Excellent Short Films

Just Withnail · February 03, 2017, 04:02:57 AM

We should definitely have a general short film thread.

Maybe someone can change the title, removing the "well known directors" part?

Most of the films that excite me these days are shorts, let's have a place to put those. This older thread is a bit messy and most of the links dead, so maybe we could also make it a separate thread? What say you? Linking-wise, it's good that people link from official places, as they are likely to stay up.

TEN METER TOWER

Wilder already posted Ten Meter Tower in the Shoutbox but it feels like a good one to kick off with. It's produced by Ruben Östlund's company Plattform, who always make really interesting things and I'm sure I'll post more from them.

Ten Meter Tower (doc)

Such a brilliant study in human behavior. The fact that they know they're being filmed really makes this a film about how people want to portray themselves.

The couple near the start, with their wonderfully overdone romantic banter, that almost feels perfectly scripted, tells us so much about how they see their relationship, who they want to be to each other (at least in the eyes of others). The line that's translated as "heaven" is actually "Nangijala", which is the first fictional afterworld in Astrid Lindgren's Brothers Lionheart, that ends with the main characters jumping to their deaths and into the next afterworld. It's such a grandly romantic thing to reference in this moment, and the way the couple builds the situation up to be like a huge fictional crescendo-moment where they get to confirm their love and security to each other is just incredibly endearing to watch. That moment when the boy says he's just "blocking her out for a bit" and she thinks she's talking too much and he rushes to say that "no no that's not what I meant" is very revealing.

The older woman in the middle is like a Bergman actor in every way. The way she casts a quick almost-glance at the camera before staring into space like an actor about to monologue, before delivering her extremely Bergmanesque "Nej, ja vägar inte!" / "No, I don't dare" + clenched fists, arms locked and one big downwards movement enunciating "dare". When she stops in the stairs we also notice her impeccable sense of dramatic pause, and a kind of familiar synecdoche where the absence of her face suddenly tells us so much more about what she's thinking than if we actually saw it - everything around her tells us what she's thinking.

The dynamic between the two boys right after is also very interesting: how the one who is going to jump starts off scared like everyone else, and spends a long time working up the courage, and after he finally does it, and returns, he has no sympathy for the completely similar fright of his friend.

These, and about a thousand more things to say about it.

Just Withnail · March 06, 2017, 09:39:31 AM

Chekhov

I love this film so fucking much. Have seen it again and again. Family, love, time, troubles. So deceptively simple, and the simlicity forefronts everything: the familiar sadness of home-video accentuated and made stranger by that empty blackness surrounding it, the distancing phone-noise of a phone-voice constrasted to the banter that reveals years spent in close spacial proximity (love), the minimalist cosmology of families, love and time that it draws up.

Heart-wrenching.

5 mins.

jenkins · March 06, 2017, 11:14:28 AM

you seduced me maybe but maybe you didn't because it's everything you said

wilder · June 14, 2017, 05:47:08 PM

Dude who directed the latest has some other interesting stuff on his vimeo channel. The latter two music videos are also chock-full of great brutalist architecture

You Are Awake

Squire and Partners - Perspectives

Territoire - Blanc

wilder · May 23, 2018, 05:13:12 AM

Man Gives Birth - Directed by Brent Weinbach

NSFW

Alethia · June 11, 2018, 02:40:45 PM

Here's one that has received a great amount of attention as of late, including a nice little write-up and interview over at ebert.com

One of the best shorts I've seen.

Fry Day, Directed by Laura Moss.

On the night of serial killer Ted Bundy's execution, a Florida teenager is taken for a ride.

Alethia · July 10, 2018, 12:13:39 PM

Observatory Blues

An L.L. Bean-clad ode to writers, their loved ones, and the expanding universe narrated by Hugo Guinness (The Grand Budapest Hotel).

Starring Tom Schiller (SNL) and Amy Sedaris.

With Ana Fabrega, Jo Firestone, Eric Johnson, Casey Jost, Lucian Julianelle, and Michael McKean.

16mm

This shit is absolutely glorious.

wilder · September 09, 2018, 03:19:44 AM

"Language Academy" web series written and directed by Jacob Farmer and Philip Hoover

WorldForgot · December 10, 2018, 05:30:49 PM

Seems to be cause for Kate Arizmendi appreciation:

wilder · February 05, 2019, 06:14:07 AM

Diagnosis (2017) - Written and Directed by Eva Riley

wilder · February 11, 2019, 07:48:49 PM

Growth (2016) by Sil van der Woerd

Growth portrays the rise and downfall of a family over the course of 20 years, in one living room, in a single shot.