For Short Film Saturday for most of the coming year I will revisit the animated shorts that were presented in snippets by the King of Cartoons on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. And here you’ll get to see the whole thing.

The films I share in my 31 Days of Oscar posts tend to get lost in the shuffle, so I’ll be featuring them on Short Film Saturday to give them their due.

The films I share in my 31 Days of Oscar posts tend to get lost in the shuffle, so I’ll be featuring them on Short Film Saturday to give them their due.

This film is not currently available on any streaming platform.

Fernanda Torres, is now a it more well-known in the US after having earned an Oscar nomination for I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui) last year. However, when she was younger she was the first the first Brazilian woman (or woman from any Latin American country) to win Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival. She tied with Barbara Sukowa and was very worthy of the honor.

Writer/Director Arnaldo Jabor refers to this film as a sort of psychological playground. It is a that a a minimalist drama experimenting in negative fill an quite nearly stagebound and focused on two actors. However, the intensity and proximity to the actors is a trick that only film can pull off.

The cultural impact of Eminem’s “Stan” is already indelible what with the word becoming synonymous with obsessive fandom, even being added to the dictionary. However, while that cultural artifact comes from a misapropriation of the intent of the song, the music, lyrics, and video still stand as a tremendous fusion of creative power. One of the rare 21st century tracks to even offer an extended video that expands on the story of the song, and stars Devon Sawa when he was in the midst of making some of his most popular works. Enjoy!

Despite dropping a reference to it in the music video section of my series Once Upon a Time in the 80s, I never featured the first vide MTV ever played in its own post. And that’s rather strange seeing as how “Video Killed the Radio Star” isn’t merely a footnote in musical history but rather prophetic, that and song and images are quite memorable as well. Enjoy!

This year I intended to start profiling national film archives that host a lot of great content online at the start of the year as part of my long-inactive By Any Means Necessary series. More than halfway through the year, I am finally doing it.

This idea started late in ’24 when I started noticing how many countries had such sites and I started perusing and bookmarking them.

Even before Conan’s Estonia joke at the Oscars, I’d seen some films on their site. As this archive is less likely to be well-known I’ll spotlight it today.

Today is Võidupüha, an Estonian holiday, which commemorates their victory over Latvia in the Battle of Cēsis. So I am featuring Arkaader, a joint project of the Estonian Film Institute and National Archives of Estonia, to host many historical films online; short and feature, narrative and documentary. Many of the films are free-to-stream. Others are available to rent for a small fee.

Any of the places I feature will have plenty of places to explore, due to the fact that they’re more likely to be dialogue-free I recommend starting with this curated list of animated shorts. There are also music video and experimental films. Most of the films typically have subtitles.

While watching a recent episode of Welcome to Wrexham I noticed they once again used a snippet of an old British Pathé newsreel featuring Cardiff City and Wrexham. British Pathé has a vast online library of digitized newsreels, so I decided to search it out. Sure, enough I found the match in question. Not much footage of live sports about 100 years ago, when they were it tended to be mostly random snippets, most people would have gotten the narrative of the game from newspapers. However, old newsreels and snippets of actual events (referred to as actualities back in the day) are some of the best time capsules we have. They’re peepholes into a past mostly confined to the written word. Enjoy!