To tell an empathetic story with characters that barely move sounds nearly impossible, right? Yet five students manage to do exactly that in Forever, building an entire emotional and comedic world around a group of garden gnomes whose rigid ceramic faces and bodies somehow carry more determination, will, pride, and stubborn heroism than many human protagonists.

Directed by Théo Djekou, Pierre Ferrari, Cyrine Jouini, Pauline Philippart and Anissa Terrier from École des Nouvelles Images, this six-minute short transforms the quiet backyard life of kitschy statuettes into a full-blown cinematic adventure. Here, the simple act of losing golf balls over a garden fence becomes an existential threat to a fragile society that refuses to accept its destiny as merely decorative. The premise is wonderfully absurd but treated with complete sincerity, as if the fate of these small figures truly hinged on defending their territory against an invisible, unreachable enemy.

With each gnome defined through posture, staging, and timing, their typically static forms become a surprisingly expressive cast. Their rigidity is both the joke and the charm, as their quest for revenge gradually evolves into something closer to a miniature epic. What unfolds is essentially a silent comedy driven by determination and an abundance of cultural references, where the language of Hollywood blockbusters is affectionately exaggerated and distilled into compact visual sketches – without ever feeling obvious or overplayed.

Dramatic framing, heightened tension, excellent sound design, and heroic poses elevate the gnomes’ struggle into something that feels both ridiculous and oddly sincere: a parody rooted in affection, with a singular goal – to defeat their ominous enemy. This antagonist remains unseen; we witness only the consequences of their actions. The true culprits – the humans behind it all, whose careless golfing disrupts the gnomes’ world – remain just out of sight.

The gnomes prepare for confrontation, organizing themselves as if facing an invading army. And yet, the only visible adversary they encounter is something far less sinister: a dog wandering through the battlefield, blissfully unaware of the war unfolding beneath its paws. It’s a small but perfect choice. The dog is neither evil nor malicious – it’s simply behaving like a dog – and by leaving it exactly as it is, the film preserves the innocence of its world while gently reminding us that the epic struggles we imagine are often invisible to everyone else.

Forever is a playful tribute to the blockbusters of our youth and a testament to the power of animation. In a world obsessed with constant motion, these characters stand victorious without shifting a muscle, telling – through the humblest of figures – a story about courage, rivalry, and heroic determination. It’s absurd, yet strikingly precise, proving that with enough imagination, even the quietest objects in a garden can carry the weight of an epic.

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Stay with me, and by extension, with Sister!, a short film that I’ve come to adore, but which I recognize could be a hard sell for loyal S/W viewers. Not because of its lack of quality, of course, but because its sensibility is different in many ways from our typical featured short.

The story of a woman who pops in unexpectedly on her unsuspecting Brooklyn-based “sibling” (their moms supposedly share a sperm donor), Sister! is a fun, transgressive, and over-the-top queer comedy written by its stars, up-and-coming talents Julia Wendt and Tessa Belle, and is an unapologetic showcase for the duo’s comedic stylings.

So far so good, but, and perhaps I am projecting here, I was fairly resistant to the film early in my initial viewing. Partly, I recognize we’re chauvinistic towards directors, and this is, resolutely, a writer/performer film. We’ve sat through enough LA actor-driven web series to be trepidatious of this. Directed by John Onieal, notable as the creator of Grindr’s first scripted show, his direction is quite deft, but, between the film’s limited locations and the rapid pace of its joke delivery, the short presents more like a single-camera sitcom than an auteurist work. Onieal’s contributions are necessary but subtle, managing the reservoir of written comedy in a collaborative process that “involved a lot of riffing with each other, comedians, and department heads so to ensure that what we were making resonated,” and making sure the camera platformed the strengths of his stars.

Fortunately, Wendt and Belle deliver star turns. Part of the roughness of the early going is that Wendt is left to establish the initial tone by playing off of a deadpan Asha Ward, but the transfemme Wendt’s line delivery is very affected and can come off as stilted. However, like a stray note brought into harmony, Belle’s entrance into the film soon snaps the dynamic into place, and their chemistry is dynamic.

It’s also relentless. The pair’s comedy style, which is progressive, but playfully mocks the excesses and contradictions of Gen-Z wokeness in subject, is basically all-joke, all-the-time in practice. It’s frankly remarkable—the film has almost no standard exposition, no calm, sincere moments, it’s pretty much 13-minutes straight of jokes.

Naturally, your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of these—comedy is hard! But a ton of them land for me, and the great thing about a high-joke tempo is that if one falls flat, another is right on its heels. The production showed up to the shoot with a huge list of ALT jokes and planned for extensive space to improvise on set, so the team had a huge surplus of material in the edit to pick what was hitting the best, and it shows.

Even if the effectiveness of the comedy is questionable for you, I argue that it is deserving of admiration. Comedy is criminally underrepresented in shorts, and especially this sort of comedy, which is not ironic, surreal, or absurdist, but focused on jokes. Wendt and Belle blasting jokes to set up a joke which delivers a joke punchline is the closest I’ve seen to a short reaching something like classic 30 Rock, which I perceive as a gold standard. That the film also has heart is almost a miracle. In the midst of their bludgeoning, escalatingly hysterical final act, the film’s producer, Jeremy Truong, challenged the production to “find moments of emotional truth,” and while the “sisters’” ultimate catharsis and bonding is telegraphed, it genuinely lands.

A feature at last year’s Tribeca Festival, we’re pleased to present the online premiere of Sister! Take advantage of this opportunity to watch a very funny short, which we expect to be a launchpad for this impressive team, especially Wendt and Belle. 

There is something about the locker – or changing – room that consistently proves fertile ground for storytelling. Perhaps it is a space defined by vulnerability, both physical and psychological, where social dynamics are heightened and identities are negotiated. In Ce qui appartient à César (English title: Changing Rooms), the César-nominated short by Violette Gitton, this environment becomes both a site where toxic masculinity festers and a space in which its young protagonist begins to process his emotions and mature.

Changing Rooms immediately immerses the viewer in its world, opening within the charged atmosphere of a fencing class. Our first clear encounter with 12-year-old César, the film’s lead character, sees him strutting towards the camera wearing only trousers and a chest protector designed for female fencers. As one of the boys is encouraged to “strip off,” César introduces the so-called “dick-o-meter,” a ruler used to measure the body part referenced in the device’s name, signalling early on the film’s engagement with performative masculinity and peer pressure.

Billie Blain (L) and Marius Plard stars as siblings in Changing Rooms

While this burgeoning toxic masculinity dominates the film’s opening moments and helps establish César’s social environment, Gitton soon shifts tone. A more vulnerable version of the boy is soon revealed as he addresses a video camera, marking a pivotal transition. From this point – particularly following the disclosure of his sister’s assault – the film develops into a layered exploration of adolescence, responsibility, and emotional confusion.

Gitton has stated that she hoped the film would interrogate “the way boys are confronted with violence and expectations about masculinity,” and this intention is clearly reflected in her narrative approach. By presenting the story through César’s perspective, she avoids depicting the assault itself, instead focusing on the internal turmoil of a young boy grappling with how to respond. This choice not only lends the film a distinctive perspective but arguably results in a more resonant and considered portrayal than a more direct representation might have achieved.

“I could see that something intense and confusing was happening inside him”

As is often the case with stories of this nature, the film is, unfortunately, rooted in personal experience. “I was sexually assaulted when I was 14, and I was struck by the reaction of my younger brother,” Gitton explains. “I could see that something intense and confusing was happening inside him.” Reflecting on later conversations, she notes that he described it as “strange” to grow up as a boy while also recognising that “men (like he was) could also represent a threat.”

Despite this traumatic event behind the film’s conception, Changing Rooms ultimately adopts a constructive and forward-looking perspective. Gitton emphasises that her intention was not to recreate the trauma itself, but to tell a story “that could feel useful for today’s younger generations,” adding that she wanted to “create something that young people could recognize themselves in, without simplifying their emotions or their contradictions.” An intention that’s especially significant in the context of adolescence, offering a nuanced reflection on the complex and often conflicting emotions young people must navigate as they grow.

In March 2020, during the first month of COVID-19 lockdowns, Greece’s SOS Line 15900 – a national service supporting those affected by gender-based violence – recorded 325 calls, a 370% increase from the 69 calls received in the same month the previous year. Confronted by this sharp rise in violence in her home country, Greek writer-director Markela Kontaratou turned to filmmaking as a means of processing and expressing her response. The result is Scorched Earth, a London Film School graduation project that went on to screen at the Locarno Film Festival.

“The film was conceived as a Neo-Noir/Giallo that subverts the trope of a male voyeur”

Drawing on the visual and tonal traditions of Neo-Noir and Giallo, Scorched Earth is set in a sun-drenched Greek seaside town. It follows Stela, who returns home to focus on her studies, only to find herself increasingly disturbed by the presence of her abusive neighbour. As his violence towards his partner escalates, Stela becomes entangled in a possible crime, prompting her to take action seek out the truth.

Kontaratou’s intention with Scorched Earth is not only to foreground the ongoing realities of gender-based violence, but also to interrogate the ways in which such incidents are often mediated and sensationalised. As she suggests, the film critiques how violence is transformed into a “serialized, grotesque sensation” within media culture. To explore this, she turns to genre, incorporating elements of horror and thriller in order to “create a world that reflects the way in which femininities are treated in real life and in film.”

“Artificial was also our choice of purple moonlight, creating a surreal, mysterious atmosphere, connecting to the character of Vicky who also wears purple”, director Kontaratou discussing the production

With regards to production, the film adopts a distinctive aesthetic. Shot on 16mm, with a pronounced purple hue in its night sequences, Scorched Earth embraces a stylised visual language that introduces a layer of artificiality to an otherwise grounded subject. For Kontaratou, this is a deliberate strategy: “I tried to portray the female experience of the male gaze by putting the audience in the place of being conscious that they are watching something constructed.” Techniques such as “dirty” point-of-view shots, zooms, and expressive camera movements work to unsettle the viewer, continually suggesting the presence of something hidden within the frame.

The result is a deliberately voyeuristic experience, in which both the protagonist and the audience occupy a position of uneasy spectatorship. Kontaratou acknowledges that the film resists narrative closure, offering more questions than answers. As she explains, the intention is for viewers to recognise that these narrative decisions were “plot points rather than plot holes,” inviting reflection rather than resolution. The core takeaway from Scorched Earth is a persistent and troubling question: “why we are all so often silent onlookers when faced with situations of gendered violence?”

Margarethe 89 was a bolt out of the blue during the 2023 festival season. Its mature spy-thriller plot line and grounded, historical realism felt like a novel pairing for a stylish, adult-focused animation, making the film an instant splash at spots like Director’s Fortnight, Annecy, and Curtas Vila do Conde. Animation is often pigeon-holed as a medium for the fantastic—a way to represent the unreal via strange worlds and creatures or represent interiority through dreams and visions, but Margarethe 89 instead utilizes the control inherent in animation to recreate for viewers the stifling surveillance state of the East German Stasi, to wonderfully paranoid and claustrophobic effect.

Directed by Lucas Malbrun, based on a script co-written with his frequent collaborator, Marie Larrivé, the filmmaker was born in Munich in 1990, and grew up in a reunited Germany where “strange revelations about this vanished country were omnipresent.” Inspired by the regime’s tactic of “Zersetzung” or “dissolution,” he sought to transpose the story of Gretchen from Goethe’s Faust to a new context. In an interview with Vimeo Staff Picks for the short’s online premiere, he notes that, “Gretchen’s love for Faust is based on a misunderstanding: he comes across as a young and righteous man, but is in fact an old man in pact with the devil…exploring the figure of the manipulative male, himself under the influence of third party…was compelling to me.”

Heinrich is that manipulative male, but Malbrun sees him as a victim of the regime, too. The film intriguingly begins on a surreal note with a parade where, instead of figures from pop culture – Snoopy, or Mickey, and the like – Heinrich witnesses a giant floating bust of Karl Marx. Malbrun is emphasizing the totalizing nature of ideology and how indoctrination begins very young. The film’s visual look reinforces this concept of arrested development, deploying bright colors in the images, added to the film by the use of normal, school-standard felt-tip pens.

Revolution is currently in the air in our media, as the best TV show of recent memory served as an epic chronicle of a nascent resistance movement, while the recently crowned Best Picture winner is about what we build once revolutionary fires burn out. The tragedy of Margarethe 89 is a nice complement to this moment, and shows how animation can be a strength within mainstream genres and storytelling modes. I’ve often noted that period pieces, despite their popularity in features and television, are tough for short films to execute. Margarethe 89, which evokes the popular German series Deutschland 83 via its title, feeds audience appetites for this sort of mainstream genre, with the level of sophistication and style they are accustomed to. It’s another big swing for the French production company, Eddy, which, via pieces like this, Larrivé and Malbrun’s prior film Noir-Soleil, or 2018 S/W selection, Le Mans 1955, is leading the way in showing how animation can tackle genres associated with live-action in sober, but artistically progressive fashion.

As children, our parents can feel like the centre of our world – figures of stability and/or authority who are easily placed on a pedestal. Inevitably, however, there comes a moment when that perception begins to shift, and we start to recognise them as flawed, complex individuals, no less uncertain than we are. It is this quiet but profound transition that Dovydas Drakšas captures with sensitivity and restraint in his London Film School short, Praeis (It’ll Pass) – a film that had its World Premiere in the La Cinef section of Cannes in 2025.

A film focused on perception – how we see ourselves, how we interpret others, and how we are, in turn, perceived – Praeis unfolds with a contemplative rhythm, anchored by two finely judged performances. Ieva Kaniušaitė plays Ada, a daughter beginning to reassess both her father and her place in the world, while Šarūnas Puidokas brings a quiet vulnerability to the role of her father. At 27-minutes long, the film sits at the longer end of the short film spectrum, yet its duration feels justified, largely due to the emotional authenticity these performances sustain throughout.

Šarūnas Puidokas stars as a cigarette smuggler and father at a crossroads in his life.

This extended runtime affords the film the space to observe rather than follow its character, allowing the audience to gradually become immersed in their emotional terrain. While strained parent–child relationships are a familiar narrative framework, Drakšas approaches the material with a notable degree of empathy and nuance. Rather than privileging one perspective over the other, he presents both father and daughter as fully realized individuals, each navigating their own limitations, expectations, and emotional blind spots. The result is a relationship that feels lived-in and recognizably human, avoiding the reductive tendencies that often accompany such stories.

From a programming perspective, articulating precisely what distinguishes a film can sometimes prove elusive. While Praeis may not immediately announce itself through high-concept storytelling or formal experimentation, there is a quiet assurance in Drakšas’ direction that suggests a filmmaker with a clear and confident voice. This quality – subtle, but pervasive – manifests in the film’s pacing, its performances, and its willingness to sit with emotional ambiguity. It is, perhaps, less about what the film does, and more about how assuredly it does it.

Grief is a strange thing. It can lie dormant for years, settling beneath the surface, only to rise again when you least expect it. A sound, a place, a smell – and suddenly it spills over, pulling you back into something you thought you had long since made peace with. We’re told that time softens the sharp edges of heartache, that memories become easier to carry, but more often than not they simply shift and distort, changing shape as they move through us. And it’s within that fluid, unpredictable space that Telsche finds its flow.

Directed by Sophie Colfer and Ala Nunu (Ahead), Telsche is a conceptual short that conveys the strange, lingering ache of loss and nostalgia in a way that hits close to home, even though its storytelling is abstract rather than literal. In just eight-minutes it makes this weight of memory feel tangible without spelling it out, and the animation is a thing of beauty: shapes and colours change and shimmer, sometimes solid, sometimes fluid, so that a single blue can feel like water one moment and a yawning void the next. Every design choice feels carefully considered, and everything comes together to make the story feel both personal and universal. It’s easy to see why this beautifully rendered meditation on grief has already made waves at Annecy, Anima and more.

“We felt that the clean 2D digital style worked best to emphasise the bleak contrasts of this world” – Colfer & Nunu discussing their aesthetic

Telsche follows a young girl chasing a memory of her mother. The story is minimal and dreamlike, loosely charting her journey as she notices a stone carved with her mother’s face at home, rushes outside to the salt flats, and sees her vanish into a blue void. Determined to follow, she dives into dark, twisting tunnels underground, uncovering a hidden world that brings her closer to a reunion. 

The story is actually rooted in Colfer’s own memories. After moving back to Hong Kong, where she was born and grew up, she was reunited with the vast sea of her youth and the memories of her family, especially her mother, a Japanese diver, and her father, an English sailor. “One of her earliest memories with her mother was of watching pearl divers in Japan”, the directors shared with S/W.“They would dip and descend in their white uniforms, without tanks of air, and collect pearls from the depths. These concepts of memory and forgetting therefore permeate the entire film, reflected visually in the contrast between light and dark and in the choice of still, wide shots, wherein the subjects are barely visible, on the verge of being seen but as of yet unremembered.” 

But the film doesn’t rely on distance alone. It counterbalances these expansive compositions with close-ups that pull us into Telsche’s interior world, creating a push and pull between detachment and intimacy. While the wide shots place her within an overwhelming expanse, emphasising her smallness and isolation, the tighter framing invites us to linger with her, to feel the weight of what she carries. 

“Our collaboration took (and continues to take) place across a distance spanning thousands of kilometres and an eight-hour time difference” – the directorial duo discuss working together

Pulling back, beyond these compositional choices, there’s something to be said about the sheer level of craft on display here. What makes Telsche so striking is just how much care and precision sits behind its apparent simplicity. This is anything but effortless. Every scene carries the weight of countless hours of animating frame by frame, of trial and error and a good helping of raw talent, and you can feel it in the way the animation moves and breathes. The limited colour palette, rather than restricting the film, does the opposite. It forces a kind of creative discipline that pays off, pushing the animators to find depth, contrast and atmosphere in every scene. Shapes and colours become more than stylistic choices too – they act as storytelling tools in their own right, continually reshaping the space around the character. Paired with the eerie, echoing sound design, which seems to stretch and bend the space even further, the result is deeply immersive. It’s a film that understands exactly how to use its tools, and never wastes a single one.

And when it ends, Telsche doesn’t so much conclude as drift – leaving behind an impression rather than an answer. Like grief, it resists being pinned down, instead settling somewhere deeper, where feeling outlasts understanding.

Muscogee artist Dana Tiger shares her life story – the ups and downs, her career, her family and their iconic apparel company – with exceptional honesty and inspiring resilience. In Tiger, director Loren Waters paints an incredibly compelling portrait of this remarkable artist, poignantly immersing us in Dana’s perspective of the world around her, and revealing how art has served as a healing practice in her family.

“The biggest inspiration behind Tiger was Dana Tiger herself”, Waters candidly confessed. While that is true for most artist portrait documentaries, Waters explained that the film was “really rooted in speaking to her character and really trying to create a painterly image with her, but also a portrait”. Dana’s voice feels present throughout all the directorial choices in the film. From her unwavering positivity to the artistic legacy of her family, the film feels incredibly personal and invites the audience into her world with a rare sense of intimacy.

“This film is a tribute to Dana’s life and her family’s incredible journey”

Waters gives Dana a voice, allowing her to share her own story in her own words. Her resilience and energy is infused in the visuals and pacing of the film, with DP Robert L. Hunter framing her in a way that makes Tiger feel like a homage to her and her work. This approach also creates a space for Dana to share her challenges and successes with agency, making the film all the more empowering. Eva Dubovoy’s editing and Amanda Moy’s sound design further enhance the empowering feeling of the film, adding to a rhythm that creates an effective emotional journey. 

“This film is a tribute to Dana’s life and her family’s incredible journey. It seeks to honor not only their legacy of artistic innovation but also their resilience in the face of adversity”, Waters shared. Despite the grief and adversity captured, Tiger also show the hope radiating from Dana in every second of the short. Her presence is not only inspiring but drives the film in a deeply engaging and captivating way. Waters crafts a work that feels celebratory while carrying an undeniable emotional depth that takes the audience by surprise and makes the watching experience so powerful.

After its World Premiere at the 2025 edition of Sundance, Tiger made its way around the festival circuit with notable stops at SXSW, deadCenter, Seattle, Aspen and the Palm Springs ShortFest. It also picked up multiple awards along the way, and was eligible for consideration at the 2026 Oscars. Waters is currently working on a short narrative film called A Map to the Next World.

Trans films are no longer niche. Looking at our collection of tagged films on Shortverse, we see dozens of works that have been major awards contenders or are streaming on the world’s biggest services. There isn’t a need for any special treatment—these are amazing works that compete on equal terms with their peers in making us laugh, or think, or cry. 

They do serve an important additional function, however, illuminating a population and a way of life that feels very foreign to many, thus fulfilling the spirit of a famous Roger Ebert quote describing cinema as “a machine that generates empathy.” Recent political trends in America and elsewhere have raised concerns that the culture’s recent progress on trans-acceptance will be rolled back, and we know there is real anxiety and fear about this. 

March 31st is “Transgender Day of Visibility,” a relatively recent demarcation, but one that resonates with values we hold at Short of the Week around showcasing perspectives outside of the ordinary. Considering the larger context, it feels more urgent than ever. We’re happy to mark the occasion with this collection of short films our curatorial team has put together, a mix of recent films and old favorites. 

🏳️‍⚧️ Celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility

Click on Image to view the Collection on Shortverse.

A drummer is confronted with the reality that age is beginning to catch up with him, gradually affecting his ability to play and forcing him to accept the decline of his career. Drawing from personal experience and a deep connection to music, writer/director Dan Silver crafts a narrative that speaks to the universal experience of confronting the passage of time. Sensitive and emotionally resonant, this slice-of-life drama carries a quietly immersive quality.

“Artists so often associate their entire identities with their work, and to lose that due to age, is genuinely heartbreaking”

“Drumming has always been an integral part of my life”, Silver shared when we asked him what inspired the film. Two of his mentors were his grandfather, to whom the film is dedicated, and famous musician Luther Rix. The filmmaker reflects that his own journey of growing up and sharpening his drumming skills mirrored the experience of watching his two mentors growing older, noting that “the physicality of being a drummer certainly took its toll on both of them”. Witnessing that decline, he explains, prompted much introspection about time and how it can affect and restrict a passion. 

By interweaving the themes of age and passion, Silver taps into a complex identity crisis. “Artists so often associate their entire identities with their work, and to lose that due to age, is genuinely heartbreaking”, he notes – an idea that sits at the core of the film. Despite the specificities of the situation, there is an undeniable universality in what the protagonist of A Beat to Rest goes through. With Silver’s lens painting an emotional portrait of this character with subtlety and nuance, drawing us in effortlessly. The authenticity of the writing truly grounds the film and makes it so effective.

Shot on film, it is not surprising that DP Kevin Johnson gives the images a texture that complements the narrative perfectly. It also brings a melancholy and nostalgia to the visual language that enhances the depth of the story. Silver also challenges himself, embracing long takes and giving the audience the room to process events alongside the main character. While the editing – by Silver himself – gives A Beat to Rest having a pace that echoes the main character’s state of mind, echoing the fact that he is slowing down.

Luther Rix – the inspiration behind the narrative – also stars in the film

Given the subject matter, sound and music play a crucial role. Silver composed the music with Alexandra Funes and they never fall into the trap of having the score be too heavy-handed with a reliant on drums. Instead, it is carefully composed to embody the presence of the music in the protagonist’s mind and how his perception of it evolves throughout the film. 

At the centre of the film is a deeply affecting performance from Luther Rix himself. Silver had shared the script with him to get some feedback, and he ultimately took on the lead role. The relevance of the material made up for his lack of experience in front of a camera, as he brings an impressive rawness to both the character and the emotional turmoil he goes through.

A Beat to Rest is having its World Premiere today on Short of the Week and Silver is already working on a new short film titled Her Painted Gaze, while also developing the feature adaptation of his previous short film Benign, which explores living with a mysterious chronic illness while navigating the chaos of the US healthcare system.