Short of the Week
As the end of 2021 marks my first complete year as a full-time Short of the Week employee, the one takeaway I’ll carry over into the work we do in 2022 is the importance we place on our curation. Alongside the ever-expanding catalogue of shorts that can now be found online, there’s also a growing number of platforms looking to showcase them. This rise has prompted us at Short of the Week to consider what is it that makes our coverage different? What do we offer that others don’t? The conclusion we’ve come to is that it’s our team and our curation.
With this in mind, it’s great to have an opportunity to celebrate our writers/programmers and showcase their individual tastes…while also putting together a banging end-of-the-year playlist. Asking each member of our team to champion one film from our 2021 coverage and write a couple of sentences on why they stand out from the hundreds of others we featured, below are their picks. If you missed a lot of the shorts we featured throughout this year and feel like you need a simple entry point to begin a catch-up, think of this list as the perfect starting point for a good old fashioned binge session – Rob Munday
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Are You Still There
dir. Rayka Zehtabchi & Sam Davis
Recommended by: IVAN KANDER
As a short film curator, I watch my fair share of “misery porn.” You know what I’m talking about…films that wallow in lugubrious topics (grief, loss, depression). What makes Are You Still There? so special is that while it’s a film about those sort of things (in this case reckoning with the loss of a parent), it’s less concerned with the misery itself and is much more interested in finding out how we as, humans, can move past it via love and compassion. It miraculously does this via the innocuous event of a dead car battery in a strip mall parking lot, our protagonist sweating in the heat as she attempts to call AAA. It’s a simple inciting incident that is subtly able to lead to so much more.
Read our full review
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Miss World
dir. Georgia Fu
Recommended by: GEORG CSARMANN
There is something about this short that I can’t seem to shake. Like its protagonist, Miss World is imperfect, but it’s for this very reason that it’s such a pleasure to watch. The film swiftly combines a nostalgic visual design & atmosphere with the tragicomic sense of story depicting its lost characters. I have a special fondness for a certain “indie sensibility,” and Georgia Fu’s dramedy reminds me why I connect so much to films that feel overly personal. For a movie that is about how hard it can be to return home, watching Miss World has the vibe of a strange form of homecoming for myself.
READ OUR FULL REVIEW
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AUGENBLICKE (A Blink Of An Eye)
dir. Kiana Naghshineh
Recommended by: SERAFIMA SERAFIMOVA
When AUGENBLICKE (A Blink Of An Eye) came out, the paralysing fear felt by women in London, following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, was still very much running through our veins. And even though this despicable crime shone a spotlight on violence against women and united the entire nation in our shocked grief, there were so many lessons to be learnt and issues to be addressed that I felt like Sarah and what happened to her on that night was almost forgotten. This film, however, depicting an attack on a woman walking home at night, pulls the audience right inside the character’s skin in such a visceral way that it’s impossible to crawl out of it. Aesthetically, it’s a formidably crafted animation as unsettling as a particularly vivid nightmare. Is it an uncomfortable watch? Yes. Is it vital to watch it and be reminded of what countless girls and women go through on a daily basis? Absolutely.
READ OUR FULL REVIEW
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Y’a pas d’heure pour les femmes (Ain’t No Time for Women)
dir. Sarra El Abed
Recommended by: CÉLINE ROUSTAN
Some might say that I am biased, but as a curator and for obvious personal reasons, I’m always super excited to see a film from Tunisia. Luckily Sarra El Abed’s Y’a pas d’heure pour les femmes is such an entertaining, insightful documentary and so authentically Tunisian, in more ways than one! In just under twenty minutes, the film paints a compelling, layered and nuanced portrait of post-Revolution Tunisian society through genuine and witty conversations between the charismatic, endearing and fun women the camera follows. Keep an eye out for the short’s breakout star: the filmmakers’ grandmother.
READ OUR FULL REVIEW
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Robin Robin
dir. Dan Ojari & Mikey Please
Recommended by: ANDREW ALLEN
During this second pandemic Holiday season with plans canceled, I haven’t connected with a short film quite as much as this wonderful, animated holiday short from S/W alums, Mikey Please & Dan Ojari. With instantly-relatable characters crafted in felt and brought to life with stop-motion and a very British tale of learning to accept one’s uniqueness, it makes for the perfect cozy holiday viewing amidst a world of uncertainty. It’s my kids’ new favorite film. Which makes it mine too.
READ OUR FEATURE ON ROBIN ROBIN / WATCH ON NETFLIX
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Listen to me Sing
dir. Isabel Garrett
Recommended by: KIRSTEN WAGSTAFF
Move over Ross and Rachel from Friends because we have a new will they or won’t they couple. This short film not only will have you second-guessing your sanity but it may even instill some emotion back into your hardened aorta. The soft texture of the stop motion puppets lulls you into thinking this is going to be a wholesome feel-good story about a woman who finds her voice. However, from the moment the walrus appeared I was certain the lobster lady was going to f*ck it… You really need to watch this short to understand because I can assure you that this isn’t some sort of frenzied pandemic fever dream.
READ OUR FULL REVIEW
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Stuffed
dir. Theo Rhys
Recommended by: CHELSEA LUPKIN
While I certainly favor genre films, I could have never predicted that my favorite short of the year would have been a musical, let alone one about taxidermy. A macabre declaration of love and all things taboo, Theo Rhys and Joss Holden-Rea’s Stuffed is a twisted tale laced with dark humor and impressively catchy ballads. A modern musical akin to Sweeney Todd, its highly impressive production and fearless romanticism of the grotesque make for a short that is worthy of the stage. Between incredible vocal performances and gorgeous cinematography on a truly killer set, Stuffed is the kind of epic horror mashup of genres that delights the senses! Having premiered at SXSW in the Midnight shorts program, this short will have you singing about taxidermy in no time! … Just do yourself a favor and try not to sing along in a crowded room full of strangers. They might think you’ve gone mad.
READ OUR FULL REVIEW
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Migrants
dir. Hugo Caby, Antoine Dupriez, Aubin Kubiak, Lucas Lermytte, and Zoé Devise
Recommended by: ADAM BANKS
Some of the strongest films I saw this year dealt with the immigrant experience, but one that I can’t get out of my head is Migrants, a gorgeously crafted allegory that uses the story of polar bears escaping a melting arctic to make a point about how difficult it is for refugees to find a country that’ll accept them. The animation may be soft, but the message is as sharp as barbed wire, and the film manages to tell two stories simultaneously — one about how the climate crisis affects wild animals, and another about the difficulties that face refugees when they leave countries decimated by war, famine, and drought in search of somewhere safer to raise their children. It’s a stark reminder that climate affects all of us, no matter if we’re human beings or wild animals. In the end, we all need food, water, and a safe place to sleep.
READ OUR FULL REVIEW
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How To Raise A Black Boy
dir. Justice Jamal Jones
Recommended by: ROB MUNDAY
Having watched every single film we featured on S/W in 2021, when putting together this list and thinking about the one film I wanted to champion, I wasn’t drawn to the most entertaining or the one with faultless production, but the film I found most striking and memorable – Justice Jamal Jones’ How To Raise A Black Boy. A poetic examination of childhood, identity and American politics told with remarkable visuals and moments of exquisite tenderness, I’ve returned to Jones’ short on numerous occasions since first watching it and find myself more and more impressed with each subsequent viewing. While I know that I can’t predict the future, I can certainly see bright things in store for this talented filmmaker.
READ OUR FULL REVIEW
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Emergency
dir. Carey Williams
Recommended by: JASON SONDHI
A film I haven’t been able to get out of my head since seeing it at its World Premiere at Sundance 2018, I was overjoyed to find that, after a brief stint on HBO NOW, the online release of Carey Williams’ Emergency left me in a similar state of awe. A classic moral quandary with a contemporary social justice angle, the script, by current Oscar Shortlist filmmaker, K.D. Dávila (Please Hold), is just about perfect. Ready for a night of partying, a group of college students must weigh the pros and cons of calling the police when faced with an unusual emergency. The story feels specific to its characters and scenario, but so wise to the societal context which informs it. Its college-aged protagonists are simultaneously hyper-vigilant but still girded by a youthful innocence that presumes fuck-ups don’t have to be life-changing. The drug war, historical notions of white female honor, and police brutality figure into the plot, but are presented neatly and as matter-of-fact assumptions by its characters, simple facets of lived experience rather than under-lined theses, which allows it to avoid the didactic moralism of many films of its ilk. Oh yeah, it’s darkly funny too. A treat of a film, and this list is a timely reminder to revisit as the writer/director duo prepare to debut the feature version of the story at Sundance next month.