The Shorter Cut
Film love is the discipline of watching, describing and arguing about cinema, and the short film and the documentary are the two forms where that discipline is most visible, because they strip the feature down to its working parts. A short film is a self-contained dramatic narrative that typically runs between 1 and 30 minutes, while a documentary is a nonfiction record that reports, investigates or reflects on real people and events, and both give a new critic a smaller surface to read than a 120 minute feature, which is why they are the natural starting point for learning how to write about the shorter cut. This page defines both forms, names the differences that matter, and gives you a working method for watching and writing about each one.
The question underneath all of it is simple: What film is, from celluloid to cut. Every format in this article, from the 1 minute abstract to the 90 minute Netflix documentary, is an answer to that question at a particular length.
What a short film is and what it is not
What a short film is, at the level that matters for a first-time critic, is a complete dramatic narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end, delivered in a compressed runtime that forces every choice to be load-bearing. The working boundary is the one the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses for its short film categories, where a film qualifies if its running time, including credits, is no more than 10 minutes, and that 10 minute figure is the line the most prestigious short awards will draw for you. Around that line, festivals draw their own, and the Berlin International Film Festival caps its short competition at 15 minutes, so a 14 minute film is a short at Berlin and a feature at the Academy. The contrast with the feature is the point: a 110 minute feature has room for subplots, for a second act that meanders and for a denouement that could have been cut; a short has none of that room, so its plot is usually a single situation, a single character under a single pressure, and its ending often lands on an image rather than an explanation.
- Feature length: 90 to 120 minutes is the standard theatrical run, with 150 to 180 minutes for the long-form epic
- Short film: 1 to 30 minutes in most festival definitions, with 10 minutes as the Academy line
- Documentary short: commonly 10 to 40 minutes, long enough to build one argument
- Feature documentary: 75 to 100 minutes, with 100 minutes as the practical standard for theatrical release
Where a writer gets short and feature mixed up is in the word short itself. It is short relative to a feature, not short in absolute terms, and a 25 minute short has more minutes of screen time than some films billed as features. Treat the 10 minute Academy line as your anchor and describe everything else as longer or shorter than that anchor.
How a documentary is made, and how a short is made
How a documentary is made comes down to deciding, before the first shoot, what the film is about and how much of the making will be on camera, and the short film is made the same way minus the reporting. A documentary that reports real events assembles 3 elements before it shoots, and those 3 are the subject, the access and the structure. The subject is the person, place or event that carries the film, such as a single family, a single building or a single legal case. Access is who will let the camera in, because a documentary without access is only footage of the outside. Structure is the question the film answers, because a documentary is built on a question the way a short film is built on a situation. Once those 3 are fixed, the making runs in the usual phases, and the phases differ between documentary and short in exactly 2 places.
- Development: write the question, or the treatment, and fix the runtime target, whether that target is a 15 minute short or a 90 minute feature documentary
- Funding: line up the budget, which for a 20 minute short might be a few thousand pounds and for a 90 minute documentary can reach the hundreds of thousands
- Pre-production: for a short this means casting and location; for a documentary it means access, permissions and the legal review of what will be shown
- Production: the shoot, which for a short is often 1 to 3 days and for a documentary can run over many months
- Post-production: the edit, the sound and the score, which is where a short earns its compression and a documentary earns its argument
- Festival and distribution: submission to festivals, then the streaming window, which for a finished short can arrive within 12 to 18 months of the first shoot day
The difference between the two makes is mostly a difference of time under pressure. The short film compresses the dramatic arc into a runtime of 1 to 30 minutes, so its edit is about removing. The documentary compresses a real investigation into a runtime of 75 to 100 minutes, so its edit is about selecting, which is why a documentary edit is often described as the slowest and most consequential phase of the whole production.
How a documentary reaches Netflix and the rest of streaming
How a documentary reaches Netflix is a deal, not an accident, and the route has changed as the streamers became buyers, not just broadcasters. The standard route is festival first: a documentary premieres at a major festival such as Sundance, Tribeca or the Berlin International Film Festival, where it plays in front of buyers, and a buyer then negotiates a licensing deal that puts the film on a platform for a set number of years. Netflix has run this route since it began commissioning original documentary features, and the 2015 purchase of the rights to the Oscar-winning documentary Amour by the French director, and its later commission of the feature documentary Beast, both illustrate the pattern of a festival pedigree followed by a platform release. A short documentary can follow the same route in miniature: it wins at a festival, a platform picks it up for a documentary anthology, and it lands on a service alongside features. The practical point for a critic is that a Netflix documentary and a festival documentary are the same animal with different distribution, so the review is written the same way regardless of where the audience will watch it.
How to watch a short before you write about it
How to watch a short before you write about it is to watch it once for the story and once for the craft, and the 2 passes are different jobs. In the first pass, watch for what happens, who it happens to and how it ends, and hold back the craft analysis, because a short is so short that the first viewing is mostly about the emotional event. In the second pass, watch for the 3 structural joints, and the 3 joints are the setup, the turn and the exit. The setup is the first 1 or 2 minutes, where the film tells you what world you are in and what is at stake. The turn is the moment where the situation changes, and in a 10 minute short that turn often lands somewhere near the 4 to 6 minute mark, which is the middle of the runtime. The exit is the last 1 or 2 minutes, where the film decides whether it will explain the turn or let the image do the work. Write down the timestamp of the turn, because a review of a short that can name the minute at which the film turns is already ahead of a review that cannot. A 15 minute short has 3 times the number of minutes as a 5 minute short, so a 5 minute short has almost no room for a turn, and that is why the very short shorts are often single-image or single-situation pieces that turn on a single cut rather than a plot change.
How to write the first sentence of a short film review
How to write the first sentence of a short film review is to name the film, its runtime and its single situation, because those 3 facts are what the reader cannot get from anywhere else on the page. A first sentence that works for a short looks like this in shape: the film is a 12 minute short in which a single character does a single thing, and the situation is stated in the same sentence. The runtime goes in the first sentence because it is the fact that changes how the reader should judge everything else, and a 12 minute short is judged against 12 minutes, not against 120. Avoid opening with the director's name, because the reader has not yet learned why the director matters, and avoid opening with a definition of the short film form, because the reader is already watching a short and does not need the form explained before the film is named. The first sentence is the only sentence in the review that has to do the job of both hook and orientation, so it carries the film title, the 12 minute runtime and the situation, and it does all 3 in one line.
How to write about a documentary without overclaiming
How to write about a documentary without overclaiming is to separate the 3 layers of the film, the event, the argument and the form, and to keep each claim in its own layer. The event layer is what actually happened, and it is the layer where a critic is most likely to overclaim, because a documentary presents real events and the critic is tempted to treat the film's presentation of the event as the event itself. The argument layer is what the film is saying about the event, and it is the layer where most of the critical work is, because 2 documentaries about the same event can argue opposite things about it. The form layer is how the film is built, the interview structure, the archive footage, the score, and it is the layer where the craft is visible. Write each claim in the layer where it belongs, and the review stops overclaiming on its own. A sentence that says the event proved the film's argument overclaims, because the event and the argument are 2 different layers, and the film's job is to move the reader from one to the other, not to prove that they are the same.
Language and the films that carry it
Language and the films that carry it are a practical problem for a new critic, because a lot of the most talked-about recent cinema is in a language the reader does not speak, and the question that comes up most often in that situation is what language a specific film is in. The answer to that question is a fact, not an opinion, and it belongs in the same layer as the runtime: it goes in the first paragraph of the review, next to the country of origin and the runtime, so that a reader who does not speak the language can decide whether to watch the subtitled cut. A 90 minute feature in a non-English language is a different commitment from a 12 minute short in the same language, because the subtitled viewing is a 90 minute act of close reading, and the short makes it a 12 minute one. The tools that exist for the language problem are the subtitle file, the streaming app that delivers it, and the translator or converter app that can pull a line of dialogue out of a clip for closer reading, and the best of them are the ones that treat the subtitle as a text you can quote, not just a caption you can skip. A critic who can quote a line of dialogue, even a single line, in the film's original language and then give the English translation is doing more work for the reader than a critic who only paraphrases, and that 1 quoted line, original plus translation, is a small act of film love that costs almost nothing and shows the reader that the review was written from the film itself rather than from the synopsis.
The forms named in this page, the short film, the feature, the documentary short and the feature documentary, are all answers to the same question at different lengths, and the critic's job is to keep the length in the sentence at every point where the length changes the judgment.