Giving Them Their Flowers

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Chalamet + the World’s Best Footballers in Adidas Short - Fondly evoking both his Marty Supreme hustler character and the blockbuster World Cup short films its rival, Nike, used to produce in the 90s and 00s, Mark Molloy and Adidas score a golazo with this 5min film.

2. Letterboxd Up For Sale? - With a simple headline in Semafor, a million cinephile hearts skipped a beat—Tiny, the parent company of the popular cinema social network, is exploring a sale and has approached the likes of CNBC and The Ankler.

3. Blender Community at War Over GenAI - Blender is a beloved open-source 3D animation software suite that has, through a non-profit foundation that funds its development, and the efforts of thousands of artists and developers, achieved professional-level functionality. Famously, Flow, 2025’s Oscar-winner for Best Animated Feature, utilized Blender. Now, the community that supports it is divided over GenAI. Last month, one of the software’s biggest champions wrote an article on X recommending that all his users get ready to incorporate GenAI into their workflows. He was savagely flamed, receiving numerous rebuttals, but the dividing lines were set for a more consequential decision this week, when the Blender Foundation, under duress from its users, backtracked on a previously agreed-upon sponsorship from AI firm, Anthropic.

4. Sofia Coppola Launches $20,000 Short Film Award - Indiewire has the exclusive that Decentralized Pictures, a non-profit with support from American Zoetrope, has launched the Sofia Coppola Short Film Award. They’ve been advertising this fairly heavily on social, and it requires you to sign up for a platform that has crypto elements, so make sure to read the fine print. However, I would probably sign over pretty much anything to connect with Coppola, one of my favorite filmmakers, so fair play.

5. Oscar-winner Aneil Karia’s New Short - Karia, fresh off a feature version of Hamlet, and who won Best Live-Action Short for The Long Goodbye in 2021, reteams with WePresent for Vote Gavin Lyle, a fictional portrait of a right-wing parliamentary candidate. Rob wrote a review for S/W, and we love this quote from Karia in the promo: “There's this unfortunate idea that the short film is something you do when you're coming up, and then leave them behind and go into long form…I just think they're an amazing format to be more instinctive, more immediate.”

6. CalArts 2026 Student Films Are Out - The Character Animation dept. at America’s most famous school for animation released its 2026 films on YouTube in a handy 74-film playlist. Looking at the school’s track record, some of these talents are destined to be household names, so dive in now and watch these formative efforts from tomorrow’s big stars (also, let us know if there are any you think are super-good).

7. K-Pop Plagiarism Drama Featuring Gobelins’ Students - From one famous animation school to another, it has been accused that the K-pop act, Billlie, used the student film Niccolo in a way that violated copyright, and that the Paris art school is looking at its legal options. Cartoon Brew breaks down the case and its context.

8. ‘Film Comment’ Returns - Preserving outlets for quality writing about film deserves applause, and we’re happy to see that Film Comment, the official publication of Film at Lincoln Center, has been rebooted after shutting down at the beginning of the pandemic. Now a quarterly digital magazine, the publication has a brand-new site and a digitized archive of issues dating back to 1962. Read the welcome letter from Editors Devika Girish & Clinton Krute, and Assistant Editor, Michael Blair.

9. Why Can’t You Sell Films on YT, Pt. 2- A follow-up to an item in our last newsletter, where filmmaker Rod Blackhurst spurred us to ask, “Why can’t filmmakers offer their work to rent/buy on YouTube?” Indiewire’s Dana Harris-Bridson picks up the conversation with inside details on YT celeb creator Markiplier’s quest to “force open a door that wasn’t supposed to exist.”

10. What to Watch This Weekend - A ton of smaller films from S/W alums are hitting theaters this week. A quick roundup:

• Takeover; Grzegorz Jonkajtys - An action thriller starring Billy Zane and the rapper Quavo, it’s fun to see Jonkajtys name pop up. A director of impressive early CG shorts in the 2000s, he’s spent years in VFX departments since, and this is his long-awaited return to directing.

• Couples Weekend; Nora Kirkpatrick - Starring Alexandra Daddario and Josh Gad, this feature debut from Kirkpatrick played Tribeca last year and is also available to buy/rent.

• The Python Hunt; Xander Robin - Oscilloscope is handling this doc about a 10-day Python-hunting contest in the Everglades, which premiered at SXSW last year. We’ve long loved Robin for shorts like Lance Lizardi and are looking forward to this one.

• Influenced; Rachel Israel - The director of Keep the Change, an autism romance story I like a lot and which was adapted into a feature, Israel is back with this celeb cameo-heavy film about Upper East Side influencer culture.

• Hokum; Damian McCarthy - Lastly, this is week two in theaters for this big horror bet from NEON. McCarthy is interesting—we featured He Dies at the End in 2009, and it’s one of the most lo-fi films in our collection. But, like with David F. Sandberg, I wonder if the ability to create compelling shorts with little to no production value is an underrated test of how good a horror director is?

As promised in our last newsletter, we followed up with academic researcher Madeleine Gross on this ground-breaking study. What was the team’s inspiration and why did they choose Short of the Week for their “artistic” non-slop shorts?!?. Also, we’ve got the creativity-boosting playlist of animated shorts that the team used, featuring fun films from Lizzy Hobbs, Zohar Dvir, and others!

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With the Star Wars franchise at an inflection point, we spent “Star Wars Day” looking back at some of the best fan films ever made. Our short survey begins in 1978 with what many consider the originator of the form, then traces the digital revolution of the early web, and concludes with more recent films.

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Cannes starts next week, and we’re celebrating with a new Shortverse collection compiling all the winners of the short film world’s most exclusive prize this millennium. 14 of the 25 films are currently available to watch, including stellar recent winners like 2023’s quarterlife sexual crisis short, 27, and the late-night queer meet-cute The Distance Between Us and the Sky, which won in 2019. Dive in!

📅 This Week on Short of the Week