Short Film
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Metrograph To Screen Filmmaker 25 New Faces Shorts on December 6
Filmmaker is very happy to be partnering on December 6, 2025 with New York’s Metrograph for an evening of shorts drawn from the magazine’s 2025 25 New Faces list. I wrote for the Metrograph’s calendar: Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces list has annually curated a cross-section of emerging and impressive new independent film talent. Directors, writers, actors, below-the-line—these are filmmakers who have made indelible work in the past year and will go on to shape tomorrow’s film culture. With the magazine’s 29th edition of the list in its current edition, the editors have curated from their work an excitingly diverse selection […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2025 -
“I Just Need More Money To Make the Longer Version of It”: On the Proof-of-Concept PROOF Film Festival
From Half Nelson to Whiplash, Bottle Rocket to Short Term 12, making a short film as a feature proof-of-concept has been a time-tested independent film strategy to generate screenplay interest and secure feature financing. But, in the past, the “proof-of-concept” part of a short’s identity is usually hidden to audiences, revealed only by the filmmakers as they then circulate their screenplays and pitch decks. More recently, though, the proof-of-concept short has come into its own as a sub-genre worthy of its own consideration and showcase. Currently in the middle of its three-day third edition is the American Cinematheque’s PROOF Film […]
by Jesse Pasternack on Nov 8, 2025 -
Find Your Power: Advice to New Filmmakers from Side Hustle Director Abby Harri
A new friend came up to me after a screening and Q&A recently for my first short as a director, Side Hustle. “I realized that you’re completely honest, in a way that must be deeply painful to you.” My brain immediately went to an answer I had just given to an audience question. A young woman asked, “Did you always want to direct or did casting work inspire you to direct?” My response was immediate: “I always knew I wanted to direct but my self-worth was in the gutter. So, I had to work on that most of all.” She […]
by Abby Harri on Aug 26, 2025 -
UFO Announces Spring, 2025 Short Film Lab Cohort
UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) announced today the three new filmmakers comprising its 2025 Short Film Lab cohort. Selected filmmakers Daisy Friedman, Carin Leong (a Filmmaker 2025 25 New Face), and Emilio Subía will begin the Lab experience this month as they develop new scripted (Friedman and Subía) and nonfiction (Leong) projects. Filmmakers Emily May Jampel, Arielle Knight, and Samuel Wright Smith from the second Short Film Lab cohort announced last spring will continue in the program through December to develop their second projects engaging scripted narrative, hybrid nonfiction, and animation, in keeping with the Lab’s staggered enrollment model. The UFO […]
by Filmmaker Staff on May 8, 2025 -
A Cinema of Gestation: On Returning to Filmmaking After a False Start, Multiple Life Changes, and 14 Years of Motherhood
A Bird Came Down is both a short and a feature-to-be by Heather von Rohr, produced by Nick Dawson, Editor of the Talkhouse and Filmmaker‘s former Managing Editor, and Emmett Kerr-Perkinson. In the guest essay below, von Rohr discusses the film’s themes within the context of its long gestation period. Von Rohr, Dawson and Kerr-Perkinson are currently crowdfunding the short’s post-production. To learn more, visit the project’s fundraising page at the New York Foundation for the Arts. — Editor In mid-June, I shot my first film in more than two decades. It’s called A Bird Came Down, and will be […]
by Heather von Rohr on Jul 9, 2024 -
“My Hope Is That the Film Itself Is An Impact Campaign”: Alex Hedison on Her Sundance Short Alok
“What lives outside of the frames of this camera and your own eyes?” is the question the poet/comedian/actor/public speaker Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the viewer to ponder at the very start of Alex Hedison’s Sundance-premiering short Alok. Currently on the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour, and premiering at IFC Center on June 14th (with both the nonbinary star and Hedison, who also happens to be married to her EP Jodie Foster, in attendance), the doc is based on footage Hedison shot during the performer’s recent international tour and is supplemented with highly stylized interviews with the spiritually enlightened artist and […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 13, 2024 -
“In Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, the Women are Voicing Out Their Deepest Feelings and Thoughts, But Here in Sauna Day the Focus is On the Unsaid”: Anna Hints and Tushar Prakash on their Cannes-Debuting short Sauna Day
When I last interviewed Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints it was to discuss her Sundance 2023-premiering Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, which would go on to win the World Cinema Documentary Competition Directing Award. (It also nabbed Best Documentary at the 36th European Film Awards on its way to becoming Estonia’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.) The film offers quite a unique peek into a UNESCO-designated tradition that for centuries has allowed women like those the director (and contemporary artist and experimental folk musician) respectfully lenses to bond, heal and reveal in a safe space of smoke and sweat. And […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 26, 2024 -
“How Do I Capture the Storytelling That is Quintessential to South America, and Marry It to the Experience of Living Here in Florida?”: Director Kevin Contento on His Vimeo Staff Pick, From Fish to Moon
In The Conference of the Birds, the famous Persian epic written in 1177 by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, a group of birds gather and discuss their collective journey to meet their king, the Simurgh, a mythical winged creature. In this allegory for the human search for enlightenment and wisdom—despite our flaws—a sparrow cowers, hoping to avoid the quest altogether. “I do not wish to begin such a toilsome journey for something I can never reach…I shall be content to seek here my Joseph in the well,” she says, in one translation. “If I find him and draw him out, […]
by Monica Uszerowicz on May 13, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: DOC NYC Short Breaking Silence
Directors Amy Bench and Annie Silverstein (one of Filmmaker‘s 2014 25 New Faces) have collaborated on the short doc Breaking Silence, which premieres today at DOC NYC before release on the PBS app beginning November 15. Winner of both a Jury and Audience Award at SXSW 2023, as well as Best Documentary Short awards at the Atlanta and Oak Cliff Film Festivals, the film is, in the words of the filmmakers, “a verité portrait of Walker and Leslie Estes, a deaf father and CODA daughter from Baton Rouge, LA, who work together upon Leslie’s release from prison—driven by their shared experiences […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 10, 2023 -
“How Could One Document the Unseen?”: Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck on Their Haunted Cinema Eye Honors-Nominated Short, The Last Days of August
In their latest short film, The Last Days of August, which depicts the slow-motion desolation of a Nebraska town economically denuded by online retail, prolific filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck create a haunted visual poetry — a blend of formally arresting, incisively spare images and heightened sound design. The two filmmakers, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2010, began as shorts filmmakers and in recent years have directed arresting character-based, documentary-tinged features (God Bless the Child, When She Runs, and, for Machoian solo, The Killing of Two Lovers and The Integrity of Joseph Chambers). But throughout their […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 22, 2022
