January can feel like the longest month: a full 31-dayer to begin with, of course, but also inordinately stretched by its sense of constant renewal. New resolutions to be kept, new standards to be met, new taxes to be filed – and that’s before we factor in Omicron, which looks set to make it an especially testing start to the year. All in all, it’s a good time to investigate new ways to entertain ourselves and nourish our minds. Cue the 31-day short film diet, a sequel to last January’s much-loved literary diet. This one-a-day starter pack – to form a different, more pleasurable kind of new year habit – is aimed at enriching our lives, not depriving it of small joys. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as regular watchers of short films per se, though we can be without realising it: what is a YouTube cat video, after all, if not a short film of some description? We’ve kept to a broad remit in defining short films for this collection. Some are cinematic by design, others made by and for mobile phones. There are works by big-name film-makers such as David Lynch and Lynne Ramsay, while viral stars such as Mufasa feature alongside musical headliners including Beyoncé and Thom Yorke. High contrast is the goal: if you feel disoriented transitioning from an animated Nazi-hunter thriller one day to an ebullient viral dance video the next, all the better to keep you on your toes. What the shorts do have in common, we hope, is a certain spirit-lifting sensibility. They’re not all necessarily feelgood or inspirational in the conventional sense (though some, like the Netflix triumph-over-adversity doc Zion, certainly meet that brief), but they all offer a stimulating dose of beauty, invention, expansive thinking or occasional concentrated joy. We’ve tried to stick to free content – though some require a Netflix subscription or trial, or a free sign-up to Vimeo – and to steer away from outright downers, but themes of loss, prejudice and the climate are woven through in unexpected ways. Happy watching, and happy new year. 1 January The Man Without a Head (Juan Solanas, 18 mins) So, it’s New Year’s Day, you might be feeling a tad delicate, and what you need is a soothing bit of beautiful whimsy to ease into 2022. Argentine director Juan Solanas’s unexpectedly tender, retro-futuristic mini-romance is just the ticket, despite its seemingly morbid premise of a headless man seeking love and self-completion. Turns out the head isn’t everything. 2 January Taking Stock (Duncan Cowles, 4 mins) At a loose end professionally, an aspiring documentary film-maker resolves to make an easy buck by shooting stock footage – while drolly talking us through his fraying state of mind. A witty dedication to any creatives and freelancers who aren’t where they want to be in life, and resonant to everyone experiencing the “what am I doing?” January blues. 3 January Anima (Paul Thomas Anderson, 15 mins) Paul Thomas Anderson, whose new film, Licorice Pizza, hits cinemas in January, has long dabbled in music-video directing, making striking clips for the likes of Fiona Apple and Haim. But this Netflix-produced collaboration with Thom Yorke is his most polished and haunting effort in the medium, an overnight Prague dream odyssey from Orwellian dystopia to gentle human contact. 4 January The Cat Piano (Eddie White and Ari Gibson, 9 mins) TS Eliot died on this day in 1965, and while this beguiling Australian animation isn’t a direct tribute to him, one suspects the poet of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats would have been charmed by this verse-based, Nick Cave-narrated imagining of the decadent, jazz-hip nightlife of our feline friends. If these guys had made Cats, it might have all worked out. 5 January The Kármán Line (Oscar Sharp, 25 mins) This Bafta-nominated short finds an initially absurd but strangely moving metaphor for the gradual wrench of terminal disease, as Olivia Colman’s middle-class housewife is struck with a rare condition that causes her to lift off the ground at an ever-increasing, irreversible rate. But that’s not the only uplift infusing proceedings: there’s beauty amid the devastation. 6 January The Driver Is Red (Randall Christopher, 15 mins) Animation doesn’t seem like the obvious medium for a documentary short about the 1960 capture of on-the-run Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, but with its sharp, austere ink-sketch aesthetic, this gripping mini-thriller proves otherwise. The visuals convey a suitable sense of subterfuge, but also the fragility of history, vulnerable to fading and being redrawn. 7 January Mufasa’s Friday Dance (Mufasa and Hypeman, 1 min) Like it or not, social media dance videos have become their own generational art form, amplified by TikTok during the pandemic – though many of them are now so polished and rehearsed that they lose their sense of fun. Scruffily shot, this early viral example explodes with manic, elated energy, inviting chronic repeat viewing. Your weekend starts here. 8 January Brown Skin Girl (Beyoncé and Jenn Nkiru, 6 mins) Beyoncé upended the form of the music video with her recent series of visual albums, merging art, activism and the simple pleasures of a good bop. Exquisitely conceived by the singer herself and British artist Nkiru, this celebratory 2020 ode to the power and pride in black and brown skin is the most joyful thing she’s made in ages. 9 January Migrants (Hugo Caby, Zoé Devise, Antoine Dupriez, Aubin Kubiak and Lucas Lermytte, 8 mins) If your environmentally minded New Year resolutions are already slipping a week into 2022, let this adorable but sneakily gut-wrenching animation renew your resolve. Its story of two polar bears left homeless by global heating, washing up on a verdant but hostile island, is unabashedly manipulative but effective – and a gentle way to explain the issues at hand to young ones. 10 January Fish Story (Charlie Shackleton, 14 mins) In collaboration with journalist Caspar Salmon, documentary-maker Shackleton unfolds an oft-shared family tale that seems too quirky to be true, as Salmon recalls his grandmother attending a 1980s gathering for fishy-surnamed folk on the Welsh island of Anglesey. What ensues is a mischievous, wickedly funny study of how personal memory and myth are formed and blurred. 11 January Zion (Floyd Russ, 12 mins) Born without legs and thrust into the foster system, where his upbringing was unstable and abusive, Zion Clark finally found his calling in high-school wrestling, rising through the ranks and pursuing Olympic dreams. With rich Netflix production values, this short documentary portrait of him wrings every ounce of inspirational joy from his story, and you can’t remain unmoved. 12 January Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle (Alnoor Dewshi, 15 mins) The BFI player is a rich source of free British shorts and archival curios, and this winning, subtly acerbic 1992 short is one of its treasures – rather ahead of its time in its good-humoured discussion of cultural appropriation and diasporic living, via the walking-and-talking of two British-Indian cousins through a timeworn tangle of London streets. 13 January The Water Diary (Jane Campion, 17 mins) With veteran New Zealand film-maker Jane Campion currently riding a fresh wave of critical acclaim for the Oscar-tipped The Power of the Dog, it’s a good time to revisit this lyrical short from 2006 – starring her own daughter Alice Englert. A child’s-eye perspective on living through drought, it blends a pertinent message of environmental sustainability with a poetic wisp of magical realism. 14 January Blue (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 13 mins) The Thai auteur specialises in measured, meditative experimental cinema that envelops you in a hazy daze. That’s true of his latest feature, the Tilda Swinton-starring Memoria, out in cinemas on 14 January – and of this short, entrancing art piece, in which a woman’s insomnia leaves her in a limbo state, licked but not burned by spreading flames. 15 January Solemates (Bryce Dallas Howard, 1 min) Bryce Dallas Howard shows her father Ron’s aptitude for plainly effective, unapologetically sentimental heartstring-pulling in this one-minute weepie from 2015. It sweetly plays out a life cycle of courtship, marriage and family purely through the shoes – a battered pair of Converse, and some chic two-tone derbies, both bearing their own personalities – worn by two lovers. 16 January Love Connection (Hendrik Harms, 1 min) There’s more to TikTok than dance videos and memes: budding film-makers are using it as a means of demonstrating their storytelling abilities on a shoestring. This breezy, sweetly silly take on the strains of lockdown dating – complete with screen freezes and collisions – won a one-minute short competition held by the Raindance film festival. Bigger things may lie ahead. 17 January America (Garrett Bradley, 29 mins) As America marks Martin Luther King day, it feels an apt moment to savour this extraordinary reevaluation of African-American cinema and images from the Oscar-nominated director. Made before Bradley’s breakout feature Time, but only recently made viewable online, it traces a powerful, illuminating arc from rediscovered black silent cinema to present-day representation. 18 January Scenes from a Marriage (Chris Ware, 4 mins) Cartoonist Ware made this droll short for the radio show This American Life in 2009, and there’s more to it than meets the eye. Ostensibly a minor anecdote about a New York street encounter (or not), told in crucially different ways by a husband and wife, it swiftly grows into a perceptive, gendered reflection on unreliable storytelling and memory. 19 January Agnes Martin: Beauty Is in Your Mind (Lindsey Dryden, 8 mins) Part of the TateShots short film series, this affectionate, illuminating primer on the life and work of the late American abstract painter Agnes Martin is guided by the perspectives of curator Frances Morris and art dealer Arne Glimcher. “Her painting is the key to the art within you,” says Glimcher: this short reminds us that looking can be a creative act in itself. 20 January What Did Jack Do? (David Lynch, 17 mins) It’s American weirdmeister Lynch’s birthday. If you don’t have time to celebrate by watching your favourite feature of his, this perfectly bizarre short, which has been quietly sitting on Netflix for several years now, will do nicely. Behind a gauze of cigarette smoke, Lynch himself takes the lead in this one, as a detective interrogating a capuchin monkey accused of murder. Of course. 21 January Ten Meter Tower (Axel Danielson and Maximilien van Aertryck, 16 mins) The concept for this lauded Swedish short is disarmingly simple and relateably human: fix a camera on a 10-metre diving platform at an indoor pool, and watch the reactions of various would-be divers as they contemplate the jump. Some baulk, some wait, some go for it in glorious slow-motion, and the film pulses with their anxiety and adrenaline. 22 January A New York Mystery (Samantha Hartsoe, 4 mins) Back to TikTok, the ultra-short form of which can also be serialised in compelling ways – as with this viral four-part series of videos in which a young woman uncovers a decidedly unsettling portal in her apartment. Shot and narrated with a tongue-in-cheek hint of Blair Witch Project creepiness, it’s surely bound to inspire a longer horror film one of these days. Part 1 /Part 2/ Part 3/ Part 4 23 January Ticky Tacky (Brian Petsos, 15 mins) Between Dune, The Card Counter and TV’s Scenes from a Marriage, the internet reached peak Oscar Isaac thirst in 2021, and if you’re still not satisfied, this mordant revenge comedy from 2014 is a tart chaser. Staged in a heightened manner in a single room, its story of a wealthy man uncovering various intimate betrayals is minor: Isaac’s louche star quality is the draw here. 24 January Anagnorisis (Wim Wenders, 4 mins) I was unfamiliar with the work of Israeli-born singer-songwriter Asaf Avidan until last year, but a music video directed by the veteran German film-maker is one way to get my attention. Exactingly staged and composed, the video recalls Wenders’s documentary Pina as a modern dance piece interacting with urban architecture, mesmerisingly performed by American dancer Bobbi Jene Smith. 25 January Swimmer (Lynne Ramsay, 17 mins) It’s Burns Night tonight, and while we could have chosen something explicitly Burns-themed, we’ve opted for a looser interpretation of Scots poetry in motion, courtesy of their greatest working film-maker. Commissioned in 2012 by the London Olympics and ravishingly shot in black and white, it’s a hypnotic, Bafta-awarded odyssey, tracing a lone wild swimmer through Britain’s waterways. 26 January A Single Life (Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins, Marieke Blaauw, 3 minutes) This Dutch animation collective nabbed an Oscar nomination for this ingeniously conceived, darkly hilarious stop-motion short, which squeezes a woman’s entire life and a time-travel conceit worthy of Christopher Nolan into three fat-free minutes. Its chronology is dictated by the skips and blips of a single record on a faulty turntable – just don’t let it reach the end. 27 January Love (James Gallagher, 11 minutes) A talented young tennis player is weighed down by pressure from his demanding father: the premise of Gallagher’s pristinely shot short promises a standard-issue sports drama. Yet the film’s dreamy tone and impressionistic structure defy expectations, and the film emerges as a moving essay on toxic masculinity and how to defeat it. 28 January In the Kitchen With Pedro Almodóvar (Luis Azevedo, 7 mins) The video essay has become a lively, expansive alternative form of film criticism, and Portuguese critic and film-maker Azevedo is one of its foremost practitioners. This valentine to the recurring role of the kitsch kitchen in Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema is a delight, and apt viewing with the Spanish auteur’s latest (and kitchen-tastic) melodrama, Parallel Mothers, in cinemas on 28 January. 29 January Date Night (Reggie Yates, 6 mins) Yates’s recent debut feature, Pirates, was a lively, irreverent surprise, though his short film work shows where his snappy brand of comedy came from. In this one, three contrasting Londoners vent about their various reservations about dating and relationships, from commitment phobia to wasted bikini waxes. It boasts a sharp, funny turn from Daniel Kaluuya to boot. 30 January Flight (Jonathan Glazer, 1 min) We couldn’t complete this diet without one example of the most prevalent form of short film-making in our lives – the humble TV ad. Admittedly, any ad by the elusive Brit Glazer (set to release his first feature in a decade this year) is a step up from car insurance meerkats: this simple, gravity-free Apple Watch promo is a brief blast of cold fresh air. 31 January Nian (Lulu Wang, 12 mins) There’s something pleasing about ending a month that began with New Year’s Day with New Year’s Eve – Chinese New Year’s Eve, that is. Whether or not you celebrate, this Apple-backed, holiday-themed short from Chinese-American director Lulu Wang (The Farewell) will leave you feeling warm and fuzzy, as it reimagines a new year folk legend in a youthful modern-day context.