Five Great Short Filmmakers & Five to See at GSFF

In many ways, it's never been easier to make a film. Getting hold of a decent digital camera is relatively easy; you've probably got one in your pocket. Same goes for editing, sound and effects, which can be knocked together on a laptop. And the internet gives you a platform to get your film out there. Despite all this, it still feels like good short films don’t get the attention they deserve. Ahead of Glasgow Short Film Festival, we caught up with its director, Matt Lloyd, who gives his thoughts on the state of short film exhibition, the role of short film festivals like GSFF, and what he looks for when programming the festival. Lloyd also picks out some filmmakers making shorts you need to seek out. 

“Naturally you always want more people to watch short film, and to watch them communally, but in many ways the current exhibition landscape for shorts is thriving, particularly online of course,” says Lloyd. “Perhaps the sheer wealth of work getting made means that individual filmmakers are always struggling to get the attention they feel they deserve. And there aren’t enough critics writing seriously about short film, but that’s only natural, no one’s paying them to do so and critics have to eat too I guess.

Filmmaking that isn’t about tax breaks and cocaine

“This is where festivals come in. Festivals are the primary provider of the communal viewing experience for shorts, and allow filmmakers to meet their audience up close and personal. I’m passionate about short film, I love putting films together in a programme and seeing how they play off one another. I want to support an aspect of filmmaking that isn’t about percentages and opening weekends and tax breaks and cocaine. There’s a contrariness to programming short film, in that you’re celebrating a distinct art form in its own right, while promoting the feature filmmakers of tomorrow. The task is to find a balance between the two that will allow you to sleep at night.

“I’m interested in what filmmakers do and how they do it. Not necessarily how well they do it – heroic failures are what I look out for, filmmakers who push themselves to do something different. This term 'short film' is so meaningless really. I’m just looking for moving image works under 50 minutes which explore the potential of the medium, whether through sound, visuals, spatially or temporally. GSFF probably prioritises films that have some element of narrative over purely abstract works, because narrative, however oblique or minimal, allows the filmmaker to tackle the temporal aspect of the medium, not all artists’ moving image works successfully do that. But broadly speaking we’re up for anything except the conventional.”

Matt Lloyd picks five short filmmakers at the top of their game

Don Hertzfeldt

“Don Hertzfeldt is that rare cross-over artist, and I’d argue his short films are more profound and complex than 99% of new features.”

Read our review of Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow

Adrian Sitaru

“It’s a hard task to find many people working consistently on Hertzfeldt’s level, but I would suggest the Romanian filmmaker Adrian Sitaru is up there. He’s made several features but keeps returning to shorts. His storytelling is masterful, understated and increasingly strange.”

Jennifer Reeder

“I love love love the work of Jennifer Reeder, the subject of last festival’s retrospective, and we’ve got her new one – Crystal Lake – in competition this year.”

Crystal Lake screens in International Competition 2: Model Citizen, GFT, 17&19 Mar

Read out review of GSFF 2015 Jennifer Reeder retrospective

Peter Tscherkassky

“The veteran avant-garde Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky is incredible. We’re showing his latest film, The Exquisite Corpus, in competition and an earlier one, Outer Space, in our Black & Light programme.”

Black & Light, 17 Mar, GFT, 8.45pm

Bryan M Ferguson

“But the beauty of shorts is that there are very few canonical auteurs. A first time filmmaker could emerge out of nowhere and blow all these greats out of the water. He’s no first-timer, but Scotland’s own Bryan M Ferguson is making work quite unlike anyone else at the moment, and whether consciously or not, I’d say he’s a natural descendant of the Cinema of Transgression filmmakers [whose manifesto sets the tone for this year's GSFF], so I’m delighted that we’re premiering his new film this year – supported by The Skinny, of course!”

The Skinny Short Film Awards, 17 Mar, CCA, 9pm

Read our interview with Bryan M Ferguson

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The Skinny’s five picks of this year’s GSFF programme:

Black & Light

Cinema has been described as painting with light, but how does the experience of cinema-going change if the filmmakers choose to paint in shades of black instead? That’s the question at the heart of this great-looking programme, which plunges audiences in with films that are dark, darker and eventually pitch black. Here's how GSFF describes the experience of watching this programme: “Our eyes nibble their way through poorly lit found footage material, stumble through film tears, fumble for shapes in the growing darkness and lose themselves in pure imagination of unexposed black film.” Expect films from masters of the dark like Chris Cunningham, Clercq and the above mentioned Peter Tscherkassky.

17 Mar, GFT, 8.45pm

The Sum of All Fears

Hitchcock once asked, “What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?” This programme of classic Universal horror movies condensed to a single reel begs the question, “Can short films be features with all the dull bits cut out?” Being screened from stuttering 16mm, GSFF reckon these abridged versions of the likes of The Mummy, The Doom of Dracula and Hitchcock’s Frenzy might actually improve on the originals.

18 Mar, CCA, 9.30pm

Jan Soldat

Each year GSFF pick out one filmmaker for a retrospective and each year it’s a revelation. German filmmaker Jan Soldat is the first documentarian to be singled out for this honour, but don't expect the prosaic: Soldat's films sound as wild and imaginative as any of the previous retrospective recipients. These are films about sexuallity, relationships, bodies and passion, and, as the GSFF programme notes, their “only limits are those formed by the prejudices and experience of the viewing audience.”

Programme 1: Deconstructing Human Interaction, 17 Mar, CCA, 9.15pm; Programme 2: Power, Safety, Control, 18 Mar, CCA, 7pm

Bleeding Edge: Filmmaking and the Virtual World

A programme of films exploring the impact of technology on cinematic expression. As technology continues to pervade our lives, this programme might be a glimpse into what cinema will look like in our fully-digitised future.

20 Mar, CCA, 7.45pm

The Skinny Short Film Awards

It may be terribly gauche of us to plug our own event, but as Matt Lloyd says above, this year’s competition winner, Bryan M Ferguson, is a one-of-a-kind talent and his visceral films deserve to be seen on the big screen with an audience. Head down to the CCA at 8pm for complimentary drinks courtesy of Saramago before the screenings.

17 Mar, CCA, 9pm

The Skinny Short Film Awards event page on Facebook

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Glasgow Short Film Festival 2016 runs 16-20 Mar at CCA, GFT and other Glasgow venues. For full programme information and listings, go to: