In One Year, Out the Other

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ Year in Review

With new editorial & curatorial initiatives + our first full year of Shortverse, 2023 was a memorable year for our team. On Wednesday we published a short round-up of achievements and new initiatives, so read that for more depth. But, I want to share key highlights with you here:

• 🎖️ S/W featured 204 official selections from over 5000 submissions.

• 🆕 We premiered 3 fresh editorial series: Meet the Gatekeepers, The Importance Of…, and Retrospectives

• 🏆 The Sentence of Michael Thompson was “Short of the Year”

• 💯 Curation came to Shortverse with over 100 published collections

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 14,000 new members signed up to Shortverse

• 🎊 Festivals were incorporated into the platform w/ searchable pages

• 👴🏻 Profile pages received a comprehensive redesign

• 🔎 Search received massive improvements

• ⚽️ We hosted our first seasonal competition (Unsanctioned)

• 📈 S/W picks did 50M views on our YouTube channel

• 💌 We launched the newsletter you’re reading!

Thank you all for participating in this continuing journey to celebrate great short films and support and foster the creators who make them. We’ve got an ambitious 2024 planned and I hope you will continue to be part of it!

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

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Our first Official Selection of 2024! One might be skeptical that a fixed camera-perspective short can entertain over a 10min runtime, but this short from John Ogunmuyiwa is crafted with cleverness and care, with Rob calling it, “An inventive and surprising portrait of an eclectic community,” and “example of the filmmaking that makes Ogunmuyiwa one of the most promising talents in the UK scene.”

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Yesterday saw the release of what might be our favorite Oscar contender in the animation category. Tune in next week for our Academy Voter Guide to find out if it claims our top recommendation! What is so special about this film from Tal Kantor? From Céline’s review:

“It is hard to remember a recent film that tackles such a large, abstract, yet important theme as Letter to a Pig does, and it does so in a sophisticated way, by capturing how memory, reality, and the subconscious intertwine and influence each other…It is not only a great short, but an important one too—a film we expect to be referenced and returned to in the coming years.”

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Then, today, Céline is back to recommend this favorite from our National Film Board of Canada friends. A winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Documentary Short, Inuk filmmaker Jennie Williams shares an exhilarating, and sometimes terrifying, Inuit tradition rarely seen by the outside world via an observational cinema approach and striking B&W photography.

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We skipped the newsletter last week so let’s not forget these selections from the festive period, which include some favorites we slipped in under the end-of-year deadline—perhaps, an eye on the upcoming Short Awards? 🤔

🪐 Shortverse Best of the Month

A new batch of 10 of our favorite Shortverse releases, this time from December. An eclectic mix of shorts, the selections include an exceedingly charming Czech animation, a TikTok star giving a deliciously unhinged performance, and a hard-hitting investigation into an attack on journalists in Israel.