- Shorts Weekly
- Posts
- Dog Days
Dog Days
A slowdown in the culture is a good time for vacations...and shorts
Jason Sondhi
August 04, 2023
It’s the Dog Days of Summer. With Fantasia over (congrats to the award-winners) there aren’t any festivals on our radar coming soon. Culture is calm too—theatrical releases are quieting down post-Barbenheimer, the guilds are still on strike…I’m going to watch the World Cup knockouts but what else? Feels like a nice time for a vacation, which might be why half our team will, in fact, be taking a vacation in the coming weeks.
Not me though! I’ll be holding down the fort as NYC humidity bakes my brain, so if programming gets weird, you’ll know why. Nothing against NYC of course, it still has its top-tier cultural advantages—tonight I’ll be checking out an advance screening of the Sundance-winning feature, Scrapper, from 3-time S/W alum Charlotte Regan. Can’t wait to share my impressions and hopefully get Charlotte on to talk about it soon!
📅 This Week on Short of the Week
For the eagle-eyed S/W die-hards, yes we did have Filipe Melo’s Oscar-shortlisted film The Lone Wolf up as Monday’s pick briefly, but a rights snafu caused us to remove it temporaily. It’s a great one, so we’re working to bring it back ASAP.
The week got a bit weird after that with a silly paranoiac comedy by Fabian Velasco and Milos Mitrovic that Céline championed out of SXSW, and she also handled the writeup for Lee Filipovski’s latest, Zero, remarking that the film reminded her that, “sometimes a very simple premise can be deeply poignant.”
Rob closed out the week writing about a long-time favorite of his, a stop-motion NFTS grad film from Daniel Quirke, a film that sculpts its characters with wax to novel effect.
In between the picks, we slotted in our latest “Best of the Month” roundup, to acknowledge recent faves like Don’t Go Where We Can’t Find You + Hangtime.
🪐 Shortverse Collections
Best of the Month comes to Shortverse too with a strong collection of shorts that are popping on the platform including a sequel to the seminal 2002 film, City of God (exec-produced by the original director Fernando Meirelles), a “surreal meditation” on the fighter’s affliction known as “cauliflower ear”, and a 16mm short doc I called “The most visually interesting artist profile I've seen in ages”.
Go deeper into the world of shorts by joining our Discord community! Share your work, get advice, ask support questions, and hang out with talented creatives from around the world.
✨ Recommended Viewing
Summer Camp Island: The Final Season
Julia Pott has been a favorite of ours dating back to her earliest school shorts, so we were thrilled when she landed her own Cartoon Network show which premiered in 2018. Summer Camp Island proved itself a beloved show across 5 seasons, but, on the cusp of debuting its final season, corporate shenanigans struck—the show was part of a wave of properties controversially axed from HBO Max in a cost-cutting maneuver ahead of the Warner/Discovery merger.
Nearly a year later, the final episodes are finally seeing the light of day. Starting this week and continuing next, the show will be airing on Cartoon Network each weekday at 12pm ET. The show is still not on MAX, so set your DVRs or check your cable package—I have something called SlingTV I access cable channels through and the entire series is available on-demand for me—I’ve been comfort-binging the whole run the last few days ☺️