January was a big month here at S/W HQ. With awards season fast approaching, not only were we busy featuring some high profile shorts, we also announced what’s been keeping us busy, behind the scenes, for the last year or so. 

Usually, at the time of the year, a large portion of our editorial team would be gathered in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. Though the IRL meet-up won’t take place this year, with most of the year’s edition of the festival occurring on a brand new online platform, our Sundance expert Céline provided a preview of the programme and our team will be heavily involved, looking for shorts to share with you all in the future.

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Team Favourites

With a raft of Oscar potentials dropping online, January was our busiest month in some time. Featuring 24 shorts, with a compiled run-time of almost five hours, narrowing down our curation to a trio of shorts was a difficult task. The team voted and the three shorts that stood out the most were; a viscerally revolting blend of social realism and horror, a visually-rich character study of man searching for something “more” and a haunting puppet short centred around a group of refugees fighting for survival.

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Dramedy David Findlay

Found Me

In the foggy, twilight, arctic, dead of winter of Quebec City, Mitch’s life takes a turn after unwittingly stumbling upon the world of underground wrestling.

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Horror Paul Holbrook & Sam Dawe

Hungry Joe

A single mother struggles to hold on to her sanity as she's forced to turn to extreme measures to satisfy her son's increasingly inhuman appetite.

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Drama Farzaneh Omidvarnia

Song Sparrow

As a group of refugees try to reach a safe place, the freezing temperature of the truck they're hiding in quickly turns their hopes for a better future into a fierce struggle for survival.

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Most Viewed

Since I started highlighting our “Most Viewed” selection in this BotM playlist, I realised my focus has been very .com focused. S/W exists outside of this site with, our social media accounts and YouTube channel, also playing a vital role in helping us gauge audience reaction. With this in mind, while Anne Thorens’ impactful six-minute short was our most popular here on the site in January, over on YT Zara Dwinger’s Yulia & Juliet has proved a big hit, clocking up over 160k views.

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Drama Anne Thorens
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Diagonale (Diagonal)

A young couple is already in the heat of the action when she asks him for a condom. He doesn't have one, but that doesn't seem to put a curb on his enthusiasm.

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