short fORMS resources

 RECOMMENDED SHORT FILMS
  • "A Teachable Moment" by Jason Jeffrey - Henry lies at the side of the road, bleeding out from a gunshot wound. A young mother with a bizarre sense of appropriate uses his final moments as a teachable lesson for her 6 year old son. (7 minutes)
  • "Balance" by Mark Ram - Friends Henderson and Morris are climbing a mountain, connected by a rope. They take an easy passage, but a loss of oversight leads to Henderson's fall. Morris cannot prevent falling too. Seconds later he finds himself hanging above an abyss, realizing the balance is unstable. (10 minutes)
  • "Best" by William Oldroyd  (3 minutes)
  • "Bubble" by Alyssa Lerner -  While her world crumbles from the 2008 financial crisis, a Filipina teenager is determined to avoid two unstoppable forces: her family's home foreclosure and the creeping realization that she has feelings for her female friend. (17:42 minutes)
  • "David" by Zach Woods (11 minutes)
  • "Dig" by Toby Halbrooks (9 minutes)
  • "Doh" by Andrew Ahn - Nick is a Korean-American living in L.A. He has a supportive boyfriend he lives with, and a cute dog. Furthermore he has a strong, traditionalist family that loves him, yet Nick has yet to come out to his parents. On the occasion of his nephew’s Dol, a traditional Korean celebration held on a baby’s first birthday, Nick feels the full weight of being an outsider even in the most intimate of family settings. Ahn has created an identity film that, by referencing his own experience,  speaks to both being gay and being Asian. Casting his own family in the film, Ahn created Dol partly as a way to come out to his family. They perform their roles without knowing the overall story, and for months after principal photography would pester Ahn to know more about the film.
    (10 minutes)
  • "Ella" by Dan Chen - Left behind by the same loved one, two Asian American youth search for connection in their small Midwestern town. (15 minutes)
  • “For Nonna Anna,” by Luis De Filippis  - As a young trans woman cares for her Italian grandmother, she discovers a tender bond in their shared vulnerability. (13:21 minutes) - About "For Nonna Anna," Indie Wire
  • "Hala" by Minhal Baig (13 minutes)
  • "H.B." by Gaspar Palacio - A one minute short film. The tale of a survivalist. When the siren rings in the distance, a family has to get inside the shelter... Nothing will ever be the same again. (1 minute)
  • "High Hoops" by Tanner Jarman (13 minutes)
  • "I Feel Stupid" by Milena Pastreich - I Feel Stupid is a short film about Lein, an inexperienced 15 year-old, who is confronted with a sexually charged reality when Amber steps into the picture. (15 minutes) 
  • "I'm Not the Indian You Had in Mind," Thomas King - A video exploration offering insight as to how First Nations people today are changing old ideas and empowering themselves in the greater community. (5 minutes)
  • Indigenous Films You Should Be Watching
  • "Masked" - MASKED was created in conjunction with the 15-18 year old’s from the Knox ‘ Free To Be Me’ LGBTQIA Youth group (12:53 minutes)
  • "Nine Behind" by Sophy Romvari (11 minutes)
  • "Marlon Brando" by Vincent Tilanus (20 minutes)
  • "Partners" by Joey Ally - Professional and life partners Kate and Leigh have shared everything for years, from their apartment to the popular bar they co-own. When a slump in their sex life forces them to reconsider their relationship, they must confront how intertwined their lives have become. (6 minutes)
  • "Places, Thank You, Places" written (and starring) ​Gary Richardson and directed by J.J. Adler - An overconfident understudy lets a taste of fame go right to his head. ​ (22 minutes)
  • "The Baby" by Ali Asgari - Transporting you to the streets of Iran, where we follow a couple of women in a precarious situation, Ali Asgari’s The Baby is an immersive 16-min short with an unnerving undercurrent running throughout a rather straightforward, linear story. With just hours to find a temporary home for a baby, the pair resort to desperate measures in this thought-provoking film that touches on themes of authority, society and family. (18 minutes)
  • "The Stutterer" by Benjamin Cleary - As the Oscar-winning short film “Stutterer” shows, communication, like love, is never easy. (13 minutes)
  • "We are in this Apart" by Yung Chang - What do you get when you cross a filmmaker and a puppeteer stuck in quarantine? You get We Are in This Apart. Filmed during our toddler’s nap times with limited resources save for a smartphone, the internet, and a partner with a PhD in puppetry, We Are in This Apart takes our collective longing for joyous interconnection and interprets it through the eyes of our protagonist who our First AD toddler named “Coco". Award-winning filmmaker, Yung Chang’s latest film This is Not a Movie, about iconoclastic journalist Robert Fisk, premiered at Toronto Int’l Film Festival ’19 and is currently on the festival circuit and virtual theatrical release. Annie Katsura Rollins is a researcher, artist, and educator. Her PhD dissertation (2019) focused on the fragility of traditional performance forms in modern China. She made a toilet paper crankie Cantastoria for the recent online edition of New York’s Great Small Works Toy Theatre Festival. (4:48 minutes)​


​SHORT FILM SITES


SHORT FILM FESTIVALS
VIDEO POETRY
WEB SERIES

​WEB SERIES FESTIVALS ~ AWARDS ~ PLATFORMS

RECOMMENDED READING
  • Scriptwriting for Web Series: Writing for the Digital Age by Marie Drennan, Yuri Baranovsky, and Vlad Baranovsky


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