Short but not sweet

Britain's sorry haul at this year's Academy Awards has had one bright side: the spotlight of attention that has lingered on the often neglected category of the short film. Yet Andrea Arnold's win for her 24-minute drama, Wasp, is only the latest in a line of wins by British short films, which have always punched well above their weight (or length) at the Oscars.

Since 1990, no fewer than 10 of the live-action and animated short film winners have been British; the ace animator Nick Park alone accounting for three of them. It's a testimony to the creative energy of our cash-strapped talent. Possibly, too, the American Academy, ultraconservative when voting in the main categories, is more open here to edgy work. There were three British nominees this year and each one had a hard-hitting subject.

The runners-up are set against the troubles in Northern Ireland and on the Indo-Pakistan border, while Arnold's film is shot in the Thameside town of Dartford, on the kind of working-class housing estate where the director grew up. Nathalie Press - winner of the Evening Standard's Most Promising Newcomer award last month for her performance in My Summer of Love - plays a single mother living on the breadline. One day in the street, after a shouting match with a neighbour, she runs into an ex-boyfriend who asks her out. It's a rare flicker of male attention and a chance to have fun.

But there is no one around to look after her four small kids, so she gets them to wait outside the pub. Hours pass. They're hungry. Increasingly frantic, the young mother shuttles between them and her date, from whom she has concealed their existence. And, on this hot summer's night, the wasps are hovering.

With its fast editing and handheld camerawork, the film zips along lightly. Like a classic O Henry short story, it has a sting in the tail. But it's above all about conjuring a sense of atmosphere and place.

Anxiety simmers below the surface, but it's just hinted at in fleeting impressions and vivid moments. The woman's toes curl on the pavement as she lies to her old flame; tucked under her arm, her baby's bottom sways in the breeze, nappyless; a flicker of panic crosses her face when she's casually asked to buy the first round.

It seems that elements of Wasp come from Arnold's own background, as the eldest child of a broken family. But the director says it started out not from the urge to express some personal issue or big idea but from a single, disturbing image, of a wasp crawling into a baby's mouth.

WASP has already won dozens of awards on the international festival circuit but there are few chances to catch short films like this beyond specialist cinemas or events. "Exposure is a problem," says Sue Lion, the director of Brief Encounters, Britain's biggest annual short film festival. "They're mainly a calling card."

Arnold's two earlier shorts, called Milk and Dog (she clearly likes terse titles), were both invited to the Critics' Week in Cannes and have played at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

And Wasp can be seen in London next week, as part of Birds Eye View, a festival of new work by women film-makers. Before the screening, Arnold will speak on a panel about moving from shorts to features.