ShortStick

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…)