Suited and Rebooted

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Short Documentary Awards Contenders Emerge - Two significant lists for awards season are out: Doc NYC unveiled its celebrated “Short List” of 15 films as part of the programming slate for the November festival, and the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards announced eight short film nominees. We’re still waiting on the Cinema Eye Honors and International Doc Association, but there is a good chance that the Oscar short doc winner will come from this pool. Kudos as well to alums like Elizabeth Lo, Ben Proudfoot, and Geeta Gandbhir, who are recognized for their features.

2. SAG-AFTRA Announce Agreement That Covers Micro-Dramas - The hot trend of the summer was microdramas, the Chinese-inspired format where scripted soap-operas, shot vertically, are released in micro-installments that users pay to unlock. They continue to be big business, but as Dear Producer shared, the working standards for these non-union sets were often substandard. Now the US guild has introduced a new agreement to cover these productions formally.

3. Netflix, GDT, and Gobelins Team Up on Stop-Motion Studio - According to Cartoon Brew, the studio, located on the Gobelins campus in Paris, will “function as a creative laboratory for research, education, and collaboration between students, mentors, and master filmmakers.”

4. Spotlight on Short-to-Series Success - Ahead of MIPCOM, filmmaker Britt Raes talked to Variety about her upcoming kids show, based on her short film Luce and Rock. It’s one of my favorite all-ages shorts of the last few years, so watch it if you haven’t yet, and hopefully it can get picked up in other territories outside of her native Belgium.

5. A Re-Booted “Spike & Mike” is Coming to Theaters - The rights to Spike & Mike, the influential traveling showcase of animation that ran from the 70s to the early 2000s, were picked up by Skybound Entertainment in 2023, with an eye on a revival. That revival has arrived, with a program featuring 24 shorts playing select Regal theaters from Oct 31 to Nov 2. Find a screening near you.

6. YouTube Just Ate TV. It’s Only Getting Started - Apologies for sharing another of 2025’s ‘YouTube triumphant’ stories, but this one, the cover story of the latest Hollywood Reporter, does get into some interesting detail on what it will take for YouTube to bridge the one TV category it has yet to conquer—scripted drama.

7. Instagram is Exploring a Dedicated TV App - Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports on murmurings out of Meta about a new initiative that may serve as a check against YouTube’s increasing dominance of the home’s biggest screen. I’ve long found it deeply ironic that Instagram has become the default social app for filmmakers since its video UX sucks so bad. If this makes IG a reasonable option for distributing a short, then…hooray?

8. New Academic Papers on Short Film - If the internet hasn’t eroded your attention span, check out these two pieces. “Insights From Short Films Awarded By Cannes Lions” looks to “identify fundamental patterns and key factors for the success” within brand films. Then, Talking Shorts shares a dissertation from the academic and festival programmer Laura Walde, which theorizes on the effect of ‘brevity’ in the form.

9. Learn “How to Write A Short Film” from S/W Alum - On Sun Nov 2nd, Liam White, a S/W-selected filmmaker for the shorts Doughnut, and Housewarming, will host an online workshop on the art of the short screenplay. The fee is around £40, with the option of script feedback for an additional fee.

10. What To Watch This Weekend - Stay in for a documentary double-dip from alum Geeta Gandbhir. Featured in 2021 for the short Call Center Blues, the filmmaker has an extensive filmography in features, TV, and shorts, and has two films in awards contention—a short and a feature—that are both available to stream. Start with The Devil is Busy, which premiered on HBO a few days ago. The short “chronicles a day on the frontlines in the battle for reproductive rights at a women's healthcare clinic,” and won a prize at Palm Springs this summer. Then, follow it up with The Perfect Neighbor, a buzzy true-crime feature which won the Directing Award at Sundance this year and which premieres today on Netflix. Indiewire’s Anne Thompson says that the film is “coming for that Best Documentary Oscar.” Could Gandbhir sweep both categories? I don’t know if that’s been done before!

📅 Spotlight on BFI London

Rob spotlights the rich short film slate on offer at the UK’s flagship film festival, highlighting 11 films you should make efforts to check out.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week