The Oscar short lists were announced earlier this week and one of the ten titles to make the cut in the Live-Action Short category was Caroline. Written and directed by Celine Held and Logan George — two of 2017’s 25 New Faces — the film follows a frenetic afternoon in the life of single mother who leaves her three children behind to go on a job interview. Watch it above.

Now that Roma is available for all on Netflix, it’s as good a time as any to revisit the earliest work of Alfonso Cuarón. Made in 1983, when he was a 22 year-old film student in Mexico City, Quartet for the End of Time bares a strong semblance to the to the classics of the French New Wave. Named after the featured chamber music by Olivier Messiaen, the film explores the solitary life of a young man in and around his apartment. It was Cuarón’s last credited short before his 1991 feature length debut, Solo Con Tu Pareja.

In The Morning After an interracial lesbian couple wake up the day after the 2016 general election to find their world changed. They drag their tired bodies out of bed to have brunch with one of the women’s fathers, who presents a charming, welcoming veneer despite his soon-to-be revealed political leanings. Written and directed by Lauren Minnerath, and starring Taylor Hess (a Filmmaker contributing editor) and Adenike Thomas, the short film methodically dissects an already tense instance of “meet the parents,” made all the more trying by the present circumstance. Check it out above.

One of the very best shorts of the year has made its way online. Actor David Call wrote, directed and stars in Cole, an elliptical drama about a combat veteran who’s suffered a traumatic brain injury and is struggling to reintegrate himself into the working world. With a steady, almost minimalist approach, Call relays the quotidian rejection that his character faces to heartbreaking effect. Check it out above.

Director and film critic Neville Pierce, who we interviewed several months ago around the online premiere of his shorts, has a new film, Promise, up on the interwebs, and it’s tied to the announcement of an unusual short film contest that offers filmmakers $40,000 in production funds for their winning pitch. From the press release: The Pitch is an annual online pitching competition which invites filmmakers to submit a two-minute video pitching their idea for a short film inspired by The Bible. It can be in any genre, can emerge from any perspective, and can draw on any story, passage, […]

Over nearly 20 years, film journalist Neville Pierce has collected bylines at most of the U.K.’s top film publications, including Empire (where he’s a contributing editor), Total Film (where he was the editor) and The Guardian. And while he worked as a reviewer early in his career, he’s best known for his long-form profiles of actors and directors, pieces that are deep dives into the art and craft of subjects like Michael Fassbender, Mark Romanek and, most consistently, David Fincher, whose sets he has visited and written about no less than seven times. But since 2011 Pierce has been building […]

I love this short — The Polaroid Job — now up on the New York Times Op Doc page by producer, director and Sundance shorts programmer Mike Plante. A trip home to visit his parents leads to Plante sifting through stacks of their old Polaroids, photos that not only document family moments but also a family business. For a short time, while Plante was 11, his parents had “the Polaroid job,” a gig that involved taking a large-format Polaroid camera to various events — a store opening, a haunted house, etc. — and taking pictures of attendees posing with various […]

For the third year Filmmaker is happy to exclusively host online selections from the currently underway Eastern Oregon Film Festival. These films will stream exclusively here on the site until Sunday morning at 9:00 AM. This year, we’re hosting a work of philosophical science fiction by Blake Salzman, a new drama from festival veteran Frank Mosley, and an inspiring London-set work from Tal Amiran. You can watch all the films embedded below, and check out the rest of the lineup at Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Midwife (dir. Blake Salzman, 2017) Synopsis: In a bleak future where women are dying rapidly, […]

As her short Whiskey Fist has made its away across the festival circuit, director Gillian Wallace Horvat has penned a couple of essays for Filmmaker amplifying and riffing off of her shorts’ themes. Specifically, she takes aim at the rise of branded content masquerading as short films, critiquing filmmakers who surrender their “authenticity” by imagining that brand sponsorship isn’t affecting their art. Her SXSW-premiering Whiskey Fist, which Horvat says was provocatively submitted to a whiskey company’s branded film content contest (containing a scene in which a man is anally penetrated by a whiskey bottle, it lost, needless to say), is […]

Dustin Guy Defa is on the cusp of big changes. The filmmaker’s second feature film, Person To Person, opens tomorrow. In it, Defa delicately interweaves multiple stories taking place over one day in the lives of New Yorkers portrayed by an ensemble of legendary performers (Phillip Baker Hall, Isiah Whitlock Jr.), name actors (Michael Cera), newcomers (Abbi Jacobson, Tavi Gerivson, George Sample III), and so-called “non-actors” (Bene Coopersmith). It’s a bighearted, hilarious and impressive display of Defa’s directorial skills and the kind of film that can jump start a career. The road to getting it made is a bit unusual. […]