🥁 Drumroll Please...

The 2024 Short Awards: The Winner Is… 💌

Les larmes de la Seine (The Seine’s Tears) by students at Piktura l'école de l'image is the big winner of Short of the Week’s annual Short Awards!

Shortlisted the S/W Curatorial team from the 200+ films featured on the site in 2023, a jury comprised of award-winning producer Katie White, filmmaker and creator of the screening & conversation series The Dailies, Tomisin Adepeju, and director of last year’s Short of the Year, The Sentence of Michael Thompson, Kyle Thrash, chose the French student animation as the newest recipient of our “Short of the Year”.

Jury statement: “We were blown away by this film. In 8 minutes and 43 seconds, we are immersed in an emotional and textured time and space, utilizing bold aesthetics and techniques to encapsulate this tragic and harrowing moment in history. The filmmaker takes ownership of their own narrative, leading to a rapturous celebration of life, love, and the shared spirit of a specific culture and community.”

We thank the jury for their work and congratulate the filmmakers, Yanis BELAID, Eliott BENARD, Nicolas MAYEUR, Etienne MOULIN, Lisa VICENTE, Hadrien PINOT, Philippine SINGER and Alice LETAILLEUR on their achievement.

Click through to the full post to see additional category winners, what you chose as an Audience Winner, as well as the recipient of our special Trailblazer Award.

➡ Read the Full Winner Announcement on Short of the Week

👁️ Watch the Nominated Films Collection on Shortverse

✍🏽 Trace the History of S/W’s “Short of the Year

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

***

A gold medal winner at the Young Director Awards, Australian Victoria Singh-Thompson’s short takes a formally audacious approach to a story of abuse. Inspired by Lolita, the film ignores the obvious and instead chooses to “ frame and focus on elements that weren’t obvious to show a dissociative point of view.” Serafima writes our review and calls the result “mesmerising and thought-provoking.”

***

Our Valentine’s Day pick, this charming short relays the story of how director Abijeet Achar’s own Mauritian mother and Indian father met! With bright production design and Bollywood-inspired dance sequences woven into the narrative, the film is a blast for romantics but also contains an inspiring and humanizing immigrant narrative within.

***

It’s fitting that in a week which sees us crown a new “Short of the Year” winner, we feature new work from a former recipient, Mikey Please. Well, not new work per se…Alan the Infinite is a 2019 proof-of-concept from Please and Dan Ojari that only played a couple of places at the time (including one of our NYC live events) but was subsequently mothballed—until now.

I took on the review, calling the film “part dead-end office comedy and part youthful romance, with some extradimensional forces mixed in,” and marveling at the wooden models used for the stop-motion. Envisioned as a series, the ending is a tad abrupt, but the endearing characters and worldbuilding alongside A+ craft make the film an easy one to recommend.

🍿 Development News!

Big news for this super-stylish and intriguing sci-fi teaser we highlighted in the newsletter last year. Animation Magazine reports that Snafu and Bauk have teamed up to co-produce a feature version with creator Sava Živković on board to direct. Congrats Sava! From the comments, you can tell that the Shortverse community agrees with this development.

📖 Stuff We’re Paying Attention To

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has entered the text-to-video space with “Sora”. Not yet available to the public, the creation tool will compete with RunwayAI which has pioneered AI-generated video with its Gen2 model.

The Oscar Shorts are coming to US and Canadian theaters today! See theater listings near you.

On the subject of the Oscar shorts, the grandmas at the center of Sean Wang’s doc short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó (now available on Disney+) received a profile in the NyTimes.

The Oscar shorts are in theaters, but the BAFTA shorts are free on YouTube through Feb 20th. This is the first time I’ve seen the British Academy do this, so kudos to them!

Kevin Parry went viral for recreating the Netflix “tudum” intro with yarn. Turns out, he faked it! Kevin himself ponders the ethics of this in a blog post.

A destination for high-brow discussion and evaluation of shorts from top European programmers and writers launched a new website redesign.

Always amusing when it happens—Teal Greyhaven’s 2018 Short of the Week selection Special Day has been discovered by TikTok who are having a field day with it. Dextero has a rundown.