Why should audiences bother with short films? Can any director take his audience on a worthwhile and satisfying journey in just 10 or 15 minutes? These are the questions that anyone who spends time working with short films will inevitably be asked. And there are few people better qualified to answer them than Luke Morris, not only the producer and sometime co-director of a handful of terrific shorts but the man behind the acclaimed Cinema 16 short-film DVD compilations.

Morris’s argument is that the short film should have equal status in cinema to that of the short story in literature. “It’s where the most interesting film-making takes place, because people aren’t restricted by the kind of commercial pressures that come with making big feature films.”

In addition, he points out that many of the most inventive directors learnt the ropes from shorts. “David Lynch, Lynn Ramsay, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro — these people developed careers through making short films, quite often on their own, out of compulsion. That’s why they’re interesting: you get a purer sense of a film-maker’s intent. Equally, that’s why they can be awful as well.”

Fortunately, Morris filters out the awful films and concentrates on the highest quality for his Cinema 16 collections. The latest, Cinema 16: World Short Films, is the fourth in the series (before it came collections of British, European and American shorts). Morris concedes that it may be the final DVD. The spiralling popularity of websites such as YouTube means that it’s harder to find the exclusive rarities on which Cinema 16 has made its name. “If a film-maker has put something out all over the internet free,” Morris says, “I tend to avoid it, just from a commercial point of view. When people put a lot of care and attention into making something, watching it streamed online is not the ideal way.”

So what are the highlights of this latest DVD? Big names include del Toro, whose commentary to his Mexican noir is one of the funniest items in the collection; Alfonso Cuarón, the Harry Potter director with, it turns out, a teenaged taste for sparse nouvelle vague homage; and Guy Maddin, who still makes shorts despite his feature film career. Also included are films by Park Chan-Wook, Jane Campion, Alexander Sukurov and the grandfather of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene.

For del Toro, who was, he says, “the gaffer, the rigger, the special-effects guy, the director, the writer and the caterer” on his short film Doña Lupe, rediscovering his own early work was a bittersweet experience. “Formally, it’s 98 per cent putrid,” he says. “But the idea and the spirit of it I have great affection for.”

Cuarón, his fellow Mexican, rediscovered his own short film when he was asked to include it in the Cinema 16 collection. “What I realised was that I wish I had had a mentor to help me,” he says. “So I decided now to be the mentor of that 19-year-old kid. I did a little recutting, I think it flows a little bit better.”

In contrast to many of the other films in the collection, Maddin’s playful collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, My Dad is 100 Years Old, was made recently rather than at the beginning of his career. “I get driven crazy by the long periods of inactivity between features,” he says. “And I would notice that on the first day or so of shooting on a feature that I was forgetting everything I had learnt, so it was just a way of keeping sharp. But this movie wasn’t some kind of warm-up exercise. I knew there would be one chance only to honour Roberto Rossellini, or more accurately honour his daughter’s recollections of him. I wanted to get it right.”

The big names are all very well but, as Morris says: “Half the point has always been to have them because they help to shine the spotlight on the new directors.”

So which films are made by the rising stars to look out for? Morris points to an Alaskan Sundance winner called Sikumi and an animation called Madame Tutli-Putli. He’s also keen on a very funny German splatter movie called Forklift Driver Klaus. But the real star of the collection is the British director Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning film Wasp, starring Danny Dyer and Nathalie Press, who says: “Short films are incredible because often they are people’s very first pieces of work and quite often the first work is the most beautiful. It’s their very first shout to the world: ‘Look at me, I have something to say.’ ”

Cinema16: World Short Films is out on DVD on November 17

www.cinema16.org

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