Rob Munday
The summer months are always a bit of strange time here at S/W HQ. With people preferring to spend their time in the glorious outdoors, instead of glued to screens, viewing figures usually suffer a slight dip and submissions go through a bit of a dry spell. With that in mind, July felt like the perfect time to release our latest think piece article How Long Should I Make My Short Film, a data-driven exploration of the duration of short films, looking at the correlations between length and success.
In terms of the shorts though, throughout the month, we featured 17 on our platform, with a handful of online premiere’s, one world premiere and our first-ever Venezuelan short. As usual though, this Best of the Month post is all about our team selecting their favorites from this period and taking a little extra time to shine a light on the shorts they can’t stop thinking about.
TEAM FAVOURITES
Featuring coming-out stories, first dates and sex clubs, the themes explored in the films this month were as eclectic as ever. For our trio of Best of picks though we selected an evocative summer hangout, a delicately-handled school shooter narrative and a freak out in the woods. Enjoy.
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Birds by Katherine Propper
I have to admit that I’m still not sure if Katherine Propper’s Birds is a documentary or indeed a fictional dramedy. To be honest, I don’t even want to know, because it works in the film’s favor either way. Propper captures the excitement and the everyday triviality of life as a teenager during the summer, when everything is possible and you still spend most of your time at an outside pool. The technology might have changed, but it evokes the same easygoing feeling I remember from my youth. Engaging, yet seemingly effortless slice-of-life filmmaking doesn’t get much better than this. – Georg Csarmann
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DeKalb Elementary by Reed Van Dyk
I’m hesitate to recommend a “shooting movie.” It feels like I’ve seen variations of this exact film countless times before, and of course, the U.S. news cycle never quite gives us a respite from the horrors of gun violence. But, Dekalb Elementary is just an impressively executed film: serious, but not heavy-handed in its representation of difficult subject matter. Beyond that, it figures out a way not to center the film on the shooter, but rather, the quiet, understated heroism of its central protagonist. – Ivan Kander
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Scary Car by Simple Town
An improvised horror short made by a comedy group and shot with a lo-fi Blair Witch style aesthetic, Scary Car is a film that feels like it really shouldn’t exist, but I’m so glad it does. Watching hundreds of shorts films every year, as a curator you often crave something different to land in your watchlist and when it does it can feel like such a breathe of fresh of fresh air, you can’t wait to share it. I’m yet to be convinced this is a film with universal appeal, in fact it could well be the film that ruins my reputation as a curator. It’s probably the type of film you should label a “guilty pleasure”, but for me this all pleasure, zero guilt. – Rob Munday
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Most Viewed
Empath by Alec Moeller
Anchored by an incredible central performance from Betsey Brown, Alec Moeller’s tale of a woman stricken by case of hyper-empathy syndrome, and the group who promises to treat this disorder, is a short full of intrigue and potential. As you watch protagonist Kate struggle with her affliction, you are drawn deeper and deeper into its elusive storyline, captivated until the very end.