Short of the Week
With October dominated by spooky season, it’s no surprise our Horror channel saw a flood of new films filling its pages in the lead-up to Halloween, but there was more to the 10-month of the year than just frights here on S/W.
We kicked off October with a look at the UK’s most high-profile festival, BFI London, with its latest edition sporting debut features from eight S/W alums. The 2nd Monday of the month is always Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the US and we celebrated this the only way we know how – with a collection of short films focused on Indigenous stories on Shortverse.
With World Mental Health Day following directly after Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we took the opportunity to put the spotlight on a subject we feel passionate about at S/W and update Georg’s original playlist focusing on mental health shorts, with a new collection on Shortverse – Rob Munday, Managing Editor.
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Team Favorites
As for the shorts featured on our pages in October, as already alluded to, they were dominated by the creepy kind and that’s reflected in our BotM picks, but we also managed to fill a hole in our collection by finally featuring a short from Latvian-born, Brooklyn-based animator Signe Baumane, follow a lonely man on his surreal search for companionship and take a poignant, yet surprisingly poetic look at the Paris massacre of 1961.
Here are our three top picks from the 17 short films featured on our site in October:
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Catching Spirits by Vanessa Beletic
Blending the dance film with elements of the horror/thriller genre is a combination not often seen in the world of shorts, or features, but Beletic makes it look effortless, her film constantly gripping and hugely entertaining. However, the fusion of these filmmaking approaches wasn’t coincidental, the director gave plenty of thought to why she would include them, explaining that she wanted to “provoke some thought by using genre tropes and repositioning them to be more mystical and evocative VS scary just to be scary”.
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FROM.BEYOND by Fredrik S. Hana
Whether or not you believe that aliens exist, Fredrik S. Hana’s FROM.BEYOND presents an uncanny representation of how mankind might take in such a world-altering revelation. No stranger to exploring and critiquing people’s dark obsessions with the unknown or the perverse nature of what it means to be human – who could forget his ‘nunsploitation’ film Sister Hell – Hana’s unsettling experimental sci-fi/horror doesn’t feel like a work of fiction. Utilizing old school film techniques, stunning practical effects, and an unorthodox approach to screenwriting, FROM.BEYOND is as disturbing as it is beautiful.
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Carne De Dios (Flesh of God) by Patricio Plaza
Inspired by the texts written by Spanish friars during a period of evangelism in Mexico, Plaza describes his film as both a “political horror” and a “South American queer film” in how it examines themes of persecution and repression. Exploring the topics of colonialism, historical abuse, religion, sexuality and more, Carne de Dios is a complex and ambitious piece, with its surprising storyline and striking aesthetic making it a short you won’t forget any time soon.
Shortverse Best of the Month
Over on Shortverse, our team picked 12 shorts as our Best of the Month for October 2023, including an animated tribute to Frasier Crane, an inventive portrait doc of a young Chinese photographer and a horror (of course!) about a wannabe influencer.