Love on the Rocks

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. How Miyu Distribution Was Nominated For 3 Oscars - If Miyu is a new name to you, or you just want more insight into how the company works, Cartoon Brew hosted a live-streamed conversation with co-founder Luce Grosean this week on their YouTube Channel.

2. How To Run An Oscar Campaign For a Short - Sticking with the theme, what goes into running an Oscar campaign for a short? Former S/W contributor Alex Dudok de Wit discusses that with Benoit Berthe Siward, whose company, The Animation Showcase, has become a key awards player. We worked with Siward to host the online premiere of The Windshield Wiper which won in 2022, and his knowledge and insight into the process is worth reading.

3. BAFTA Nominees Online - In other awards news several of the best British shorts are now streaming on the official BAFTA YouTube channel. Only two of the films are available to global audiences, but UK-based viewers can catch an additional four shorts, including Miyu’s Oscar-nominated Wander to Wonder.

4. Awards Roundup - Wander to Wonder also took home Best Short at the Annies, the animation industry’s internal award show. Australia’s top prize was announced—congrats to Shortverse member Veniamin Gialouris for winning with his short, Gorgo. Finally, Clermont-Ferrand which we often tout as the world’s most important shorts-specific film festival, handed out its prizes. Variety has the rundown.

5. Previewing the Berlinale Lineup - The festival world shifts to Germany this week with the Berlinale underway. We gathered the 26 films in this year’s shorts program in a Shortverse collection for you to explore.

6. “The mission of film festivals now falls on local theaters” - Speaking of fests, the chatter out of last month’s Sundance was predominantly dour, with the fest’s imminent departure from its Park City home, a depressed sales market, and rampant piracy from the fest’s virtual screenings combining to provoke something of an existential crisis for some attendees. It was in this context that I discovered a long X post from Sebastian Pardo, co-founder of the small, but acclaimed distribution company, MEMORY. Pardo argues that festivals have lost their way and champions cinephilic theater owners as independent film’s way forward, charging them with nurturing local film talent and cultures in a grassroots way. It’s an intriguing argument for an industry that needs fresh thinking.

7. The Rise of Mini-Dramas - Speaking of innovating, Bloomberg covers a phenomenon we first highlighted last year, which is the rise of the mini-drama format. Conceived in China, these low-budget web series, with episodes clocking in at TikTok lengths of 60-90 seconds, are massively popular. Analysts estimated revenue of nearly $7B last year, a figure that exceeded the Chinese box office. Western creators are eager to follow suit, but will audiences embrace them? Also, how versatile is the format, dominated as it is by soap-operatic melodramas?

8. Interesting Development News - Oscar Hudson winner of our “Short of Year” for Joy in People, is shooting his debut feature project, Straight Circle in South Africa. Multi-time alum Jacob Chase is shopping an exciting horror project with Black Bear, Britt Raes is turning her delightful short film, Luce and the Rock, into a pre-school series, and fresh off winning the Canal+ award at last week's Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, the team behind the provocative Two People Exchanging Saliva announced a feature adaptation with Paris-based Misia Films.

9. Weekend Watches - A ton of alum projects to highlight this week! From the directing duo of Dane Clark and Linsey Stewart comes Suze, a comedic feature that is one of the first releases from Tribeca Festival’s new distribution arm. I also recommend GOLDIE, a new kid’s show on Apple TV+. The brainchild of Emily Brundige and based on her short, we felt it was a no-brainer for series adaptation back in 2019. After a long road, we’re excited Emily got there! The biggest Oscar underdog, or should we say undercat(?) is about to be seen much more widely. Flow, the Latvian animated feature from Gints Zilbalodis that is competing for Best Animated Film, hits the Max streaming service today. Finally, our steadfast support of S/W alums necessitates trekking out to Captain America: Brave New World despite the bad reviews as it is directed by 2013 alum Julius Onah (Big Man).

10. “A Place of Fleeting Beauty” - We’ll close with this beautiful piece of writing from alum Jimmy Goldblum, recently known for his haunting short doc A Broken House. In the wake of the fire that destroyed his Altadena home the filmmaker, whose past films explored displacement in Syria, from Hurricane Katrina, and New Delhi redevelopment, wrestles with the cosmic irony of his own home being ripped away.

🗣️ S/W Editors: Oscar® Endorsements

As mentioned up top, voting is now underway to decide the winners that will be announced at the 97th Academy Awards on March 2nd. The 15 nominees in the three shorts categories are of high quality this year, confronting voters with unusually hard choices. We are not Academy members, but if we were, these films would receive our vote.

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BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM

Any of the three Miyu nominees are worthy, but our panel ultimately sided with Nina Gantz’s Annie-winner. We were floored by Wander to Wonder’s imaginative premise, which combines wildly disparate story references in a deliciously dark way. Its stop-motion execution—8 years in the making—is simply top-class too. A case could be made for Yuck! as its cutesy design and crowd-pleasing story beats disguise how phenomenally calibrated its direction is, but we opt for disturbing rather than sweet.

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BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM

Our delight with Instruments of a Beating Heart has been frequent and effusive—from our glowing review back in December, to landing on our year-end Team Selects list. Because it was carved out of a larger feature project the “scriptedness” of its verite storytelling is second to none. You just don’t see clean story arcs like this in documentary shorts! Oppositely dismissed by some critics as lightweight or dystopian, the dissonance of those appraisals just highlights the moral ambiguity underlying its sports movie structure.

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BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT FILM

A close battle between the two Official Selections in the category — A Lien and I’m Not a Robot — sees the Dutch short receive the nod from our team. This clever, darkly comedic sci-fi short is a deep exploration of free will and agency, and we found the film’s peculiar absurdity, plus its dynamite lead performance from Ellen Parren, to be simply wonderful, giving it a slight edge over the Cutler-Kreutz brothers’ impressively visceral and vital immigration thriller.

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