The winners of our short film competition—revealed

February 25, 2025 · By A Rabbit's Foot

Our inaugural short film competition invited filmmakers to explore the five—and sometimes six—senses.

Last year, A Rabbit’s Foot partnered with their sister production house Rabbit’s Foot Films on a short film competition which today announces its winners. Launched last year, the competition was initiated to discover new filmmaking talent from across the globe, with ambitions of developing both long and short-form content with them, along with championing their work. As well as Finch, the judges included filmmaker and actor Isabel Sandoval, Bruce Robinson and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap.

This marks the beginning of a film distribution chapter for A Rabbit’s Foot who will now distribute short films on their platform. Rabbit’s Foot Films who are already in the feature film business will oversee and produce a series of original shorts in partnership with the magazine.

After co-producing Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, Finch rebranded his film company Standalone Pictures as Rabbit’s Foot Films, to celebrate the growing partnership with the magazine. The young company which consists of Finch, Sara-Ella Ozbek and Issy Carr, has a term deal with Colombia Pictures and feature films in development with Netflix, Sony Pictures, Erik Feig’s Picturestart, Lorenzo Mieli’s OUR Films and Entertainment Film Distribution.

The Old Young Crow which was written, directed and produced by New Yorker Liam LoPinto, has won first prize in the competition. This eleven-minute short which combines live-action with animation portrays an “Iranian boy who befriends an old Japanese woman at a graveyard in Tokyo”. LoPinto has been awarded a prize of £10,000. Runner up was awarded to Estonian filmmaker and NFTS graduate Johannes Magnus Aule, whose film The Tree of Many Faces is a slavic folklore tale about “a broken-hearted woman named Anna who is led to make a deal with an ancient tree and its mischievous inhabitant”. Kodak sponsored the runner up prize, offering 5 x 400ft 16mm film with processing and scanning at their London lab. Aule is set to make an original short using the film provided by Kodak in partnership with Rabbit’s Foot Films, with ambitions of shooting in Estonia and to be produced by in-house executive Issy Carr. Ciara Kerr, another graduate of the UK’s prestigious film school NFTS was awarded third place for her startling animation Homemaker which tackles the subject of domestic abuse.

A Rabbit’s Foot are gearing up for their 11th issue which will launch at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, along with preparing for the next edition of their POWER OF FILM event at Curzon Mayfair on the 12th March where an evening of masterclasses with filmmakers, actors and heads of department will take place.