Too Hot to Handle

Vimeo pulls a celebrated short for being too sexy, Hollywood unites against SORA, and developments in indie validate an audience-first approach

Author

Jason Sondhi
October 12, 2025

Welcome to the latest issue of Shorts Weekly. I had a fun week, heading out to events around NYC most nights. Thanks to Transmission and Sub Genre, who showed off an interesting new brand short during Advertising Week. Afterward, I met up with the film’s director, Celia Aniskovich, who also runs the new digital publication Switchboard Magazine. Shorts are at the heart of the Switchboard project, and she hopes to be in the mix this award season.

Speaking of awards, two of our favorite Frenchies also came to town, as Luce from Miyu Distribution and Benoit, founder of the excellent resource, The Animation Showcase, arrived to present their awards slate. We’re excited to share some of these lauded festival films with you in the coming weeks.

With that in mind, this is a good time for a reminder: now that Oscar submissions are closed, message us if your short will be in the running. Like last year, we’ll aggregate a Shortverse collection of qualified films. Then, if you would like to work with us more closely during your campaign, consult our guide.

As for this newsletter, we start with our usual 10 Things… which include dispiriting news out of Vimeo, big moves from the company that I think is the most exciting actor in indie production currently, and the next step in indie coming together in the face of huge challenges facing it. Then, the fallout of Sora 2 and its new social app necessitates a fresh AI Corner. We wrap up with the week’s S/W Official Selections, as well as a reminder to hurry up and get your submissions in for our Halloween coverage!

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

  1. Vimeo Takes Down Buzzy Short - Phoebe Jane Hart’s Bug Diner was one of our favorite shorts of the 2024 festival circuit. An award winner at Sundance and SXSW, we were excited for this outrageous stop-motion to hit online. But, after premiering on Vimeo as a Staff Pick Premiere, the film was taken down after just a few hours due to its sexual explicitness, as Phoebe explains in the above IG Reel.

    Our sympathies go out to the company’s Curation Team, as this was clearly not their call, but it’s an ominous early move for the new ownership regime, as Vimeo’s artist-first allowance of mature content was, for many years, a key differentiator compared to alternatives like YouTube. We’re working with Phoebe to find a solution and can hopefully bring the film to your screen soon.

  2. Glitch Productions Unveils “Glitch Presents” - I’ve been thinking about Glitch a lot lately, and mentioned them in my recent panel at Gotham Week. The Australian animation studio is a pioneer in the trend of producing animation series that release for free on YouTube. These shows, like The Amazing Digital Circus and Murder Drones, have become massive hits, which has led to them inking distribution deals with Netflix and Amazon even as the shows stay on YouTube. Their latest announcement sees them partner with an outside team for the first time, as the company will co-produce a season of Lackadaisy, expanding the show’s plan from 5×11min episodes to 6×22min. I wrote about the Lackadaisy pilot in 2023, which was my first exposure to this trend of professional-level animation proof-of-concepts leveraging YouTube to build audience and buzz. Now, my YouTube homepage is filled with them, and with this move, Glitch is making a play to support and aggregate the cream of the ecosystem. Can other styles duplicate this model?

  3. Sundance Won’t Save Filmmakers, But Community Might? - There is a circularity to trends in indie, and Dana Harris-Bridson broaches what might become the new/old conventional wisdom for Indiewire. The early 2010s were dominated by the idea of Direct Distribution—artists taking their work straight to paying audiences and developing tools around cultivating loyal fanbases. The rise of Kickstarter, the #ArtistServices track at Sundance, and things like Vimeo On Demand catered to this philosophy. It turns out that this is hard to do though! The trend was beginning to fizzle out when the streaming wars swooped in. Streamers degraded the audience’s willingness to rent or buy individual pieces of content, and also masked the underlying weakness of the indie ecosystem by splashing out big checks to select festival titles. In the meantime, many of the audience-development strategies from this period were picked up by the influencer community and have proven sound. I suspect it’s past time for more filmmakers to return to them.

  4. Future Film Coalition Selects Executive Director - Jax Deluca will head the nascent organization, which seeks to unite indie media’s disparate components into a unified force for policy and regulatory advocacy. Unprecedented corporate power from tech and chaotic governance in the US are huge headwinds for indie, so this is a vital project. Read Deluca’s introductory statement here.

  1. Luke Barnett’s Latest Short Pokes Fun at Festival Ovations - Barnett premiered his last short, The Crossing Over Express, on Short of the Week, but the film really made a splash on X, where the filmmaker leveraged his small supporter base to share the film and tag noteworthy execs to watch it. It was a viral success and led to immense professional opportunities for the actor/director, including TV show roles and selling a feature script. This latest, directed by Noam Kroll, is a cheeky short inspired by Joaquin Phoenix’s reaction during Cannes and looks to duplicate that splash. Give it a watch!

  2. Profile on the Animation Classic, Father and Daughter - The substack blog Animation Obsessive continues to be one of my favorite reads, and just did a spotlight on one of my all-time favorite shorts, the 2000 classic Father and Daughter from Michael Dudok de Wit, who is, to date, still the only foreigner to direct a film for Studio Ghibli.

  3. Nintendo Drops Surprise Short Film - With the global success of the Mario movie and a Zelda film on the way from S/W alum Wes Ball, it seems the Japanese video game giant has a taste for film now. Check out this surprise short they released this week on their YouTube Channel.

  4. Instagram Unveils Its Own Creator Awards - Evidently, there aren’t enough awards for creativity out there, so the Meta-owned giant is jumping into the fray with “Rings”, a new platform-specific awards program that will bestow literal rings to a jury-selected group of creators. Spike Lee is one of the judges on board.

  5. Listening Recommendation: The Animator’s Friend - Someone else I met this week was India Lombardi-Bello, whose podcast appeals to my sensibilities. India felt that many animation podcasts were informative but dry, focusing too much on technical details of the craft and state-of-the-industry topics. Her podcast, The Animator’s Friend, “creates a platform where animators get to talk about themselves outside the context of their work.”

  6. What To Watch This Weekend - Our weekly spotlight of Feature and TV projects from S/W alums spotlights the feature debut of Courtney Marsh, an alum for Zari, and the Oscar-nominated documentary short, Chau, Behind the Lines. Marsh’s latest, Where Did The Adults Go? follows Cynthia (Carey Cox, The Handmaid’s Tale), a disability activist whose overlooked advocacy collides with family legacy as she and her brothers reunite to decide the fate of their late parents’ summer home. Marsh is releasing the film for free through Monday on YouTube via an innovative partnership with the disability non-profit, The Ehlers-Danlos Society. Check out the full film for the next two days below.

👻 Send Us Your Shorts!

Spooky season is here, and every year we turn over our programming to celebrate the scary. However, our calendar space is limited, and spots fill up fast. Don’t wait to submit to us on All Hallows’ Eve! If you’ve got a short suitable for the season, get it in right away by submitting to Short of the Week on Shortverse.

🤖 AI Corner

In the wake of SORA, our periodic update of headlines and happenings that caught our eye in AI.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

Lean In by Lucy Coleman

A broke feminist comedian is taken out for corporate drinks with her brother Benny. Will the enticement of money and a job see Rach flip on her morals and "Lean In"?

Bita Joon by Sara Boutorabi

The grand prize winner at Slamdance, the director casts her own Iranian family to collectively reenact a deceptively ordinary day in the life of her terminally ill mother in this moving work of autofiction.

Pillow Fortress by Zander Coté

When Lana brings her new boyfriend Bart on a visit to Tommy’s house, it doesn’t take long for the two men to realize that they knew each other as young children. Soon though, they disagree about their memories of a specific, trivial event, in a dark comedy from S/W alum Coté.

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