Short of the Week
I know it’s a little late, but I wanted to take a moment to say Happy New Year to everyone reading this. I know from the analytics there’s not a huge number of you, but the team here at Short of the Week are grateful for your continued support and looking forward to sharing more great short films with you in 2022.
We closed off 2021 here on S/W with an impressive month of shorts, I often know my favourite from our last 30-days (or so) of coverage instantly, but December was a real struggle to narrow it down. I could have easily picked all three myself, with two of the films making my top 10 favourites from our yearly coverage and another just outside.
Alongside our film coverage in the final month of the year, we also took a look at the shorts battling for an Academy Award in 2022, while our team highlighted their personal favourites from the 233 titles we featured in 2021, choosing one film that they wanted to show a little extra love at the end of the year.
TEAM FAVOURITES
From the 20 films we featured in December, our team has once again selected the three shorts that really stood out and haven’t left our headspace since we featured them. This month I’m happy to report we’ve got a trio of animations to present in our Best of the Month playlist, with stories including a pair of battling carnivorous plants, a heartbroken wildlife photographer and even a little (literal) soul searching.
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La Neige Incertaine (The Uncertain Snow) by Marion Boisrond, Marie-Liesse Coumau, Ada Hernaez, Gwendoline Legendre & Romane Tisseau
The Uncertain Snow feels like it has many different meanings that could be interpreted in many different ways, depending on who’s watching, and for that reason, it rewards those who rewatch it. Is it about the end of a relationship? The end of a career? The end of a species? The plight of the main character – a photographer who gets lost while photographing wildlife – is amplified by a haunted, windswept soundscape and the all-consuming vastness of a gorgeously animated snow-white arctic, and it reminds us of the way in which a personal experience can bleed into the professional sphere, and distract from the task at hand. – Adam Banks
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Bad Seeds is currently offline.
Mauvaises Herbes (Bad Seeds) by Claude Cloutier
Shortlisted for an Oscar, this unusual tale exploring what it means to be a “bad seed” follows two shape-shifting carnivorous plants who compete over who is the alpha. Directed by Claude Cloutier, Mauvaises Herbes’ striking hand-drawn visual style is impressively captivating. – Chelsea Lupkin
Duszyczka (The Little Soul) by Barbara Rupik
Spirituality meets stop-motion in this truly distinct 9-minute animation from Polish director Barbara Rupik. Who knew a film centred around decay could be so beautiful and mesmerising? And as I mentioned in my review of Duszyczka, this isn’t just a favourite of mine from our December coverage, but one “of the boldest and most memorable shorts I’ve seen in 2021” – Rob Munday
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MOST VIEWED
Sudden Light by Sophie Littman
With so many eye-catching shorts on our site in December, it was always going to be interesting to see which film proved most popular with our audience. The star power of Will Ferrell would obviously be a draw, as would the festive setting of the Oscar-shortlisted Les Grandes Claques (Like the Ones I Used to Know), but it was something much more sinister that grabbed your attention with Sophie Littman’s dizzying horror Sudden Light ranked as our most viewed pick. Diving into the more experiment areas of genre storytelling, S/W writer Chelsea Lupkin explained how this seemingly simple story of a pair of sisters out walking their dog “will leave you feeling ill at ease and on the very brink of grief”.
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