Short Film Studies - Current Issue

The ‘Editor’s Introduction’ notes the interview, articles and book review published in Issue 14.1. In the interview, Somalian filmmaker Mo Harawe talks about his recent short film, Will My Parents Come to See Me (2023). The articles include those that address the American Film Institute’s long-term and unprecedented project to incorporate short films into its catalogue; the New Zealand anthology television series, Beyond the Veil, which features the work of Māori, Samoan, Filipino and Chinese New Zealand storytellers; Spike Jonze’s ‘screendance’ shorts that combine dance with the format of live music video; renowned filmmaker Charles Burnett’s two short films, Several Friends (1969) and The Horse (1973); the critical and theoretical distinction between the fiction art short and the classical short; the legendary filmmaker Youssef Chahine’s personal portrait of the Egyptian city of Cairo in Cairo as Told by Youssef Chahine (1991) and a review of the book, Richard Green in South African Cinema (2023).

After its world premiere at Berlinale, Mo Harawe’s fourth short film played at over eighty film festivals, won the Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and secured a European Short Film Award nomination. Apart from employing a slow cinematic style in service of a strong narrative that deals with the death penalty in Somalia, Harawe’s filmmaking style also illustrates how a filmmaker’s confidence in their feelings and instinct can result in the quiet devastation of Will My Parents Come to See Me.

This article describes and makes a case for the importance of the ‘Behind the Veil’ project at the American Film Institute (AFI), involving unprecedented research of short films released in the silent and early sound eras for documentation in the AFI Catalog. AFI’s research not only assists the Institute’s ongoing efforts to record the profound influence of women and people of colour to the creation, distribution and reception of early cinema, but it also rectifies an inclination in film scholarship that has long favoured feature-length titles – a partiality that has limited historians’ efforts to study how people from diverse communities made films and how they saw themselves on-screen. With generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, AFI is on a mission to establish the foundation of a new canon that represents filmmakers, actors and audiences who have been marginalized to date, offering a look ‘behind the veil’ of historical bias to reveal the true breadth of America’s cultural legacy.

The Aotearoa New Zealand television anthology, Beyond the Veil, offers stand-alone horror and supernatural shorts from Māori, Sāmoan, Filipino and Chinese New Zealand storytellers. Focusing on the Sāmoan found-footage horror episode ‘26:29’ and drawing from internal government agency documentation, this article suggests that the state-funded series leverages the strengths of short-form storytelling, and the unique textual features of the anthology format, to offer a playful, often pointed counter to dominant (i.e. Pākehā/New Zealand European, Anglo-American) cultural and horror narratives, while creating much-needed opportunities for culturally responsive stories and production practices. These concerns are contextualized within an account of genre-led storytelling and the emergence in recent years of the anthology form as a powerful political site of Indigenous, immigrant and diaspora-led filmmaking practice in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Review of: Richard Green in South African Film: Forging Creative New Directions, Keyan G. Tomaselli and Richard Green (2023)

Cape Town: BestRed, 270 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-92824-660-2, p/bk, USD $45.00