Short Film Studies - Current Issue

Maggie Kamal is an Egyptian filmmaker based in New York City. Culminating in a scene of sexual harassment, her short film Microbus (2021) serves as a microcosm of patriarchal society and the precarious situations that women often have to navigate. During its festival run from March 2021 until August 2023, the short film drew passionate yet diverging responses from across the United States, Europe and the Middle East, suggesting how audience reception can reveal the different yet subtle ways in which sexism operates.

This article analyses the 1998 short film Nocturne, directed by artist Peggy Ahwesh in one of her most earnest engagements with the horror genre. It demonstrates the ways in which Nocturne uses visual and aural horrific elements to show how the gendered female body is socioculturally constructed. Importantly, its horrific elements open up the possibility for women to reclaim corporeal agency, a feat otherwise absent in the very source material that Ahwesh borrows from in her film. The female body is presented in Nocturne as uninhibitedly able to move, touch, explore, desire and, yes, kill, as it navigates through, and eventually destroys, the intricate systems of power keeping it in check. After exploring Ahwesh’s larger body of work, the article considers how Nocturne assigns the so-called corporeal weight to its female bodies on-screen, through horrific elements and, to a lesser extent, the woman-as-animal metaphor.

Immigration and refugee crises have become a major focus of discourses about international politics that are influenced by geopolitical conflicts and, increasingly, by climate change. Such discourses can influence personal interactions between people. As political situations develop and change such interactions are increasingly represented in media forms such as film in national industries. This article examines how the short film The View from Up Here explores the political ideology of the War on Terror and the theory of Orientalism through interactions between two characters.

This article explores how proxemics (by way of cinematography and other formal strategies) as well as microaggressions are brilliantly deployed throughout The View from Up Here in order to demonstrate a racist power dynamic – one that is inherently tied to the manner in which deeply damaging stereotypes of migrants and refugees are not only created and reinforced by the mass media but also subsequently disseminated by audiences.

This article poses a critical question regarding the concept of everyday life: can everydayness be a source of conflict? It spotlights an overlapping framework of J. Ann Tickner’s notion of the realist and its perception of threat against all that is foreign and Hannah Arendt’s portrait of loneliness and isolation as the common ground for terror. Reinforcing this framework, the article focuses on Marco Calvani’s short film The View from Up Here, which uses space as a foregrounded character embodying an existential dualism of realism and otherism, expressed through the protagonists of Claire and Lila respectively.