When people think about Disney, the first things leaping to mind tend to be princesses, superheroes, or Jedi knights. But a corporate behemoth with such deep pockets can also afford to venture out beyond the safe realm of franchising to throw some money around where it goes a little further, and now they’re bringing a bit of their largesse to the lower-profile international market.

The Italian-made short film Le Pupille will be available through Disney+ starting 16 December, an unlikely if widely accessible home for the latest work from arthouse favorite Alice Rohrwacher. Photographed with a combination of 16mm and 35mm formats, the 37-minute homage to Zero for Conduct and other unruly-child classics may seem an odd fit for the Mouse’s streaming platform, but the seasonal angle will nonetheless place it alongside the rest of their Yuletide-themed content.

Le Pupille was conceived as part of a series of Christmastime shorts commissioned by Disney and produced through Alfonso Cuarón, a fan of Rohrwacher’s who figured that her experience working with children would make her an ideal fit for the kiddie-beloved studio. And while her project does indeed feature holiday merriment and apple-cheeked youngsters, it’s also an irreverent perspective on the emptiness of conventional Christian pieties.

The short — adapted from a letter penned by the celebrated writer Elsa Morante — joins a gaggle of students over a lonely Christmas they’ve all got no choice but to spend at their boarding school. As they stage their own little nativity play, they also introduce a bit of anarchy to the stuffy environment of grown-up authority, reminding us all of the childlike spirit that’s supposed to animate a holiday rooted in belief.

For parents trying to get their offspring hooked on cinema outside the English language, Rohrwacher’s newest is an early gift, proof that youth-friendly filmmaking can exist outside the bright, loud, excitable register of G-rated US exports. For some, it could be their first time seeing something shot on analog film — and isn’t creating memories to be cherished for the rest of a child’s life what Christmas is really about?

The domino effect that forms human connections has never been more relevant in our coronavirus age, as droplets pass from person-to-person, linking us through an invisible chain. Symbiosis charts a different type of intimate relationship that can exist between otherwise strangers: sex with the same person.

The film follows a nameless woman who realises that her partner is cheating on her with multiple other women and proceeds to stalk these mistresses, swiping little pieces of them – stray hairs, trash – and adding them to an ever-growing collection that come to hold more intrigue than the infidelity itself. The sexual energy of these mistresses causes objects to vibrate and shape-shift so the animation progresses through this natural yet dreamlike process of one thing becoming another.

The story is told almost entirely without dialogue, just the occasional ‘Hey!’ or distant murmur included for sonic effect, with a spell cast through a hypnotic sound design by Péter Benjamin Lukács and original compositions by Mads Vadsholt.

Andrasev shows that the couple’s sex life has dwindled to nothingness. He is disinterested in her body, in contrast to the appetite he shows for other women. The pain of her physical loneliness is made palpable until there is a transformation. Insects and butterflies are used to symbolic effect. Indeed, Andrasev, who worked as second assistant director on Peter Strickland’s BDSM lesbian love story The Duke of Burgundy, used its same insect supervisor, Tamás Németh.

Symbiosis evolved out of Andrasev’s own primal experience of jealousy, something she recollects feeling to a distressing extent at a party years ago. She has since reached a different perspective and has given her emotional arc to the lead character. Insecurity blossoms into an empathic fascination for these other women.

In real-life Andrasev has now “collected” some of her former antagonists. She says: “You can start thinking about a man’s perspective: appreciating sexuality, beauty and the intelligence and talent of other women. It’s a little bit of an obsession, like you are in love with them in a strange way because you can see the attraction.”

‘In love in a strange way’ is a great way to characterise the relationships between the women in Symbiosis. Watch it below and let us know what you think @LWLies.

When I was growing up in the late 1990s and early ’00s, fat people were always the butt of the joke. Pop culture presented the likes of Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin as rotund buffoons, lazy and food-obsessed, while rom-coms like Shallow Hal made a whole song and dance out of how hilarious it was that an obese version of Gwyneth Paltrow should be worthy of love. Shows in which fat people were berated by dieticians until they consumed a bit of broccoli and a diet shake were all the rage, and I was taught that my body was a source of shame, to be covered up and reviled at all costs.

Thankfully, perceptions are starting to change, and fat characters aren’t relegated to the role of comic relief or villain anymore (though Ursula remains an icon of fat representation, regardless of Disney’s intention). In 2019, fat megastar Lizzo appeared in Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, putting to bed once and for all any claim you can’t be fat and hot as hell. As part of the Barbican’s Emerging Film Curators’ Lab, programmer Grace Barber-Plentie is championing fat bodies on screen with a special event taking place this Saturday (5 December) which seeks to show lived experience of being fat in a world where we are taught big isn’t beautiful.

Through a series of seven shorts, Reframing the Fat Body celebrates the diversity of fat lives, whether it’s plus size pole dancers or a young woman struggling through weight loss camp. The Fat Feeling, model and activist Talia A Darling invites models to a photoshoot where they discuss their experiences of being fat in the UK, while Aquaporko! is the story of Australia’s first fat femme synchronised swimming team.

Barber-Plentie, who also runs the Instagram project Fat in Film, has put a lot of thought and care into planning the event, which also features a virtual pole dance performance from Roz Mays. The event is now sold out, but you can read up on the films on the Barbican website, and here’s more from Grace on why she decided to spotlight fat bodies.

LWLies: What was the motivation for programming this season?

Barber-Plentie: The brief for the Emerging Curators lab at Barbican was ‘Inside Out’, and I knew straight away that looking at fatness would fit in with this. I wanted to look at what it’s like to both inhabit a fat body [inside] and how fat bodies are perceived in the world [out], so it was all a very happy coincidence!

But, aside from that, I’ve been thinking about fatness and film for a while now – both what film is like in terms of fat representation, and what it’s like to work in/attend cinematic spaces as a fat person. I went to an amazing event that Fringe! Festival hosted last year, a screening of Kelli Jean Drinkwater’s Nothing to Lose with shorts and a panel. It felt like a genuinely inclusive space in every way and I wanted to help encourage more spaces like that in film.

How easy did you find it to select a broad range of films that deal with fatness?

I actually applied for another programming opportunity last year looking at the same themes, but on a much larger scale. So I initially went back to a list I prepared for that, which included a lot of mainstream films like anything with Melissa McCarthy and Rebel Wilson in, down to some really interesting shorts I managed to read about online. From there, I basically did a lot of googling. I think I have now used every possible combination of words to find films about fatness.

It feels like something mainstream cinema is still very reluctant to show. Do you recall the first time you saw fatness portrayed on screen in a positive light?

The key film for me was the 2007 remake of Hairspray. I was a musical theatre kid and my mum’s friend used to bring me back bootleg CDs of soundtracks to Broadway shows when I was 11 or so. I learned all the words to the Hairspray soundtrack and was already obsessed with it by the time I saw it as a kid. But it was still such a pleasant surprise to see Tracy Turnblad as a character who likes the way she looks from the beginning of the film. There’s no journey of self-discovery for her, her goal is to be a dancer and the film is about her getting it.

It feels like short films are leading the way in terms of representing fat bodies.

Short films definitely offer more variety. For example, every film in this programme offers a real different range of experiences and identities. I initially wanted this programme to focus solely on fat femme bodies, but I realised that it felt much more exciting to open up that focus to show how well short films are doing the work when it comes to fatness.

Was there anything that surprised you while researching and selecting the films for this season?

I wasn’t surprised so much as I was frustrated when looking at lists of ‘The Best Fat Films’ and ‘Top Fat Actors’ – the same names and films kept coming up time and time again. I know it’s easy to put Hairspray and Bridesmaids on a list because they’re hugely popular films, but it doesn’t take long to research a film that’s a bit less well-known, like Dee Rees’ Bessie which features Queen Latifah and Monique as fully-realised fat black queer women. I think we definitely need to work on diversity within fat representation, but hopefully once we start seeing the representation itself, that will get easier.

What are your hopes for the future of fat representation in cinema?

I want us to properly archive the past and the history of fatness in cinema. I am by no means a historian, but I’m trying to do that with my Instagram page dedicated to fatness in film and I hope that more research can be done into this subject. And I hope that the fat stars we currently have will keep working, and have long and rich careers in a variety of roles. Let’s just get Brian Tyree Henry into every single film so I can stop annoying everyone on social media by going on about him all the time!

Reframing the Fat Body takes place at the Barbican on Saturday 5 December.

Somalia Seaton has made a name for herself as a gifted playwright, steadily crafting an impressive body of work for theatres including Stratford East, the Lyric, Soho Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her plays offer insightful and uncompromising perspectives on race, family, identity and womanhood.

A Response to Your Message is her first foray into film, an experimental short based on a letter Seaton wrote to her white friends and colleagues who reached out to her in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests.

“I didn’t speak to some of my closest white friends for about three months,” says Seaton. “I was without language. I felt like the language that I had spoken to them with, or we had shared was no longer in my mouth. And so I was journaling and it turned into a letter. Then, at some point down the line, I shared it with Susie [Wokoma] and rather than reading it and then texting me back to talk to me about it she recorded herself reading it and sent it to me. There was just something so powerful about hearing it in someone else’s mouth and really painful, and the seed of this film was planted.”

In the film, images of Black women dancing, moving and relaxing are interspersed with shots of a group of Black women and girls dressed in gowns and afro-futuristic regalia in a sun-dappled woodland. “I wanted to bring Black women into nature,” Seaton explains, “to pick up the rhythm of nature and that flow of nature. To reclaim that space and have our feet in the soil and ground ourselves.” All the while, a voice narrates Seaton’s letter, addressing an unseen white friend:

“I don’t need cheering up. I don’t wish to house your guilt. I don’t wish to house your shame. I don’t wish to house your awkwardness. I don’t wish to house your fragility. I don’t wish to join your book club. I don’t wish to hear about that one time you called out a racist. I don’t wish to be introduced to your replacement token you’ve recently met. I don’t wish to house the emotional labour of our big talk. I’ve got no room for that at this moment in time.”

Much of the footage is self-recorded, with a diverse group of intergenerational Black actors, artists, dancers and performers given a broad brief to interpret. They were simply asked to engage in motion and depict “rest, peace and joy”. The power of that act feels revolutionary in a time where we are more used to seeing Black women on screen running from slave masters than practicing sun salutations. “I’m so sick of seeing specifically Black women’s bodies mutilated, abused, enduring, persevering and having resilience,” says Seaton. “I want to see women engaged in pleasure, sexually and in many other ways. We don’t talk about it enough, that there is something that happens to us culturally and physiologically when we continue to see images of ourselves engaged in that duress.”

There is a renewed power to Seaton’s message following the recent election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Black women mobilised, turning out in record numbers, and the media acknowledged their hard work as many well-meaning liberals expressed their gratitude that Black women had ‘saved’ them. For all that this may be true and worth acknowledging, it also further reinforces the idea of Black women as brutalised beasts of burden working for a collective self-interest rather than towards their own goals.

“The idea that we’re supposed to sustain and persevere, it makes me so angry,” says Seaton. “You’re just supposed to endure culturally as well as in wider society. You’re supposed to house the shortcomings of men and you’re supposed to house the shortcomings of white people. You’re supposed to be really humble. You’re not supposed to be too angry. That goes somewhere. It costs us. It costs us in complete physiological health. And I’m so sick of it as a lesson that we teach young Black girls, to just work hard. Really, the code for Black women when we talk about working hard and is ‘overexert yourself”.”

A Response to Your Message comes as a balm in a year where Black women have had to deal with their vulnerability to the pandemic and white supremacy, their lack of inclusion in politics and culture and being, to paraphrase Malcolm X, the most disrespected, unprotected and neglected people of all.

A year where we are bombarded with images of violence against Black bodies, where Janelle Monáe is raped and tortured for Antebellum’s self-proclaimed satirical purposes and Black politicians like Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrams are treated with open contempt across social and mainstream media.

A year where Black trans women were murdered in record numbers while so-called ‘feminist’ icons and columnists in purportedly progressive newspapers dehumanised them and debated their right to exist. Most of all, it serves as a reminder to us all of the power of sanctuary and the importance of savouring the joy of existing within your own skin.

Watch A Response to Your Message below and find out more at aresponsefilm.com

It’s down over four months since lockdown officially began, although many of us have been stuck inside for longer, and even now with the government cajoling us to “Stay Alert > Control the Virus > Save Lives” by nipping down to Primark or consider returning to the workplace in order to boost the crippled economy, the reality is, a lot of people are still spending the majority of their time at home.

Personally I’ve been using the time to catch up on all the prestige television I’ve missed over the past two years and to clear out the attic, but filmmaker Sam O’Mahony set himself a more creative challenge: to create a  short about the current situation that avoided the tropes that have become so prevalent recently: to-camera monologues, zombie apocalypse plot lines, and (bafflingly) extremely lo-res webcams.

“Those initial few weeks of lockdown, I was about to go and do a music video and my partner Lisa was about to film this Netflix show,” Sam explains, “and there was this very reactive thing where a lot of actors were suddenly doing their own bits in front of webcams and making bits about zombie apocalypse. I didn’t want to get involved, I didn’t want to be part of this bad filmmaking movement. But after a few weeks, there was a desire to make something that used cinematic language, that had motivated characters. We can still be ambitious, even with very limited resources.”

The result is I Don’t Find Any of This Very Peaceful, a film conceived, scripted, shot and edited on location in Sam and Lisa’s flat, in just seven weeks. Inspired by the master of modern realism Michael Haneke, Sam was interested in grappling with the interiority of the pandemic: how our anxieties have manifested beyond the compulsion to watch Contagion or 28 Days Later again.

Katharine, an artist (played wonderfully by Lisa Dwyer Hogg) is isolated in her flat, worried about a missing partner and fielding phone calls from her mother who seems to have a very different perception of the pandemic. When a visitor comes calling, Katharine is forced to confront her demons. It’s am ambitious, expertly-executed bit of filmmaking, all the more impressive given the difficult circumstances of its origin. But how does one go about making a short during a pandemic that doesn’t feel hindered by the environment?

“It’s difficult, because if you have other voices physically in the room, you can recognise when you’ve shot enough,” Sam admits. “I had to split my head up into departments, so I was mentally handing the script over from the writer to the designer to the production manager who was sticking Post-it notes all over the apartment. And living in the world that you’re editing, you walk from the edit suite back onto the set essentially – so there’s always a voice in the back of your head saying “Well, I could go back and shoot more.”

But the end product speaks for itself. I Don’t Find Any of This Very Peaceful is a great piece of filmmaking, pandemic or not, and if you’re considering picking up a camera yourself to document the strange new world, Sam has some advice: “You have to be ambitious– there is no point in doing it otherwise. But be strict with how you’re going to make it, plan it properly. If you act like you’re making a film with a fifty person crew, and work towards that level of logistics and everything else, then just strip it down, you can achieve so much.”

Check out the short film below, and let us (and Sam!) know what you think.

For the past month, David Lynch’s YouTube channel has been the province of self-recorded clips in which the noted filmmaker and artist delivers daily forecasts for weather in the Los Angeles area. A gift to the most hardcore fans, it didn’t give those invested in the man’s cinematic output a whole lot to pore over, but now a new video has appeared in the so-called David Lynch Theater as a more decisive creative statement.

Lynch has finally given the world a look at Fire (Pozar), an animated short and collaboration with Polish-American composer Marek Zebrowski that’s been a long time coming. During a talk at the USC School of Music in 2015, Lynch made mention of a follow-up to his 2007 album with Zebrowski, articulating an intention to give the musician free license to interpret a set of given visuals however he might please.

The result of this experiment has now been made available, a disturbing synthesis of sound and image joined by a taste for the eerie. Lynch gets back in the saddle of animation, returning to the crude surrealistic style of his early avant-garde short Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). In stark black-and-white, he privileges irregular lines and movements suggesting the work of a human hand, making the nonhuman elements (antlered monstrosities, a floating worm that wriggles out of the sun) even more uncanny.

It’s all accompanied by moaning strings from the Penderecki Quartet, Zebrowski’s kindreds in the Polish music world. They take the principle of translation from image to noise and run with it, creating an equivalent for Lynch’s on-the-move pointillism with the pizzicato plucks going along with it. As the proscenium arch that frames the beginning of the short would suggest, it’s more of a mixed-media art project than a proper film.

Lynch has grown increasingly generous with the long-languishing bits of his catalogue as of late; “Fire” arrives hot on the heels of What Did Jack Do?, another short unseen for years until the director loosed it on the Internet with no warning. It’s a nice stopgap solution while we’re all focused on surviving the lockdown, but true disciples still await the holy grail that may never come: a new feature.

How’s this for a Monday morning surprise: David Lynch has released his first proper new work since 2018’s disturbing yet mesmerizing “Ant Head”, and you can watch it right now. “WHAT DID JACK DO” appeared without warning today on Netflix, ripping open a portal into a surreal noir netherworld to break up the streaming binges – and just in time for Lynch’s 74th birthday!

Filmed in 2016, the 17-minute short was shown for the first time at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in 2017 and then again at Lynch’s Festival of Disruption one year later. After floating around for a few years, the deep-pocketed benefactors at Netflix have given it a fitting home, where Lynch devotees can watch and rewatch as they obsessively search for clues unlocking its meaning.

In the short, the filmmaker portrays a tough-customer cop at a train station, interrogating a small primate that he suspects of murder. He grills the little monkey while the suspect delivers classically Lynchian non sequiturs about birds, until the animal launches into a musical number of strangulated passion and scampers away.

What it all means is anyone’s guess, as is the usual case with the sui generis work of Lynch. The familiar atmosphere of stark unease has returned, as has the elaborate background hiss of his meticulous sound design, and the faint genre signifiers that most recently informed the Twin Peaks series. It’s Lynch doing Lynch, and as long as he still have the space in the industry to do that, we can count it as a win.

Which is to say that while the short’s meaning may be inscrutable, its larger significance to the business of film is clear. Lynch subsists primarily on the generosity of institutional benefactors these days, most recently Showtime and now Netflix.

And even that is tenuous; anyone with an impression of Netflix’s business model understands that they’ve licensed this short not out of any desire to foster a culture of independent film, or even to champion the work of Lynch and his ilk. He’s a name, and the cachet attached to that name can get checks signed.

WHAT DID JACK DO is streaming now on Netflix worldwide.

Jonathan Glazer has been rather quiet since he flattened moviegoers with his sci-fi masterpiece Under the Skin in 2013, but that changed earlier this year at the end of October, when he debuted his first new work in half a decade. The Fall, an exquisitely unsettling short film of nearly seven minutes, instantly yielded a strong reaction – from those who could see it, that is.

The short first came to the UK, sneaking up on some unsuspecting audiences at brick-and-mortar cinemas and available to everyone else in the region via the BBC’s iPlayer, where residents can still see it today. But Americans remained out in the cold, until A24 purchased the national exhibition rights to the short and tacked it onto in-theater showings of The Lighthouse earlier this month. (With their coarsely textured atmospheres of ambient dread, they make an apt double feature.)

The good news is that now, even those unable or disinclined to trek out to the local multiplex can drink in the eerie menace of Glazer’s vision. A24 has made the short free to stream for all US residents with online access, and it’s a worthy follow-up to the strong precedent set by Under the Skin.

The short, a relatively simple concept taking wing in execution, depicts a violent ritual executed by masked figures. They shake their victim down from a tree, string him up for a hanging, and let him plunge into a well. Once there, however, he manages to survive and begin the difficult climb back to the light of day.

It’s a fascinating exercise, especially when considered as an addition to Glazer’s body of work, steeped as it is in societal alienation. And one needn’t dig all that deep to appreciate the formal rigor of the piece, as Glazer embeds squares within squares, perverting the limits of his frame.

All we can do now is wait for the Holocaust drama A24 said he’s shooting next year, and wonder how much hard formalism can fit into a film about historical human tragedy. What fun conversations this will spark!

As part of their Black History Month season, Channel 4 are showcasing new work from young and emerging filmmakers around the theme of ‘Black Britain’, as commissioned by the lovely folk at Random Acts. We’re thrilled to be able to present all six films below, along with short statements from the people who made them.

The Gift

Synopsis: An art film that blends Grime with surrealism and explores the theme of identity in Grime’s formative years circa 2003, where a paranormal entity represents the dark external forces that chose to influence and manipulate the genre.

Director Dumas Haddad: “The film is a warped love letter to Grime’s formative years. I grew up around it’s inception and was captivated by its sounds and DIY nature as a culture formed with the scene blossoming through skill and infectious passion. Then a host of commercial entities, with little to zero care for the scene, swam in with negative intentions, which led to grime’s detriment; so I was keen to create a film that touched on the nature of this sinister influence. It blends the genre with surrealism and I was excited about exploring new ways to work with the genre, away from some of the more common tropes.”

Wither

Synopsis: A dance film that explores the complexity of identities and the ever evolving state of being that defines who we are.

Director Antoine Marc: “Working with Random Acts allowed me to engage with a much larger audience. It’s been a unique opportunity to share the passion of film and dance.. The dance film Wither portrays the struggle of acknowledging the diversity that compose our being. A path that could lead to solitude. There is this idea of releasing expectations and accepting the complex layers that define who we are, somehow having differences leading to commonality.”

Dark Matter

Synopsis: A sci-fi visual art documentary that looks at Dark Matter through the unseen presence of black women in science whilst channeling the spirit of Vera Rubin (the woman who searched for and discovered Dark Matter).

Director Adeyemi Michael: “Dark Matter is a statement on the position of the omnipresent nature of blackness. When I was commissioned to make this film by The Science Gallery & Random Acts I saw an opportunity to bring two worlds together about science and race. We are all born into Dark Matter but only some of us see it. Using this as a metaphor I hope the film serves as a tool to recognise those that go unseen in all walks of life, from those women who work in science or in any other fields and go unacknowledged. The film is in homage to the late Astronomer Vera Rubin who identified the scientific presence of Dark Matter.”

Everything Feels Like Water

Synopsis: From young people’s laureate Theresa Lola, an allegory for depression told through a girl’s unique relationships with the rain.

Writer Theresa Lola: “Everything Feels Like Water means so much to me, watching it back brings a joyous relief. It was important to send the message on mental health without preaching but using a creative depth I felt would be more memorable to the audience.”

Ajamu: Joyful Insurrection

Synopsis: An experimental film celebrating the life and career of photographer and artist Ajamu X, and using him as a conduit to explore the black British gay sexual experience.

Director Stephen Isaac-Wilson: “This film was a chance for me to listen to, learn from and collaborate with a black British gay man in his fifties. I’m so grateful that RA made that possible.”

The Muse

Synopsis: Portraits shot through mirrors, with a voiceover of women and non-binary people discussing the intersection of their identities, being queer/non-binary and people of colour.

Director Anna Fearon: “The film for me is a moment of reflection for yourself rather than for others. The act of looking in the mirror is a private moment with yourself, of recognising yourself. As a queer person of colour you’re subjected to prejudgements, misrepresentation and lack there of. To me The Muse is about self acknowledgement and of defining our own narratives. It’s just a fragment of a much wider discourse of identity and intersectionality.”

Inclusion, tolerance and defiance were the self-stated aims of this year’s Iris Prize Film Festival in Cardiff, a perspective- and genre-spanning showcase of queer cinema that constitutes keen practice of the principles the festival has preached en route to becoming the world’s largest LGBTQ+ short film prize. In this 50-strong slate – 36 films competing for the £30,000 top prize, 15 comprising the Best British Short sidebar, and one crossover – Iris’ 13th edition brought to bear a cross-continental consideration of the contemporary queer experience. Here are six standouts showing new directions in its cinematic expressions.

My Brother Is a Mermaid

Alfie Dale’s endearing effort in magic realism earned the unprecedented honour of scooping the Best British Short prize alongside the category’s audience and youth jury awards. That triple-crown glory is an apt indication of this sensitive portrait’s likely crossover appeal: a tender outlook on childhood innocence and unconditional love, it’s told from the perspective of a seven year old as his older sibling comes out as transgender. Experienced in the depiction of marginalised communities from a prior short set among the Roma community, Dale – himself cis – took care to cast a trans actor in the lead role and worked extensively with charity Mermaids to ensure a faithful portrait of trans youth experience. The result is a gorgeous short as steadfast in its representative resolve as it is singular in its empathetic importance.

Ponyboi

In a wider film culture ever awash in the controversies of casting cis actors in trans roles, Iris’ core commitment to inclusive representation is a welcome vision of the world as it should be. Yet newer ground was broken here with Ponyboi, tipped as the first narrative film directed by and starring an intersex actor. River Gallo offers a dynamic display of vitality and vulnerability as the eponymous sex worker, as his direction (with Sadé Clacken Joseph) invokes western and road movie tropes to gently underminine gender archetypes in those most American genres. It’s a convincing proof-of-concept toward a planned feature expansion; with co-production credits here for Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, Gallo seems set to repeat that first distinction at full-length.

Stigma

The queering of genre is critical, too, in David Velduque’s Cronenbergian chiller, ample evidence of his experience in commercials and short films to date. Capably drifting from the heat of a hook-up to handheld horror via his rigorous visual control, this visceral work thrives on atmospheric versatility to deliver a concise and cutting take on serophobic self-loathing. But the fears underlying Stigma are far more than ghettoed gay concerns: its remarkable impact is in building on its frank queer sex scenario to develop a broadly resonant portrait of the prejudices and hang-ups that deny us connection, in expressing with its well-executed body horror squirms the universally-felt pain and isolation of being held apart.

Deep Clean

Whether casting aside tragedy tropes that once came as inevitable or bringing to screen the erstwhile underseen, these shorts as a whole present a community increasingly intent on being seen in its own terms. Taking that to transgressive extremes with a trail of dropped jaws assured in its wake, Grammy-nominated music video director David Wilson’s Deep Clean puts to film an audacious performance piece by Harry Clayton-Wright. With a colour palette and set design that gestures to the not-so-distant days of Sirkian nose-tapping and happily thinks fuck that, this truly stunning short might comprise film history’s most intimate use of a household appliance. Bracing in its defiant reclamation of screen cabaret’s queerness, Deep Clean is a work of legitimately radical power.

How to Live Your Life Correctly

From queer reclamation of domestic space to queerness as national threat in Xindi Lou’s energetic tale of Chinese conformity and youth in rebellion. Dynamically shot with satiric and stylistic abandon, boasting the scale of an epic in the slimmed-down shell of a short, How to Live Your Life Correctly delights in its affecting nascent lesbian love story set against the backdrop of rigorous social control. Lou’s assured use of colour and an eye for spatial composition contrast with a flaring surrealistic edge for a satire light on its feet and lingering in its effect. In its nimble critique of state-sponsored othering, it finds defiant force as an object of dissent – like the best of this year’s Iris offerings, meeting an oppressive gaze with its own steely-eyed stare.

Hey You

It’s partly in the implicit contrast of widely-divergent rights for LGBT+ communities worldwide that Deep Clean’s uncompromising flaunting of freedoms not universally available derives impact. That’s a link more intently evoked in Jared Watmuff’s disarmingly funny Hey You. A multi-hyphenate helmer with teeth cut in micro-length shorts, Watmuff distinguishes himself here primarily in the edit: his movie is mercilessly concise and match-cut to perfection, visually conveying the tension of an app hookup in the making with a deft formal control that marks him one to watch closely. Its slow and then sudden reveal is an immense achievement of pacing, managing in its four mostly dialogue-free minutes a build-up of assuredly cinematic skill.

For more on this year’s Iris Prize visit irisprize.org