Our favorite time of year is back! There is no better way than to thank our viewers and filmmakers by trimming out our top 10 picks of the last year. The list includes shorts that have touched us and inspired us the most, with either their stories, visual effects or originality. These are films featured on Film Shortage in 2017, not necessarily made in 2017.
Here are Film Shortage’s Top 10 Shorts of the year, enjoy!
10. Fifty Minutes (United States)
DJ Qualls & Stephen Tobolowsky kick off the Top 10 with an intensely dialogue driven film. Focused on communication and perhaps missed interpretations, Paul Schneider’s Fifty Minutes is a tense drama letting viewers unthread the conclusion on their own.
9. The Privates (United States)
Simply electrifying. Dylan Allen’s ‘The Privates’ is just a whole lot of unexplained and amplified fun, a sci-fi rock-and-roll comedy about the absurd frustrations and minor triumphs of an unknown rock band with a radioactive energy in their music they can’t control.
8. At The End of The Cul-De-Sac (United States)
Director Paul Trillo has been twisting our minds with incredibly creative shorts for years, and we’re thrilled to have his last film hitch the Top 10! At The End of The Cul-De-Sac is a 10 minutes continuous shot filmed entirely with a drone. While the story is simple in context, any filmmaker will recognize the complexity behind such concept.
7. The Narrow World (United States)
Falling down the path of a sudden and unexpected alien arrival like some of our favorite science fiction films, The Narrow World takes the raw documentary style of District 9 and blends it with the tenderness of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.
6. Beautiful Dreamer (United States)
Beautiful Dreamer is a sci-fi, time travel tale set in a striking near future world of drones, robots, holograms and transport pods. But it’s also a personal story. A mother, facing a terminal disease, leaves her baby daughter and travels into space at near-light speed. Using relativity, she is able to stretch her final two years over her daughter’s entire lifetime but is only able to visit her daughter for one night every seven years.
5. IFCC 2017 Main Titles (Serbia)
This short had us scratching our heads for a while, is it a short? A trailer? Proof of concept? In reality IFCC 2017 is the main title sequence for the yearly Independant Festival of Creative Communications turned into short film. But where this short wins our hearts (and minds) is in its concept and design. Mind blowing visuals and innovating exploration of concept and how it redefines our ideas of space and time travel.
4. Dawn of The Deaf (United Kingdom)
This one’s for the out-of-the-box thinking. Robert Savage set out to create a film that would connect with the deaf, and rather than doing one of those typical inspirational film, they decided to tackle tense genre and have the disability play as an advantage in the situation. The result is an ever growing tension stemming from three different storylines. The film also brought us one of the coolest scenes this year which had the opportunity to break down with the director.
3. The Cage (United States)
The Cage is a just pure rawness, authentic and profound capture of the North Philly streets, blended with a vivid melange of realistic and metaphorical pictures, the entangling of violence, anger, and death. Shot with an entire cast of non-actors, an asset that truly helped Ricky achieve the rawness and authenticity of the story he was trying to tell.
2. Firebase (Canada)
And then there was Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie) and his short film masterpieces. To be honest, all three of Blomkamp’s Oats Studios films probably deserve to be in this Top 10 list, but we thought we’d leave some spots for others. You can watch Rakka (Sigourney Weaver) and Zygote (Dakota Fanning) right here on Film Shortage. Firebase will soon be undergoing a crowdfunding campaign for a feature adaptation, so stay tuned and be sure to support!
1. A Single Life (Netherlands)
And finally, our top pick of the year may be a surprising one, but it really has everything we look for in a film. It’s pretty incredible what can be done with two minutes, and this film bundles up the perfect storyline with the right amount of humor and packed punch. A Single Life will make you laugh, cry and think deeply about life, it’s no surprise it was nominated for an Oscar.
A huge congratulations to Job, Joris & Marieke.
Honorary Mentions
Of course, picking only 10 films from the hundreds of featured films is quite a difficult task. Here are a couple of films that deserve an honorary mention and that just grazed the Top 10.
Mariner
An ambitious marine navigation cadet is on the verge of cracking during his final exams. The recruit is haunted by an incident from his past — and fights to find a way to turn his personal demons into a source of strength.
Seam
In the not-too-distant future, a tenuous peace between humans and remarkably humanlike “machines” is tested when synthetics begin spontaneously exploding.
Susie Sunshine
In an alternate world, Martin Energy dominates the energy market by harnessing women’s emotional intelligence and strength to generate resources.
Night of The Slasher
A “one-take” slasher film about a teenage girl who lures a masked killer by purposely committing horror movie sins.
