A Fantastic Voyage

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

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The week kicked off in grand style with Bestia from Hugo Covarrubias, courtesy of animation-world heavyweights Miyu. The stop-motion short is one of the most acclaimed animations of recent years, but I would not call it a crowd-pleaser—the intense subject matter and psychological approach make for a difficult watch. However, I think time will prove it to be one of the most influential animations of this era, so check it out now—released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coup that ushered in Pinochet’s dictatorship, this one is a limited-release.

Then Rob goes deep with Jean Anne Lauer of Fantastic Fest. It is her first year as the solo Director of Shorts programming for the American genre festival, but she’s been with the org for over a decade and is the perfect guide to walk us through its evolution. Jean was very expansive in this piece, so even if you don’t care about Fantastic Fest in particular, the Q&A is a great chance to read two veteran short film curators talk shop.

Rob was also responsible for reviewing the latest film from Charlie Tidmas. Proudly noted by the filmmaker as a short film “produced democratically both for and by trans men”, Rob called it “immersive” in its depiction of a trans man hidden away by his older, famous lover, and for whom that status does not sit right.

To close out the week, Céline welcomed back Laura Wadha to Short of the Week. I wrote about Wadha’s Flight in 2018 which told the story of her cousins fleeing Syria and finding refuge in Sweden via Skype calls, home movies, and cell phone clips. I called the result surreal, “…amateur footage assembled like an art film, impressionistic snatches and bites of interviews quilted upon ghostly images.” This film, winner of a Crystal Bear at the Berlinale and distributed through The Guardian, plays like a spiritual sequel, as Wadha seeks to reconnect with her favorite cousin and process the enduring separation of their family.

This week’s spotlight YouTube film, embedded above is Strange Company by Weston Currie. An archive pick, the film is…quite an experience. As our writer Serafima tried to describe upon its release, “Currie takes you on a perverse ride, where repulsion and desire crash together, resulting in a sticky, shameful mess you will not be able to forget any time soon.”

🪐 Shortverse Collections

The Best of Fantastic Fest

A guest-programmed collection this week, courtesy of Jean Anne Lauer! As part of the Q&A, Rob asked Jean to provide a collection that summed up the festival and she delivered this lineup of 12 fantastic shorts. Some of our faves like Chris McInroy and Joe Cappa find spots, but Jean was also really able to stump us and discover some gems that were off our radar entirely.

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.

🔍 Someone you should follow…

Four “someone”s this week! We have a lot of love for Filmmaker Magazine and their much-anticipated annual feature, “25 New Faces of Independent Film”, the latest edition of which dropped this week. Andy and I were surprise picks by Editor-in-Chief Scott Macaulay and his staff back in 2011, and while you may find it silly to hear, that validation really changed my conception of Short of the Week and its future at the time, as the project was just a part-time hobby back then.

Even without being an alum or having had the privilege of nominating several recipients over the years, I would still choose to eagerly memorize the lineup and bios each year simply as a resource: the collection serves as a terrific and knowledgeable snapshot of the American film scene, and every year some of these talents go on to become household names.

So congrats to 2023’s 25, but especially to Maegan, Kayla, Dustin, and Samm who we have as part of our Shortverse community. We rounded up their profiles into a collection for easy following.

🙋🏽‍♀️ Join Our Team!

From one people collection to another—our collection of humans that work on Shortverse and Short of the Week!

We’ve recently opened up applications to our Fall ‘23 contributor class. This is the ground floor for learning about what we do as short film curators, critics, and community builders. Our team is fully remote so applicants can be based anywhere. This is a small (~10hr/wk) commitment over 3 months, with the potential to join the team officially at the end.

Additionally, we are looking for a contributor to specialize in Feedback. We’re one of the few short film outlets that offers formal written feedback to filmmakers and they love it! They often need notes on their rough cuts, or an opinion on the relative quality of their film before spending thousands on festival submissions. Sometimes they just want smart analysis on what they can improve on for their next film. Whatever the reason, we seek to provide them with expert insight.

Candidates need to be excellent writers and have meaningful experience as a programmer, critic, or filmmaker. If that’s you, this is a great, flexible gig you can do remotely on your own time, and it allows you to really help emerging filmmakers out.

For either position fill out the form linked below and share which role you’re interested in in the “cover letter” field.