Writing about short film

No concessions to runtime. No studio note that says "but does the audience know who to root for." No distributor waiting for a marketable cut. The constraints of the short are the point — and they produce a different kind of honesty.

Eleven films from this year's shorts programme, with notes on what made each one worth watching a second time. Not a ranking — just the ones that opened something.

Over twelve films in six years, the Japanese-Dutch director has made the personal essay the defining unit of her practice. We spent a month with her catalog trying to understand why it works.

A film wins at Clermont-Ferrand, screens at twenty festivals, earns its director a reputation — and then vanishes. We tracked a cohort of award-winning shorts from 2015 to see where they ended up.

We started FilmZee in March 2019 with two hundred films and forty members. Six years later we have some thoughts about the form, about preservation, and about what it means to take something seriously.