Short of the WeekShort of the Week

I was genuinely gutted when my Uber customer rating dropped from 4.94 to 4.8 after an especially boozy ride home one night. Never mind that 4.8 is an excellent score. I wore that 4.94 like a tiny badge of honour, proof that I was a worthy human being. It was only my pride on the line. But what if your livelihood depended on those five little stars? For those people, hell is...

The emotional aftermath of sexual assault must be unimaginably complex, making it one of the most challenging subjects a filmmaker can choose to explore. Drawing on his own experiences, writer-director Andy Reid confronts that reality head-on in his SXSW short Brief Somebodies, crafting a deeply personal film that transforms trauma into a powerful and unforgettable...

A place overflowing with hormones, emotions and confusion, high school isn’t usually somewhere we long to revisit. For filmmaker Kyle Sims, however, the desire to return to its “labyrinth-like classrooms and corridors” became the starting point for Galapagos, a quietly unnerving short centred on a teacher’s missing pet rabbit and the unsettling power dynamic she sh...

Although it’s something of a hackneyed question, asking filmmakers where a story originated will always hold a certain fascination. The answer often reveals as much about the filmmaker as it does the film itself. In the case of A Crime Across Four Landscapes, director and co-writer Aidan Weaver explains that before there was even a story, “there was a desire to sta...

Narratives centred on death and grief are hardly uncommon in filmmaking. After all, mortality – and the many ways we respond to it – is one of the few experiences that ultimately unites us all. Apologies if that’s a rather heavy way to begin this article, but thankfully S/W regular Stephen Irwin’s latest short, A Round of Applause for Death, approaches the subject ...