With our February coverage dominated by Awards seasons – first, we announced the Oscar nominees, before revealing our own prize winners in our annual Short Awards, with the innovative Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma named as our Jury Award winner – you won’t have to wait long now to discover the short films picking up the much-coveted BAFTA (March 13th) and Oscar (March 28th) trophies in 2022.

It wasn’t a month purely dedicated to awards though, as we also found time to speak to previously featured filmmakers Zeek Earl and Christopher Caldwell (Prospect) about their plans to kickstart a new cinematic universe via an NFT drop, explored the Frameline Voices short film initiative and provided filmmaker updates on work in development and current projects you can watch now.

TEAM FAVOURITES

With a whole week dedicated to our awards, plus the aforementioned editorial, the 28-days of February saw us feature only 16 shorts in total. With films from Israel, Germany and The Philippines and topics including horny vampires, prom fantasies and social media hysteria, the S/W team still had a difficult job narrowing our coverage down to just a trio of picks. Eating disorders, dystopian worlds and breathtaking craft won the vote though and you can watch our highlights below, plus our Most Viewed short from February.

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Nervosa by Thessa Meijer

Films about eating disorders almost never get it right, focusing almost exclusively on food consumption and body weight, rather than the internal issues that fuel them. Inspired by the director’s own experience of anorexia, Nervosa explores the continuous struggles of those battling with eating disorders even when their illness is no longer visible. It’s a film that digs deep, and in doing so unearths a truth that might be tough to stomach but also one that resonates. It’s a film that gets it right. – Serafima Serafimova

[READ THE FULL REVIEW]

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The Vandal by Eddie Alcazar

If it’s innovative storytelling we’re looking for on Short of the Week then Alcazar’s The Vandal is the perfect example of this. Employing a rare combination of stop-motion and live-action – an approach the director calls “Meta-Scope” – this 16-minute short wears its influences proudly and yet still manages to be the most unique and unforgettable piece I’ve seen in some time. – Rob Munday

[READ THE FULL REVIEW]

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Pantser (Shielded) by Jan Verdijk

A moral dilemma is one of the tastiest premises in short film…if you can get it right. This claustrophobic Dutch short from Jan Verdijk (previously featured for Wild), deliciously dramatizes the absence of trust between two teenage girls, abandoned in the midst of an apocalyptic pandemic, and a lone male stranger who offers them help. – Jason Sondhi

[READ THE FULL REVIEW]

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MOST VIEWED

Run by Ruth Greenberg

An uncomfortable, but powerful short driven by a gripping performance from Niamh Algar, Run was our ‘Most Viewed’ short of February. There are many reasons this film proved so popular with our audience, but there’s no point in listing what makes this such a standout piece when our writer Serafima has already done a perfect job of that in her article (see below). 

[READ THE FULL REVIEW]

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