Short Films = Creative Fuel

📰 Short of the Week News

🏳️‍🌈 Pride Shorts

Short of the Week has launched our first competition since 2023! Pride Shorts is a competition for LGBTQ+ shorts, designed to amplify perspectives that challenge, inspire, and reflect the richness of queer experience. The contest runs for the next month, culminating in time for Pride in June.

Why a competition? We ran our first one way back in 2009, so they’ve long been part of our programming mix, and they are fun! Moreover, by focusing on a particular theme and leveraging our network in a concentrated way, we feel we can deliver our winners supersized outcomes compared with a standard Short of the Week selection. We’re working hard to make this one great and are already thinking up future themes.

This competition runs alongside our normal S/W programming, and you can submit to either or both. Check out the competition page on Shortverse for more info and to submit.

🎖️The 1st “S/W Award” to Premiere at Ouray 2026

In the grand tradition of outside organizations sponsoring awards and film festivals, we’ve teamed up with the Ouray Film Festival to present the first “Short of the Week Award” at their next edition this June.

Rob recently took part in the Colorado organization’s “Film Sabbatical” and was struck by the sense that our two organizations shared common values and possessed similar missions. Talks continued about how to collaborate more deeply, and this partnership represents an initial step.

From Jake Abell, co-founder of Ouray, “At OIFF, we know online and in-person curation go hand in hand. It’s not a zero-sum game. Just like festivals, Short of the Week does something indispensable for short filmmakers. Together, we believe OIFF and SotW can amplify what our respective platforms can do to support the folks making amazing short films.”

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Scientific Proof that Watching S/W is Good for You - A fascinating study from researchers at the University of Santa Barbara demonstrates that viewing artistic short films improves your creative thinking. 500 participants were recruited to either watch animated short films sourced from Short of the Week or watch typical social media reel content. Those who watched Short of the Week had a measurable advantage in tests designed to evaluate creative thinking! The Hollywood Reporter and Animation Magazine have subsequently run the story, and we’ve got a piece with insight from the study’s research lead, Madeleine Gross, coming soon!

2. Hollywood Stars Sign Letter Opposing Warner Bros. Deal - Over 1000 big names lent weight to a letter hoping to block Warner Bros proposed sale to Paramount. Organizations at every level of the industry have been banding together to lobby against the union of the two big studios, and despite shareholders approving the merger yesterday, this coordinated opposition, combined with the war in the Middle East (where much of the deal’s financing is from), makes me wonder for the first time if this thing’s gonna get done.

3. Wall Street Journal Tracks Entertainment’s Jobs Decline - While the pro-Trump sentiment of Paramount’s leadership is a not-insignificant factor in popular opposition to the Warner Bros. deal, really, it’s the jobs. The Wall Street Journal published a sobering piece visually representing the decline in film & tv work over the past decade.

4. Cannes Lineups Unveiled - From Hollywood to the Riviera, Cannes and its associated satellites have been announcing their selections. Typically, the 10-film official shorts selection mints new stars, but Niki Lindroth von Bahr and Daniel Soares bring considerable reputations to this year’s competition. In features, the main slate has been derided as a bore, but we’re excited for Un Certain Regard, which will debut new features from alums Jane Schoenbrun and Louis Clichy, & the feature debut of Jordan Firstman! La Semaine de la Critique opens with In Waves, an animated feature from S/W alum Phuong Mai Nguyen, and Quinzaine de Cineastes lands the feature debut of Dekalb Elementary filmmaker Reed Van Dyk.

5. Neon Adapting Viral Horror Short Into Feature Film - The pipeline from YouTube success to prestige horror is a certified trend—Portrait of God filmmaker Dylan Clark was tapped by Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele late last year to adapt that short and was just announced as the director of the Blair Witch reboot. Now, Neon has struck a deal with Sam Evenson, creator of the Grimoire Horror YouTube channel, to adapt his viral 2024 short, Mora, into a feature.

6. Why Won’t YouTube Allow TVOD for Indie Filmmakers? - Speaking of YouTube, filmmaker Rod Blackhurst (Dolly) hit me up out of the blue with this question a few weeks ago, and I didn’t have a good answer! The video giant allows users to buy or rent films, but this function is gatekept through partner distributors. Even worse, I was surprised to hear that the market for paying aggregators to get your work into these digital storefronts has gotten really expensive and uncompetitive in the last decade. Blackhurst posted his initial query to Reddit to crowdsource insights, but news just dropped that Markiplier, fresh off the massive success of Iron Lung, is working on a potential solution.

7. Fun Brand Short From Spike Jonze and Zendaya - Spike Jonze is a short film director at heart, which is probably why he hasn’t directed a feature since 2013. This piece, for the shoe brand On Cloud, uses pixilation and perspective to great effect. Also, while the 20-year rule on the cyclicality of trends is undefeated in clothing, I guess I never really thought to apply it to video; however, this video has powerful 2007 vibes.

8. Animation’s New Wave on YT - Animation pilots launching on YouTube in a bid for an audience that will sustain their ongoing production is one of the trends I track most keenly. YouTube ratifies this movement in its latest Culture & Trends Report, which spotlights projects we’ve talked about in the past, like Milky Subway and the new-age juggernaut studio, Glitch Productions.

9. Building a Cartoon With an Audience Instead of a Studio - If you’d like to follow this trend in more detail, I recommend S/W alum Emily Brundige’s Substack, which is really picking up steam in recent weeks and is a great guide to this topic from someone figuring it out on the ground via her series Strawberry Vampire.

10. What to Watch this Weekend - Failing to publish the last couple of weeks means a big backlog of films from short filmmakers we support have come out in theaters. We want to quickly recommend these excellent works for you to check out.

• Blue Heron - One of the toasts of world cinema at the moment, Sophy Romvari's acclaimed first feature is in US cinemas. Sophy chats with the next filmmaker on this list in Filmmaker Magazine.

• Roommates & Mile End Kicks - I don’t think I’ve seen this before—Chandler Levack had their 2025 indie feature arrive in theaters the same day that their 2026 film debuted on Netflix!

• Mother Mary - I love David Lowery and adore many of his films. This new release, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, is easy to get excited for, but will he ever top Pioneer, one of the greatest shorts of the 21st century? 🤔 

• The Travel Companion - Alex Mallis and Travis Wood have made “one of the better indie films about indie films in recent memory.” Find screenings here.

• Lee Cronin’s The Mummy - Quite a departure from the Brendan Fraser classic, so much so that they had to put his name in the title. That said, Lee Cronin has evidently made something reminiscent of The Evil Dead. That’s…awesome?!

• Omaha - Opening in limited release today, read an interview in Moveable Feast with its director, Cole Webley.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week