Notes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.