Affirming our commitment to review the finest of world cinema regardless of length, The Film Verdict’s Short Films column is a unique feature that recognizes the growing influence of shorts on the film industry and the role they play in the careers of young filmmakers in particular. The reviews are curated by London-based critic Ben Nicholson (ben@thefilmverdict.com), whose expert opinions have appeared in Sight & Sound, MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies and Hyperallergic. He has programmed for Sheffield DocFest and the London Short Film Festival and in 2019 founded ALT/KINO, which screens and publishes writing about experimental film. He is the artistic director of the Alpha Film Festival, the first shorts festival in the metaverse.
Becoming Male in the Middle Ages
Pedro Neves Marques follows 2019’s The Bite with another sci-fi-infused relationship story in this thought-provoking meditation on traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
Nazarbazi
An utterly captivating found footage collage that pieces together a sensuous history of intimacy in Iranian post-revolution cinema where depictions of physical contact are prohibited.
Warsha
A potentially familiar story of a Syrian construction worker living in Lebanon is turned on its head in Dania Bdeir’s sensual and soulful evocation of freedom.
Egúngún (Masquerade)
Olive Nwosu’s delicate drama explores the difficulty of confronting complex notions of identity while also traversing a tender story of first love lost.
Listen to the Beat of Our Images
Siblings Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste mine the archive to visualise the transformation of 1960s French Guiana by a new space centre in this poetic documentary.
Tundra
A paper-pushing official searches for a woman in red in José Luis Aparicio’s noirish short set in an oppressive, dystopian Cuba afflicted by strange, sluglike creatures.
Sandstorm
An excellent, nuanced performance by Parizae Fatima anchors Seemab Gul’s tense depiction of a teenage girl navigating the dangers and dilemmas of an online relationship.
$75,000
First person testimonies and 3D modelling are effectively combined in Moïse Togo’s harrowing short documentary about the horrific violence faced by albino people across Africa.
Bestia
The inner life and fragmenting psyche of a secret police agent form the basis of Hugo Covarrubias’s exemplary and sinister stop-motion animation set during the Chilean military dictatorship
The Headhunter’s Daughter
A young woman navigates the Cordilleran highlands to seek fame in the big city in Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan’s mysterious, Western-tinged drama.
Love Stories on the Move
Ilinca H?rnu? gives a captivating performance in Carina Gabriela Da?oveanu’s restrained but perceptive drama about a taxi driver longing for romance amidst a faltering marriage.
Zoon
Jonatan Schwenk follows the award-winning ‘Sog’ with another beguiling animated short that wordlessly meditates on our relationship to the natural world via a group of axolotls and the people that eat them.