These entries on the short list for this year’s Best Short/Animation award represent the very best of Ireland’s newest wave of film and video makers. Steven Benedict’s The Last is a beautifully photographed and deeply moving story about an aging shoemaker (David Kelly) whose final wish is to fulfill a promise he made fifty years ago. John O’Donnell’s The First Television is a crackpot comedy about an eccentric miser’s quest to purchase his first-ever television. Cathy, by Neil Dowling, is a dreamlike tale of young woman’s encounter with a golf-playing angel in Dublin. Kevin Jakubowski’s Round Two wisecracks philosophically on the virtues of hard drinking, while Diarmuid Goggin’s dark and affecting Nell tells the story of an embittered woman who seeks revenge on her neighbor for stealing away the man she loved. The award for Best Short/Animation goes to Nora Twomey’s From Darkness, an imaginative and lyrical retelling of an Inuit legend about a lonely fisherman who drifts into haunted waters.