at Short of the Week/Shortverse is a Dad-squad, and there is nothing like becoming a parent to teach you how lacking film discourse is for the all-ages set.

9. Sundance Chooses 3 Finalists for New Home - Sundance is looking at moving out of its iconic Park City location. So many historic scenes and memories were made at the small resort town, but there is no denying that Park City is expensive as hell and really doesn’t have the infrastructure for a festival of Sundance’s scope. Three finalists were just announced.

10. Short Films Are a Waste of Time and Money? - We’re not propagandists here, so I will close the newsletter with this thinkpiece from veteran filmmaker Joshua Caldwell. While I disagree with the thesis, there is a lot of thoughtful insight shared. What are your thoughts?