Short Films

The short film is the ideal starting point for those rare and doubly driven artistic personalities who go under the hybrid name of writer/directors. Often, if and when they graduate to feature films, they are never quite so pure and free again. The form has fascinated me ever since, back in the erupting London of the 1960s, I first saw a clutch of short films by the Australian multi-talented prodigy Don Levy. They pioneered many editing techniques which have since become part of the common vocabulary. Later on, his career as a director of feature films proved less satisfactory. He might have been better off pursuing his vision through more ventures in the form he had already mastered. Relative independence from financial pressure is only one of the factors that attract talented directors to the short film. There is also the chance of writing a lyric poem, as it were, without the onus of having to turn out an epic. Hence there is always a new squadron of highly individualistic makers of short films on the way up. The first such director to have honoured this website by choosing it as a showcase is another Australian, Cordelia Beresford. I think you will agree that we couldn’t have made a more dazzling start.

— London, May 2008

(Image from the Cockatoo Island Project, 2007, by Genevieve Blanchett)