A collection of essays on short film programmes, trending industry topics, and open-access academic papers.
For more than a decade, Babylon’13 has been documenting the war in Ukraine. In over five hundred films, the association of documentary filmmakers has adapted the camera to act as a weapon. Their work achieves the purest form of documentary cinema as a creative treatment of current events, according to John Grierson's infamous definition.
Certain films call to action our entire sensory sytem: the moving image is not only seen but heard and felt too. In shorts by Neritan Zinxhiria, Slava Doytcheva, Norika Sefa and Ana Hušman, layered textures of memory are tactically explored.
In films by Stefano Dealessandri and Furio Ganz, Martyna Ratnik unlocks the eternal paradox of tourism, and wonders how film festivals can use their spaces more to rethink definitions of sustainability beyond reusable plastic cups.
Palestinian filmmakers often not only put their work on the line, but also risk their lives, channeling grief and hope through moving images. Against an ideology of denial, each film becomes a valuable historical monument.
Several short films in Short Waves Festival’s 2023 international competition question the reactive relationship to our known visual referents that tend to be the norm with digital models and propose a more perceptual use of them, emotive even.
In a yearly tradition, Talking Shorts invites filmmakers, critics and programmers to pick their three favourite short films of the past year.
Austrian filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr shapes her unique work around human bodies, natural environments, and their entanglements with both personal histories and collective narratives.
Family archives are a fruitful resource for filmmakers, exemplified in this year’s International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA)’s short film competition.
Agency is a precious resource, one continually at threat from wider forces of authoritarian ideologies and capital, as stated in several short films at Encounters Film Festival.
Concorto Film Festival’s MNEMOSYNE cycle aptly summarised contemporary trends in found footage filmmaking. Shorts from different cultural contexts incited viewers to wonder which spaces have been allowed to become subjects for nostalgia and which have not.
Chantal Akerman’s short films tell the story of a life engaged in an ever-changing relationship to the city, and to cinema.
As reflected in this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival programme, cinema has played an important role in identity construction. Many of the films that have emerged from the former-Yugoslavia region are preoccupied with the past.
This year’s Discourse: Europa programme at Filmfest Dresden inspires acts of defiance, as seen in short films from the Basque Country and Catalonia.
The double exposure embedded in dance: the real bodies and the allegories they construct with motion, as represented in a T A P E programme at London Short Film Festival.
In a new yearly tradition, Talking Shorts invites filmmakers, critics and programmers to pick their three favourite short films of the past year.
CinemaAttic’s holiday programme touches on “sustainability, colonialism and some other lovely consequences of the fast-paced life we like to live”.
Amongst the many great films in IDFA’s short film competition this year, hailing from the mountains of Buthan all the way to the jungle of Colombia, an overwhelming majority flirts with the idea of rituals.
A look at how the Kurdish artist and filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub glues together ‘inside’ and ‘out’, inspired by her recent retrospective at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2022.
First encountering Atsushi Wada’s animations can be a transformative experience. With his latest film, Bird in Peninsula, it’s our hope that new audiences are exposed to this unique figure of contemporary animation.
A number of recent short films that have had high-profile wins on the festival circuit are notable for how they play with realist tropes. We examine some of them and find a young generation in need for new tools to talk about their experiences.
Many films in this year’s IDFA short film competition are committed to the act of looking—or, sometimes, seeing.
In Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur’s Country in Focus Programme, Kosovar histories are retraced, reimagined and repurposed
Immigration, identity and the feeling of home in short films in this years Go Short’s competition.
During its 65th edition, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen focused on analogue film material and its importance in the digital age.
