Kickoff!

💌 Oscar® Nominees Announced

45 shortlisted films become 15. Congrats to the nominees, which include S/W official selections Retirement Plan and Two People Exchanging Saliva.

🌞 Sundance Begins

Sundance began on Thursday, and while we’re not on hand this year to celebrate the Park City farewell edition, we’re paying close attention to 2026’s big kick-off festival. Here is our coverage, plus some links below:

• Céline has compiled our annual “short-centric” guide for Short of the Week, highlighting alums in both the short and feature programs.

• Over on Shortverse, we have the full, 54-film short lineup in a collection for easy perusal.

• For something more considered, we’ve watched all the selections and have compiled a 15-film “Curator Picks” selection of shorts we especially like.

• A reminder that US-based viewers (or VPN-users) can watch the full lineup by purchasing a $45 shorts pass from the festival.

• If you like attending talks and panels at festivals, Sundance has unveiled “Story Forum”, with a series of free, online talks exploring the latest ideas and technologies in filmmaking, including a heavy dose of AI talk. The online forum runs Jan 29th to Jan 30th, and you can register here.

• Finally, congrats to the filmmakers announced for Sundance Institute’s upcoming Screenwriter Lab and Screenwriter Intensive. Special shoutout to S/W faves Renee Zhan, Nicole Daddona & Adam Wilder, plus reigning Short of Year winner, Esteban Pedraza, on their inclusion!

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. David Erlich’s Top 25 Video Countdown - One of the great traditions of the year in cinema is Indiewire critic David Erlich’s needle-dropping supercut of the year’s best films. No matter what I’m doing, when this releases, I drop everything and lock in for 20 minutes. I wish the Oscars could make me feel this romantic about movies. As always, the video supports a charity; this year, it is the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

2. Award Updates (Non-Oscar Division) - The European Film Awards were presented last weekend, including the Prix Vimeo for Best European short film. Congrats to City of Poets! The film is streaming in select European countries via ARTE. We also got nominees for the 53rd annual ANNIE Awards, the US award show dedicated to the animation industry.

3. Mass Layoffs at Vimeo - Friday morning, Business Insider aggregated social media posts that suggest ‘most’ of the staff at the New York-based video hosting platform have been laid off. How this affects Staff Picks and the Curation team is unclear at the moment, but this is the sort of big cost-cutting move many have expected since the company’s acquisition by Italian tech portfolio company, Bending Spoons, late last year.

4. A Resolution to the US TikTok Saga - The influential Chinese social video platform has been a political football in recent years, repeatedly threatened with bans if it maintained its foreign ownership. The NyTimes reports that a deal for a US version of TikTok has been completed, which will see tech titans from Oracle, Dell, the Emirates, and investment firm Silver Lake spin up a domestic version of the service.

5. YouTube’s Guidelines for Ad-Friendly Content Are Changing - Potentially big news for creators and audiences on the video giant, as the company looks to relax its standards for “Ad suitability”. Why is this big news? YouTube has become a behemoth because they pay out 100x the $$$ of any other user-generated platform. Yet, “mature” storytelling has been effectively off-limits to monetization. Probably 1/3 of Short of the Week selected films are ineligible for monetization, no matter how artistically valid they are. Tubefilter reports that “Videos that touch on certain sensitive issues will now be eligible for full monetization so long as they avoid graphic depictions of those subjects.”

6. Everything is Fine (Maybe?) - Mentioned before in this newsletter, but long-time EiC of Filmmaker Magazine, Scott Macaulay, has released his last issue in charge. Kudos to Scott on a legendary run! He invited Brian Newman of Sub-Genre to contribute to the issue, and despite the cultural attitude in Indie Film being about as pessimistic as I can ever remember, he has produced the most provocative of contrarian takes—maybe everything is working about as well as it should?

7. The Future Belongs to Creative Generalists - Amidst predictions of doom from creatives regarding the threat of AI, Michelle Higa Fox writes a piece for It’s Nice That, arguing that AI will strengthen the need for artists who understand why something should or shouldn’t be done. Higa Fox herself is one of the most well-rounded artists I know—an S/W alum, we met when I first came to NYC in the early 2010s, and she curated for Motionographer. She’s subsequently become a great creative technologist and is the head of the applied research group at the motion design firm, BUCK.

8. Upcoming Festivals and Lineup Drops - Sundance hogged the attention up top, but a pair of world-class short film festivals began this weekend. In the UK, the London Short Film Festival started and has over 300 films playing over 10 days. Under the artistic direction of Philip Ilson, the festival is known for its cutting-edge thematic programming. Then, in Australia, one of my bucket list festivals also starts, as Flickerfest gets underway. Looking ahead, the Berlinale is only three weeks away. Here are the shorts selections to date. Then, one of our favorite festivals, SXSW, announced its complete film lineup. Expect more from us closer to the event in March.

9. The Importance of Bearing Witness (and Short Content) - Anthony Kaufman, in a new piece on his Substack, is reaching toward ideas that have been percolating in my mind too—as the US is rocked by another killing of a US citizen by ICE agents in Minnesota, the vital importance of short-form vertical video clips, a form of citizen documentary, has proven itself a vital bulwark against politicized media and a major shaper of public opinion. When will official organs of the largely leftist documentary industry and/or mainstream media embrace this method of production and consumption?

10. What to Watch This Weekend - Like many in my over-40 age cohort, I miss tuning in to music videos on a linear channel. A very cool project is reviving that experience, though. I Want My MTV is a free web project that plays music videos nonstop. There is a universal live channel you can tune into, or curated collections, including old-school Palm Video style “Director Showcases” for the likes of Jonze and Gondry.

    

📅 This Week on Short of the Week