Short Films from the Oscar® Best Director Nominees

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Oscar® Director’s Collection - There is a hipster element to short film fandom, of knowing about the next big thing before anyone else. Did you catch Chloe Zhao at Palm Springs Shortfest in 2010? Or watch PTA’s short at Sundance in ‘93? We thought it would be fun to look back at these early projects from today’s most celebrated auteurs, highlighting 12 shorts you can watch right now.

2. The SXSW Shorts Lineup - Mentioned up top, we’ve got a collection of this year’s shorts on Shortverse. As we often say, SXSW’s taste is the closest of any festival’s to ours, so you can bet a lot of these films will make it onto Short of the Week in the coming months. Get familiar with them now.

3. Sundance Story Forum Sessions Online - Sundance Festival’s in-person and online forum exploring art & innovation is now available to watch. You need to sign up for a free Sundance Collab account, but then the individual sessions are at no cost. As I covered back in January, the sessions index hard on AI, including a session from S/W alums, Daniel Kwan and Charlie Tyrell, on their AI Doc, and a really good nuts and bolts breakdown from Eliza McNitt on the making of her AI short, Ancestra.

4. Netflix Buys Ben Affleck’s AI Company - Gifted $3B from the breakup of their deal to buy Warner Bros, Netflix immediately splurges on the AI startup InterPositive, which makes AI tools for film workflows. Rather than generate original images from text prompts, the tools train on a production’s dailies, allowing teams to streamline aspects of post-production. This X post is a decent take on the implications.

5. Evangelion's Anniversary Short Charts Bizarre Path to the Internet - Evangelion is Anime’s defining franchise, something that pulled off the double whammy of being a thorny and provocative artistic statement from a generational auteur, and also achieving stupendously outrageous popularity. That auteur, Hideaki Anno, declared himself done with the franchise 5 years ago after the release of the final “Rebuild” feature film, but excitement has built for months about a short film to celebrate this year’s 30th anniversary.

   
   The short premiered exclusively at an in-person “Eva Festival” in Japan at the end of last month, but there was no announcement for a larger release. Predictably, audience members recorded the film on their phones, and clips and copies began to spread. Khara, the studio behind Eva, issued takedown notices, but something about the X.com copyright flow was messed up—in the takedown email that went out to dozens of fan accounts, a Google Drive link to a pristine 4k version of the film was included. 🙀
   
   This perfect copy proliferated online all weekend. Now in damage control mode, Khara has uploaded the film officially to YouTube, where it’s done 3M views in just over a day. Did they want to keep the film controlled, and is this another sad story about fans’ blithe disregard for copyright? Or was the plan always to make it public, and did this end up being a fortuitous future marketing case study? Either way, I’m happy it’s out. It’s definitely for fans only, but very deftly manages that tricky balance between being inessential to the franchise, but also deeply moving.

6. Filmmaker Mag Moves to Substack - The beloved chronicle of Indie Film has joined the newsletter service-cum-social network. Writing the introductory post, Mike Hogan points to the energy that has surrounded Ted Hope and the constellation of film voices on the service dubbed “Filmstack” as a major reason for the magazine to jump aboard. Georg from our team is a devoted Filmstacker and regularly expresses his disappointment that this newsletter is not on Substack. What about you? Are you part of the Filmstack scene? Would love to hear from you.

7. Found: The 19th Century Short That Captured a Robot Attack - NPR has a neat story about a long-lost Méliès film that has been discovered by the Library of Congress. Gugusse et l'Automate depicts “…a child-sized robot clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a stick.”

8. Why Does Every Film Seem to Have the Same Plot? - Recommended by Brian Newman in his Subgenre newsletter, this piece in Aeon Magazine on the tyranny of the “Hero’s Journey” story structure goes over territory I’ve been thinking a lot about. If it piques your interest as well, my favorite Sundance Story Forum session from the festival asks similar questions.

9. S/W Alums Team Up on a Children’s Book - Julia Pott and Daniel Kwan have produced a successful Cartoon Network series and an Oscar Best Picture since their last short films, but they are returning to the short story format—this time, in print. Have You Ever Seen a Ghost? is a forthcoming children’s picture book from the pair and is available for pre-order. Pott has additional details on her Substack.

10. What To Watch - Alum Rod Blackhurst is back in theaters this weekend with his Shudder and IFC-released horror feature, Dolly. I confess that I haven’t seen this one yet, but we’re friends and admirers of Blackhurst, who has crafted an interesting space for himself in the horror scene after originally bursting into the mainstream with the docu-series Amanda Knox for Netflix. Rod just did a Reddit AMA, which has links for where you can catch this intriguing exploitation flick.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week