Ask any short-film director and they’ll tell you the same thing: finding distribution for short films absolutely sucks. Ask any distributor and they’ll tell you the same thing: we want to release more short films but properly distributing them absolutely sucks.
Due credit to Cinema Guild for engineering a neat workaround: they’ve acquired Pedro Costa’s nine-minute short The Daughters of Fire off its Cannes premiere and will pair it with Hong Sangsoo’s 61-minute In Water––naturally branding the experience Fire+Water, at last giving Barbenheimer its reckoning. As Cinema Guild’s Peter Kelly noted, “There are too few opportunities for short films to play theatrically, but no recent short is more demanding of a theatrical experience than Pedro Costa’s monumental new work.” Apologies to everyone hoping they might watch the latest from one of our great imagemakers on their 13-inch MacBook Air. [Deadline]
The Daughters of Fire, Costa’s first work since 2019’s Vitalina Varela, was seemingly fashioned for some time in a film-theater-music hybrid, and (no matter its original form) sure to deliver this year’s greatest images. Hong’s In Water greatly impressed out of Berlinale, with Rory O’Connor writing, “Narratively it’s nothing if not succinct, and whatever In Water lacks for plot it more than makes up for in mood and ideas, as well as a kind of raw artistic honesty––regarding his work, yes, but also his sense of mortality.”