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A collection of essays on short film programmes, trending industry topics, and open-access academic papers.
In the latest iteration of Concorto’s “Supernature” programme, images from the frontlines of environmental breakdown present strategies for living in its aftermath.
As part of our FeKK Ljubljana Short Film Festival coverage, participants of the European Workshop for Film Criticism #7 reflect on a film festival’s responsibilities in breaking the canon.
As part of our FeKK Ljubljana Short Film Festival coverage, participants of the European Workshop for Film Criticism #7 find formal playfulness not only in Lynch, but also in Slovenian works from the archive.
As part of our FeKK Ljubljana Short Film Festival coverage, participants of the European Workshop for Film Criticism #7 share thoughts on David Lynch, Momoko Seto, and more.
In this essay, Emel-Elizabeth Tuulik dissects Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg’s two-sided short film programme, which connected Pakistani cinema with films from Kurdistan, examining what these two regions and their cinematic representations have in common beyond a shared experience of marginalisation.
In 2024, Artūras Barysas’s rebellious chronicles of the Soviet regime were finally screened again in his hometown of Vilnius, after gathering dust on the shelves for many years. Posthumously, the Lithuanian avant-garde legend reclaimed his rightful recognition.
In Koki, Ciao, Quenton Miller depicts the autobiography of an immortal parrot, a loyal comrade of Marshal Tito, leader of Yugoslavia for 35 years. Saulė Augustinaitė explores how the cockatoo’s status correlates with Mary Midgley’s notes on “person” as a concept.
Through the symbol of home, Vienna Shorts’ programme “When Will They Ever Learn? Testimonies from Today’s War Zones” ruminated on the scars of war trauma.
Championing the legacy of filmmakers like Harun Farocki and Chris Marker, contemporary filmmakers reclaim the computer screen as a site of reflection and resistance in a time when algorithmic culture and censorship define our mediatised society.
The growing presence of surveillance practices has been a source for filmmakers for years. In this essay, Sarah Fensom examines how subverting the datafication of human life can be turned into political resistance.
Olivia Popp examines the blurring of lines between documentary and fiction, as exemplified in short films that linger on the intersection of both.
Video essays offer various possibilities for cinematic reflection, criticism and artistic expression to intersect. Kevin B. Lee, Dana Linssen, and Eric Hynes discuss the format’s origins and its current place in the film distribution ecosystem.
In Ren Scateni’s “Grieving Tomorrows” programme at this year’s Glasgow Short Film Festival, grief is framed as denied, fragmented, or fluid, and, most often, as a political act.
Expectations of masculinity permeate today’s visual culture, creating pressure and exclusion for all, as illustrated in Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur’s short film programme “He’s Got the Look”.
Among the shorts featured in “Tongues (Re)United”, a programme curated by Berlin-based Chinese filmmaker Popo Fan, Tianyu Jiang finds a shared concern with the power of language to question queer and migrant bodies.
Marina Zigneli ponders over the elusive concept of film adaptation, unglueing its intricate layers through different forms of storytelling found in the short film format.
Savina Petkova reflects on the cinematic grammar of pornography and the effects of consuming NSFW images in the context of a festival screening.
In a yearly tradition, Talking Shorts invites filmmakers, critics, and programmers to pick their three favourite short films of the year.
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.
In this paper, Yuna Hoch argues that the combination and customisation of contrast programming and double features can elevate the queer short film experience, and can result in an approachable way into complex topics.
Through an in-depth analysis of Naïla Guiguet’s titular trans character in Dustin, Jesper Rusterholz argues that the short film format actively subverts the public’s lack of understanding of the transgender community by potently deflating transphobia and discrimination by representing the ordinary.
In this paper, Laura Carluccio discusses how short films, within their brevity, can showcase the mental health aspects of queer people’s lives while holding a positive note for the future at the same time.
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.
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