Josh's ShortStick Picks 2024

It has been another banner year for ShortStick. Virtual festivals have taken us all around the world, and I even got to attend my first in-person festival (see Kasauso, below). We have already reviewed a lot of films I loved this year (Oyu, A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers, SKRFF, The Moon Will Contain Us, to name just the very tip of the huge iceberg of titles). So, for this list, I have chosen my ten favourites that we haven’t yet featured on ShortStick. These films come from both established directors like Cronenberg and Rohrwacher, as well as first time up-and-comers, and span animation, documentary, comedy and drama, as well as a few forays into the more experimental realms of filmmaking. These are my favourites, hopefully some of them inspire you, too.

-Joshua Hunt

An Asian Ghost Story (九龍東往事), dir. Wang Bo

An Asian Ghost Story is Wang Bo’s singular documentary (?) about the modernization of Cold War-era Hong Kong told through the eyes of wig factory workers. Beginning with a spooky story told among female workers at the wig factory about a Japanese ghost, the film combines stock footage with vintage news clips, interviews, voiceover, and, why not, a karaoke number, to explore ideas of memory, Empire, history, and change. Each development is more outrageous than the next (hair from Communist China is banned in exported wigs, a ghost takes up residence in some immortal hair), yet director Wang manages to keep the film remarkably grounded in the liminal space between emotion and ideas.

An Urban Allegory (Allégorie citadine), dirs. Alice Rohrwacher, JR

Italian director Rohrwacher lends her sensitive sense of magical realism, and Agnès Varda associate JR brings his ability to paste giant pictures on walls, to this update of Plato’s cave allegory set in modern-day Paris. A host of unexpected collaborators keep the dreamy and metaphorical An Urban Allegory surprising at every turn, including a cameo by iconoclastic director Leos Carax, and music by Daft Punk’s silver robot, Thomas Bangalter. The simple story of 7-year-old Jay discovering the city around him builds to a rousing and kaleidoscopic new way for us to look at art and at the world, in one of my favourite endings to a film all year.

ME, dir. Don Hertzfeldt

While it may have begun its life as an Arcade Fire music video (before the Canadian band’s troubles became public last year), ME is pure, unfiltered Hertzfeldt, identifiable from even a single frame as the work of one of animation’s most singular geniuses. A pulsing, throbbing musical epic about narcissism, ME uses Hertzfeldt’s signature simply-drawn stick figures, but continues to stack on movement, colour, and textures across its 22-minute runtime. Somewhat more grounded than Hertzfeldt’s recent World of Tomorrow trilogy, you’ll find yourself surprisingly moved by just how much emotion you can feel for a lonely stick man.  

ME can be rented here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/marblehalls

Ungentle, dirs. Huw Lemmey, Onyeka Igwe

“When did I become a traitor?” asks the opening line of Ungentle, spoken by Paddington Bear himself, Ben Wishaw. Without even appearing onscreen, Wishaw gives ones of the best performances in a short film this year, narrating the intriguing and understated story of the coming of age of a 20th Century English spy, who grew up gay and eventually turned against his comrades. Beautifully shot on 16mm film, the picturesque landscape and architecture shots that make up the film give a pastoral feeling to a story that might normally lend itself to subterfuge and gunplay. While Wishaw himself barely rises above a whisper, Ungentle gives a voice to those who were forced to lie to survive.

Ungentle can be streamed on mubi.

Don’t Fuck With Ba (Đừng Giỡn Mặt Với Bà), dir. Sally Tran

Sally Trans ultra-stylish revenge extravaganza brings together her Pan-Asian cast of gorgeous baddies (Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin each have their own candy-coloured subtitle) in this multilingual, kick-ass action spectacular. The tale of a crew of femmes in New York's Chinatown striking back at a gang that threatens their community, Don’t Fuck With Ba, a favourite from this year’s tiff has a killer combination of outrageous costumes, dramatic lighting, flashy editing, even a cool-as-hell typeface! Sally Tran is a major new filmmaking talent, and the final showdown between the rival gangs is one of the best scenes in any film this year.

Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection, dir. David Cronenberg

For David Cronenberg, surgery is still the new sex. The Canadian horror icon’s newest short film is provocatively titled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection, yet somehow manages to provide exactly what it promises in the title. Inspired by the wax models used for medical demonstrations that Cronenberg saw at La Specola musem in Florence Italy, Four Unloved Women alternate closeups of the spilling guts of these female bodies with their faces (and sounds!) of orgasmic pleasure. It’s unexpected, grotesque and upsetting. It’s Cronenberg.

Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection can be streamed on mubi.

Kawauso (カワウソ), dir. Akihito Izuhara

The most beautifully animated short film of the year, Akihito Izuhara’s luminous Kawauso is the story of a girl from the Japanese countryside, who tries to communicate with a river otter—the only problem being that these otters went extinct in 2012 due to the country’s rapid growth. The almost unfathomably lovely pencil drawings and evocative sound lend a symbolic otherworldliness to the environmental message (as do the mobile phones, electronics, cars, and boats that unexpectedly begin to fall from the sky). Kawauso is quietly radiant, until it ends with a delightful musical number remembering the river otters’ past.

Yeah the Boys, dir. Stefan Hunt

An exploration of Australian masculinity might sound like a bit of a chore, but director Stefan Hunt, in his short film Yeah the Boys tears through the expected, and looks at the machismo of his six (beautiful) Australian boys through drinking culture and dance. Choreographed by genius choreographer Vanessa Marian, the boys party through a day and into the night as they slam one beer after another, laugh together, get in brawls, and dance, dance, dance. Featuring an absolute barnburner of a soundtrack by the sampledelic band The Avalanches, the unexpectedly tender Yeah the Boys says everything it has to say without saying a single word.

Yeah the Boys is a Vimeo Staff Pick: https://vimeo.com/1019210228

Digital Devil Saga, dir. Cameron Worden

A violently original film, but entirely composed of digital detritus, Cameron Worden’s flashing Digital Devil Saga is a litany of shameful web searches strobed across the screen; it’s like the entire internet, everything, everywhere, all at once. A million pieces of internet iconography, from Spongebob memes to Simpsons clips, from tweets to googles, are all chopped and screwed together, high art and lowbrow given equal importance. I get a kick thinking of this film premiering at the New Directors/New Films festival at the prestigious MoMA; seeing Digital Devil Saga there must have carried the same shock as seeing the train almost drive off the screen in the Lumière brothers’ earliest films. But perhaps the greatest joke of all is that despite the perceived irrelevance of these images, the film is also an act of preservation, embalming each ephemeral image, each frame, in preservation-grade 35mm ESTAR-base film stock.

Corpus and the Wandering, dir. Jo Roy

Inspired by (and needing a break from the frustration of) the zoom calls she was forced into during COVID lockdown, director and choreographer Jo Roy made Corpus and the Wandering, an animated masterpiece consisting of a grid of 100 video screens, each animated separately, and created using only her body and an iPhone. An attempt to find a shared humanity during a time of isolation, the mind-bogglingly complicated videomosaic finds Roy dancing, writhing, twirling, and gesturing 100 times over, forming intricate shapes, patterns and designs. The incandescent black-and-white cinematography give the experimental self-portrait a transcendent beauty; this gem is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.