June proved a successful month for S/W alums on the festival circuit. Jeremy Clapin (Skhizein, Palmipédarium) followed his recent Cannes success, when his feature J’ai perdu mon corps (I Lost My Body) won both the Cristal Award for best feature and the Audience Award at Annecy (the success of the film on the festival circuit has seen it acquired by streaming giants Netflix). While Gints Zilbalodis (Inaudible, Priorities) won the inaugural award in the Contrechamp section at the French Festival, with his debut feature Away.

We caught up with Dan Ojari (Slow Derek) and Mikey Please (Marilyn Miller) at Sundance London, as they unveiled their latest work – a pilot episode for a proposed 12-part mini-series titled Alan the Infinite. Screening in the UK Shorts section of the festival was Renee Zhan’s (Hold Me, Pidge) Reneepoptosis, winner of the Short Film Jury Award: Animation at Sundance Utah, who explained how her work acts “as a sort of diary of my thoughts and emotions at the time”.

Also during this summer month, we saw the release of what will undoubtedly be the highest profile short of the year, Anima, the latest collaboration between critically-acclaimed director Paul Thomas Anderson and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Spoke to director Lewis Arnold (Echo, Charlie Says) about his path from film school to directing prime-time British television, played around with Michael Frei’s Kids game and we held our second in-real-life event S/W:IRL #2.

With all this exciting news in June, we also managed to programme over three-and-a-half hours of shorts into our coverage, including an experimental dance short featuring a dragon, a stop-motion film about stop-motion filmmaking and a surprising film about a Vietnamese-American hoarder, whose life is upended when worms open a black hole in her house.

Below are our three favourite shorts from June, which our team describe as: A beautifully made film that hides everything in the shadows, a rare “festival drama” that feels like it gets better as it goes along and the perfect short for LGBT Pride Month.