- Shorts Weekly
- Posts
- One of Our Own
One of Our Own
One of our Team Releases a Short, This Weeks Picks, and Another Short Film Talent Produces a Game
Jason Sondhi
February 23, 2024
A quiet week at our HQ where some of us took time off and others tried to catch up on (so many) things before the close of award season.
Well, not so quiet for all—Chelsea had a busy week for reasons you can read about below, and, on the festival front, frequent flyer Céline made it to the Berlinale. Rather than shorts though, she was most interested in the world premiere of Meryam Joobeur’s feature debut, Who Do I Belong To which landed a coveted in-competition spot. The feature mines similar terrain as her Oscar-nominated short from 2018, Brotherhood, which I wrote adoringly about for S/W in 2019, and friend-of-the-site, Catherine Bray, has a positive review of the feature in Variety. Congrats Meryam!
Our eyes now turn to SXSW which is around the corner. Expect some coverage soon, as well as a couple of fun pieces now that the Oscars are fast approaching.
📅 This Week on Short of the Week
***
The first short featured this week is the one we have tracked the longest. From S/W Senior Editor Chelsea Lupkin, Scooter is a short we’ve known about since before its creation, and we’re proud to see it debut online. Programming one of our own team members could easily be construed as favoritism, but Lupkin is becoming a much-in-demand filmmaker independent of her connection to us. This short played top genre festivals like Fantasia and Sitges and the horror fan-turned-artist just signed to a commercial roster.
Rob takes the review, and connects the short to horror’s long lineage of social commentary, as its proud feminist leanings provides color and satisfaction to its abundant blood and jump scares.
***
Tourists may not love Bognor Regis, but it means the world to its residents. Yet, as soon as 2050, the town could be underwater. Rob lives near the UK coast and was the natural choice to champion this SXSW selection from Rosie Baldwin and producer Lucy Draper. The latest feature in an ever-expanding trend of filmmaking that explores the human cost of climate change, the Bognis Regis-born Baldwin interrogates concepts and home and community from the perspective of those hanging under its apocalyptic specter.
***
On Thursday we welcomed back Daniel Sinclair to S/W after a gap of nearly 10 years! We featured Dinner With Holly in the summer of 2014, and in the interim Sinclair has experienced success in TV. His return to shorts is a family affair—produced by his wife, Bridget Moloney (who directed the S/W-featured short, Blocks) and starring his brother, Ben Sinclair, known for his work on High Maintenance, the film depicts a married couple whose relationship seems beyond repair. Greta Lee, fresh off a star-making role in the film Past Lives plays the wife and Céline admires their performances, but an unexpected development is a huge part of the film’s appeal, noting that “the film’s turning point truly caught me off guard and made me physically react in my seat.”
***
We close out the week with this celebrated film from Douwe Dijkstra. A well-known figure on the European short film circuit for over a decade, the inventive filmmaker often enjoys the meta aspects of the art, consciously calling attention to the means of creation within his films. This one, nominated for a European Film Award for Best Short and initially released through the NyTimes Op/Docs, is perhaps his most emotive as he bends his proclivities to a specific and humanistic end in telling a story he hopes “paints a hopeful portrait of a person who regained himself after many setbacks.”
🪐 Shortverse Collections
With all of us cheering on our colleague Chelsea this week on the release of her short, it only made sense to craft a collection around it! The team produced this appropriately long 13-film list which captures many soon-to-be-classic shorts from rising stars like Mariama Diallo and Natalie Erika James.
🍿 New releases you’ve been enjoying…
This Swedish comedy pokes fun at influencer culture and delivers on its cringe-inducing premise. For better or for worse Rob concludes:
***
An ostentatiously stylish short documentary centered around what the filmmakers purport is the first tattoo done via Augmented Reality. I’m not sure the payoff lives up to the buildup, but in Evgenii Bakirov’s hands, it is never boring.
🎮 Shorts Filmmakers in Gaming
Caleb Wood is a talented animator with whom we go way back. Part of the celebrated Late Night Work Club crew and possessor of several Vimeo Staff Picks for his music video and experimental work, we most recently saw him credited as a character designer for MAX’s Scavenger’s Reign. He also has been active in video game development and just dropped an amazing new game called NIDUS on Steam this week.
The crossover of gaming and filmmaking is a trend we keep being intrigued by. Games have become more sophisticated in their writing and storytelling in the past decade, and with recent scripted examples like “The Last of Us”, and “Super Mario Brothers” becoming big hits, it feels like the established Film & TV industry is finally paying gaming its proper respect. Filmmakers are drawn into these adaptations, such as S/W alum Wes Ball who is set to take the reigns of a Zelda adaptation, while Short of the Year winner, Graham Parkes, is among the talents flowing the other way into game writing and direction.
That’s on scripted projects though. We’ve also seen a completely different scenario, where unique and iconoclastic visual talents are approaching gaming from an indie, non-narrative perspective—David O’Reilly, Michael Frei, & Scott Benson are some of the creators in this mold, of which you can now add Caleb Wood.
Analyzing the appeal of these approaches, either creative or financial is out of my depth, but we’ll look to dig in deeper in the future. In the meantime consider giving NIDUS a try and let us know what you think of it.
