New Oscar Short Films

This week I have done a fair amount of reorganising on my short films website. This was prompted by an email from Shorts International, a company of which I had never heard, claiming copyright on several short films.

Anyway, it has forced me to watch yet more short films from those that were Oscar nominated over the last few years and I have found many that I prefer to the eventual winners.

One of those films now added to the Oscar Short Films page is The Substitute (Il Supplente) by Andrea Jublin. The director plays the main character himself – a substitute teacher who seems to be more hormonal than his class and instigates a series of crazy games in which his students are marked on their ability to mimic animals… you’d be forgiven for asking whether this guy really is a teacher…

Another new short film is Miracle Fish, written and directed by Luke Doolan. This is one of only two Australian films on the site and was nominated for its Short Film Academy Award in 2010. It is something of a slow-burner but worth the patience. We follow unpopular schoolboy Joe on his 8th birthday. After suffering at the hands of the playground bullies, Joe sneaks off to the sick bay, wishing that everyone would go away. 

He soon finds that his miracle fish may have turned his wish into bloody reality… enjoy!

Short Film From The Rest Of The World

This week I have added a new global page to my short films website.


South America, Africa and Australasia are underrepresented on my website so this page is the first of two pages from the rest of the world. 


The first film on the page is No Support (Sin Sostén) by Mexican duo René Castillo and Antonio Urruti. This stop-motion animation was nominated for a Palm d'Or at Cannes in 1998. It sees a suicidal man climb onto the rooftop between two billboards - one with a busty pin-up advertising a bra (the title is a play on words!) and the other with a mounted cowboy. When the time comes to jump, these two  huge advertisements come to life...


The next film is Kibera Kid by Nathan Collett. I spent a long time searching the IMDb for short films from Africa and after watching a few decided Kibera Kid was the best. Collett is actually an American filmmaker who won a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006, allowing him to research and make films in Kibera, Africa's largest slum. 


Kibera Kid is one of the resultant pieces, a short fiction film focusing on a young member of a gang caught while on a stealing mission. He is saved from the baying mob by a do-gooder, but this man becomes the victim of the gang's revenge and our Kibera Kid is meant to deliver the fatal blow.


The final two films on my page of short films from the rest of the world are Signs by Patrick Hughes, and Alive In Joburg by Neill Blomkamp. I may have already blogged about these films but will leave them for another day today. Feel free to watch them in the meantime!

Asian Short Films

This week I have added a new page of Asian Short Films to my short films website.


The first of the new films is Two Solutions For One Problem by Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most illustrious filmmaker. Kiarostami wrote and directed a whole heap of short films in the 1970s and 1980s, starting at the Centre for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (I kid you not!). Two Solutions For One Problem is a simple story of right and wrong that still resonates today (and Ahmadinejad should watch it!). 


The next new film is Strangers by Eraz Tadmor. Ezra, a filmmaker from Tel Aviv, suggested I use one of his short films and I was happy to oblige. Strangers is a vignette from his feature film of the same name, but it works very well as a stand alone short and won several awards on the short film festival circuit. Two strangers exchange glances on the Tel Aviv underground but are then joined by an unwanted mob. 


The tension rises as they approach the next station... can they escape the situation?


Another new Asian film is Little Terrorist by Ashvin Kumar. Little Terrorist was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. Set on the border between Pakistan and India, where a village has been split in two during the partition, it follows the travails of a Pakistani boy who is caught on the wrong side of the fence when he goes to retrieve a cricket ball. An Indian father and daughter disguise him and shelter him for the day but their deep-rooted suspicion of Muslims is impossible to disguise.


I'll leave the rest for you to watch. Enjoy!