ShortStick

This past month Robin had a blast attending the 2025 London Film Festival and is reporting back with several of his favourite shorts he saw at the fest. In Part 2 below he reviews The Big Bad Wolf, Forgotten Routes and Another Other. The Big Bad Wolf, dir. Leo Wright Stop motion filmmaker Leo Wright, through the world famous Aardman Animation Studios, brings us the BAFTA qualifying The Big Bad Wolf . The film cleverly riffs on what is perhaps the most famous kids fairy tale o

This past month Robin had a blast attending the 2025 London Film Festival and is reporting back with several of his favourite shorts he saw at the fest. In Part 1 below he reviews Elephant Families, Cardboard, End of Play and happiness. Elephant Families, dir. Elena Escalante The former part of the title stems from the south London area of Elephant and Castle, a district which houses a community of people with roots from a mix of Latin American cultures who have come together

The Fisherman , dir. Calvin Brown From the opening moments of The Fisherman , a portentous bible quote from the book of Job in an old-timey font over a screen of ominous static, it is clear that this is not the usual animated film: no cutesy anthropomorphic animals will be learning the power of friendship here. The Rankin and Bass-styled characters belie the dramatic hardships and evangelical yearning that is about to overcome this animated world as a devout fisherman has his

As the end of the year and the Oscars draw near, we have a few more festivals we are honoured to be covering, including the always stellar AFI FEST! The programmers have curated several thoughtful blocks spanning animation, narrative and documentary containing some of the best short films of the year, including Oscar hopefuls previously covered here in Snow Bear, The Singers and Shanti Rides Shotgun as well as other favourites of ours like Nervous Energy and Pavilhão. Robin,

Without Perfection , dir. Vega Moltke-Leth Historically, women have suffered immensely from societal pressure upon them. Each century represented a different degree of expectations, ranging from the necessity of raising children as their sole function to the pursuit of immaculate visual beauty as a means of aesthetic appeal. Therefore, the late-stage capitalism increased the pressure and the beauty patterns, influenced by social media and the urging of advertisement. The goal

The Song of Drifters , dir. Xindi Zhang The Song of Drifters  is a poetic and experimental animated documentary that captures the voices and emotions of a generation constantly in motion, of young people who drift between places, unable to settle, yet carrying with them an evolving and sometimes contradictory sense of home. Through the overlapping voices of eight interviewees and an evocative hybrid visual style, the film explores what it means to belong when permanence is el

I Remember, dir. Jane Deng From New York University the 52nd Student Academy Awards winner Jane Deng brings us her documentary film I Remember . On the surface the student short film is a COVID-19 documentary shot largely on ground zero, at the homes and hospitals of the Wuhan population - where the director was “lucky” to have perfect timing; With a masters degree and a new husband in her trunk she traveled from the UK back to China towards the end of 2019. At the time the p

Dad's Not Home, dir. Jan Saczek A birthday notification buzzes on Kuba's phone, but it goes unmentioned. He and his younger brother Bartek stir awake in their bunk bed and begin the familiar routine of the day. This is not a typical household, though. Their father, David, is suffering from some form of dementia, and the boys share the burden of caring for him while also preparing themselves for school. As they cook, dress him, and keep the house in order, the implication is c

This past weekend Josh attended Ottawa International Animation Festival and took in some of the best the animation world has to offer. Here are three shorts that stuck out as some of the best of the bunch! States of Matter , dir. Marvin Hauck An experimental journey unfolds in Marvin Hauck’s enigmatic short film States of Matter,  a strata-cut animation, born from the alchemy of wax and paper. The film echoes the mysterious cycle of metamorphosis: molten wax, once fluid and f

Confession , dir. Rebeka Bizubová Documentaries have the formal capacity of emanating truth and reality. Hence, the possibilities are infinite. An example of the limitless power of the medium is Spoved' (Confession) by Rebeka Bizubová. The Slovak director portrays her personal story of a sexual assault that happened a few years ago and still echoes loudly in her mind. The director analyzes her personal pain in two different scenarios: confessing to her best friend and confess

In ‘ A Sparrow's Song ’ we follow an elderly widow who finds herself in the harrowing throes of the struggles of World War II. She is serving as an air raid warden in a busy shelter, with daily occurrences of air raid alarms slowly wearing down her hope of returning to a normal life. Already struggling to overcome the grief of losing her partner, she is forced to witness the suffering of the people and children around her as they all scurry to take shelter together. One morni

flower_gan , dir. Mati Granica “The work that you are seeing is perfectly legal—but should it be?” The unconventionally inventive short film  flower_gan stands at the crossroads of creativity and technology, confronting head-on the future of filmmaking with both curiosity and critique. It challenges the promises of AI-driven creation where speed and scale threaten to dissolve the human touch and asks what is lost when art becomes data. In a landscape rushing toward automatio

The 12 Inch Pianist , dir. Lucas Ansel Lucas Ansel's short film is centered around a classic joke involving a bar, a genie with a hearing problem, and a miniature pianist. Ansel, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, created this as his senior film, drawing inspiration from Simon Rich's short story "Guy Walks Into a Bar," published in The New Yorker in 2013. Rich took the well-worn and somewhat crude gag and extended it into the world just beyond the titular punchli

The Shyness of Trees , dirs. Sofiia Chuikovska, Loïck du Plessis D’Argentré, Lina Han, Simin He, Jiaxin Huang, Maud Le Bras and Bingqing Shu The Shyness of Trees is a meditative story about 40 year old Hélène who takes a trip to visit her aging mother. She lives alone in the french countryside, surrounded by thriving plants and garden insects taking up every corner of her home. Hélène knocks on the front door but gets no response, so she lets herself in only to find her moth

In Part 2 of our Student Academy Award Winner series we break into the documentary category to review Tatiana McCabe's Tides of Life. See our full review below! Tides of Life , dir. Tatiana McCabe Jacques-Yves Cousteau is quintessential to documentary filmmaking and marine biology. After creating his diving suit, the multi-talented French man would document his dives, culminating in the 1956 film The Silent World, co-directed with Louis Malle. It won the 1956 Palme d'Or. Henc

Welcome to our Student Academy Award Series. We are very excited to be back for a third year highlighting and celebrating the Student Academy Winners leading up to the medal ceremony on October 6th. We kick things off with Live Action winner Kubrick, Live I Love You, directed by Zefan Wang. Kubrick, Like I Love You , dir. Zefan Wang Fei is facing a problem that would horrify any cinephile. “My girlfriend doesn’t know who Kubrick is!” (Or Renoir, or Bergman, or Tarkovsky, or…)

Here at ShortStick we like to leave no stone unturned, exploring every genre of short film, including experimental shorts and some of the stranger corners of short film. Some of the best work in short film can be found in more experimental blocks that TIFF offers like Wavelengths and Strange Cuts. We are lucky to have writers on this site like Josh and Pedro who are passionate about this unique style of film-making. Here they write about five of their favourites from these bl

TIFF, as always, brought the heat this year with their short film programs. It is always so exciting to attend a festival full of world and international premieres with every program having a little mix of everything genre-wise. For Short Cuts 5 and 6 we chose to review some of our favourites from the programs including Dish Pit, Arguments in Favor of Love and All The Empty Rooms. Dish Pit, dir. Anna Hopkins A year and a half ago, I quit my job at a local radio station. I had

Short Cuts 3 and 4 are in the books! Short Cuts 3 offered one of the strongest lineups of the festival with standouts like Sea Star, Asparagus Bear and the star-studded The Non-Actor. Throughout both Short Cuts 3 and Short Cuts 4 a common through-line appeared in three shorts I have reviewed for these programs. Check out below as we review Dust to Dreams, What We Leave Behind and Ali - all stories about finding and using your voice. Dust to Dreams, dir. Idris Elba Idris Elba

It has been an amazing start to TIFF this year! Over the next couple weeks we will be covering shorts from every program at TIFF, starting with our favourites from Short Blocks 1 and 2. Each block had some really strong shorts. In Short Cuts 1 Jazz Infernal was a highlight as new immigrant, and son of a legendary trumpet player spends his first day in Canada. Agapito gave us heartfelt emotion and DISC brought down the house with laughter and its stellar screenplay and acting.