The Short Award Winners

🏆 The 14th Short Awards

A week ago the S/W Curatorial Team announced 20 short films in the running for our annual awards. Drawn from the 187 official selections Short of the Week featured in 2024, it is a diverse group that we would not hesitate to match up against any festival lineup or award shortlist for pure quality.

We believe in speed too—filmmakers that submit to Short of the Week receive an answer in 7 days, so we immediately handed the films off to our jury for deliberation and 7 days later we’re ready to share the winners!

Our utmost appreciation goes out to that jury, comprised of celebrated filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, Fantastic Fest Head of Shorts Jeane Anne Lauer, manager and producer Shams Mohajerani, and Carlos De Carvalho, the Pedagogical Director at French animation school Piktura and faculty advisor to last year’s Short of the Year, The Seine’s Tears. See what they picked from our nominees and find links to our coverage below.

The Winners

Short of the Year: 👩🏽‍🍼Bogotá Story
Animation of the Year: 🦀 A Crab in the Pool
Documentary of the Year: 💗 Instruments of a Beating Heart
Drama of the Year: 🪮 Precious Hair and Beauty
Genre Short of the Year: 🏈 End Zone
The Trailblazer Award: 🍺 Yeah The Boys
The Audience Award: 🩺 Relationship to Patient

• See the full announcement on S/W

• View the Winner’s collection on Shortverse

• Watch the Winners in our YouTube Playlist

• Revisit all “Short of the Years” since 2007

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Introducing Oscar-Winning Short Films Collection - As we prep for next weekend’s big ceremony, take a trip back through cinematic history by browsing a massive collection of all the short film winners dating back to 1931. We’ve worked to sort the films chronologically and have added a ton of trailers and viewing links, but the collection is still a work in progress. Feel free to add comments to individual film pages, or email [email protected] if you have things to add as we shape this into the definitive portal for shorts honored by the Academy.

2. Oscar® Nominated Shorts Pass $1M in Box Office - For the films hoping to be added to this collection soon, Forbes reports rosy numbers for the theatrical presentation of the nominees. While a late start due to the LA fires will prevent this year’s crop from setting a record, ShortsTV CEO Carter Pilcher suggests that the series, now in its 20th year, has recovered its per-screen average back to pre-pandemic levels.

3. BAFTA Winners - In other awards news, the UK’s national film honors took place last Sunday selecting Rock, Paper, Scissors as “Best British short film” and Wander to Wonder as “Best British short animation”. Shorts have few advance indicators for Oscar, but this and an Annie win means Nina Gantz should be considered the favorite for next week’s Academy Awards.

4. The Spirit Award Winners - The USA’s biggest award show for indie productions had its ceremony in Los Angeles over the weekend. Anora was the headline winner, but the Spirits are important for recognizing talents on the come-up—we were pleased to see alums Sean Wang take home “Best First Feature” and Sarah Winshall recognized with the prestigious “Producers Award”.

5. Future Film Coalition: Upcoming Town Hall - The Future Film Coalition is a brand-new non-profit designed to “serve as a research think tank and coalition-builder for advocacy campaigns that will help secure the future of art house and independent media in the US.” Impressive names are taking part in this week’s introductory town hall on Feb. 27th. You can sign up to take part in the virtual event.

6. MrBeast to Launch Series of Animated Shorts - Fresh off of invading “traditional TV” with Amazon’s Beast Games, the YouTube sensation is expanding his empire again, teaming up with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios to produce animated shorts that will provide lore around his nascent toy line.

7. YouTube Shorts Gets Generative AI - We’ve haven’t shared much on the AI video front of late, but things are heating up with the rollout of models that are married to massive distribution channels. First up, YouTube is integrating Google’s VEO 2 into its YouTube Shorts product. Called “Dream Screen”, see it in action in the video above.

8. OpenAI Sora & Hollywood - Bloomberg, which had a scoop in the fall reporting on OpenAI’s charm offensive with the major studios now has a followup report indicating that the AI giant is “meeting resistance” in their overtures to Hollywood.

9. Talks From BrandStorytelling 2025 - Mentioned in our Sundance edition last month, talks from this year’s BrandStorytelling conference are now up on YouTube, including Voyager’s and one with Ben Proudfoot on his new L’Oreal-sponsored short documentary.

10. Building a Fiction Empire with Brandon Sanderson - A leftfield recommendation to close things out. Brandon Sanderson, best known for his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive fantasy book series sat for an over 3hr(!) podcast with Tim Ferriss, the personal optimization guy known for his 4-hr books. I like fantasy novels and have read a lot of Sanderson’s work, but that isn’t the reason for the recommendation. Instead, this is simultaneously one of the best conversations I’ve listened to on the craft of storytelling AND one of the best conversations I’ve listened to on the art of creative entrepreneurship. Sanderson is a systematic thinker who cleanly and expansively provides writing tips but has also created a business structure around his creativity that is the envy of any artist, culminating in his $40M Kickstarter campaign, a record for the platform. Art, commerce, marketing, audience-building—there are a lot of threads in this podcast that creatives in any medium can learn from.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week