Romford Horror Festival 2022 – Nerdly’s pick for Best Short
As you may know Nerdly, the website, and our fledgling – but growing – YouTube channel are proudly latched on to the Romford Film Festival. I have loved working on the panels and having discussions about what we should and shouldn’t show, what should be nominated and what should win. However, I and my esteemed judges don’t always agree and sometimes you can see your favourite falling down the list. It’s not to say you were wrong to champion the flick just that something else just shone that little bit brighter, this my friends is the true magic of cinema.
I’ve already brought you my choices of Nerdly’s pick for the Best Feature Film, Best Actress and Best Actor. The thought process is that, honestly, I have a terrible memory and can’t actually remember what won what. I am going to go through some of the categories and give you what I think should take the coveted Rommy for that category. This time… BEST SHORT
Nominees:
- Moon Drops
- Transfert
- Draining
- You Will Never Be Back
- Cutter
- Familiar
- Visitors
The bulk of projects submitted to the Romford Film Festivals are shorts, making this category a really hard one to get down to the best 6 or 7. It’s made even harder when the quality is as high as this. There are some names you will have already seen in other categories with Cutter, Moon Drops and You Will Never be Back jumping in for another nomination. This speaks volumes to how great those shorts are across the board in terms of quality of cinematography, score, directing and more importantly, the performances.
Draining for me was a cracking little documentary short but for me raised the question of when does a short stop being a short? With a 50 minute runtime (or thereabouts) I myself hesitate to call it one. I take nothing away from the project, I just think it sits in no man’s land, neither Short nor Feature.
Now I flip-flopped a lot on this one because I found it hard to separate two shorts as one standing out just that little bit better. Transfert and Familiar were my top two all-rounders but I am going to have to give it to Familiar.
A great little old school, eerie as all hell, throwback short the days of tense edge of your seat haunted house flicks. It’s visually striking, has a nice score and doesn’t waste a second of its runtime on anything it doesn’t need to. Of course, there are some things it could do a little better but honestly, I really liked it how it was and its little quirks only serve to help the narrative.
I think the Romford Horror Hounds will get a kick out of Familiar and hopefully they take to it as much as I did. Yes, Familiar would take MY Best Short Rommy BUT did the collective agree is the question! No spoilers here though!
I will be back shortly with another of Nerdly’s Romford Horror pick sAND we’ll be reviewing some films from the festival, so keep ’em peeled.
