Country New Zealand
Grounded, Chris Callus's animated short film, is a perfectly nice little thing that I struggled to feel much about one way or the other. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival, and it is pleasant, harmless and competently made, which is also just about all I
interview
There are few premises at this year's festival circuit as gloriously, defiantly bonkers as the one at the heart of A Tail: a woman wakes on the morning of a crucial job interview to find she has grown a mermaid's tail overnight. Director Rosie Gaunt-Mathieson,
Country Switzerland
There is nothing at all wrong with Bats & Bugs, Lena von Döhren's animated short film, and I think that is rather the problem. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival and found it a perfectly pleasant, nicely drawn little thing that simply never gave me
Country Sudan
Some films find you at exactly the right angle to cut deep, and White Musk, Fatima Wardy's short film, did that to me. I watched it at the BFI London Film Festival, and it is an impactful and genuinely sad piece of work, handled with such honesty that
Country Ireland
I always feel a particular kind of disappointment when a film whose argument I broadly agree with still manages to lose me, and that was my experience with Landscapes of Shame, Patrick Hough's essay film, which I caught at the BFI London Film Festival. The history it draws
Country Nepal
There is a quiet ambition to Elephants in the Fog, Abinash Bikram Shah's feature, that I found genuinely stirring. It is a real landmark for Nepalese cinema and a valuable addition to the LGBTQ conversation in Asia, and while a couple of things hold it back from the
Country United Kingdom
There is a good short film somewhere inside The Animals, and a strong cast doing their best to find it, but Calvin Demba's eighteen-minute piece never quite gets there. It has a sharp premise and some real talent on screen, yet it states its point so bluntly,
Country Switzerland
Every so often a short film comes along that is so beautiful to look at that the usual criteria start to feel almost beside the point, and Into the Forest, Antonin Niclass's stop-motion short film, is one of those. I watched it at the BFI London Film
country-uk
There is a genuinely intriguing moral knot at the centre of How to Hide It, the short film co-written and co-directed by Ramla Ali and Richard A. Moore, and for thirteen minutes it packs in a surprising amount of story. I caught it at the BFI London Film
Country Belgium
There is a very good film somewhere inside Heysel 85, and for long stretches you can see it in the craft alone. Yet for all its technical brilliance, Teodora Ana Mihai's dramatisation of one of football's darkest nights left me strangely unmoved, and that is a
Country Jamaica
Now and again a short film comes along that seems to speak directly to you, and FarEye, Hayden McLean's beautiful short film, was exactly that for me. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival, and as someone who follows the teachings of Haile Selassie myself, the
2020s
Some shorts are over before you have really had the chance to take their measure, and Last Minute is one of them. Sam Brain's five-minute piece sets up an intriguing, charged little situation and then ends almost the moment it gets going, leaving me genuinely unsure what
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