The Worldwide Short Film Festival has announced its 2008 line-up, all set to play the city from June 10 to 15. The screenings are led by the opening gala of award winning shorts from around the world, including Jesse Rosensweet's Paradise (featuring the voice of Dave Foley) and our eye has been caught by this year's Japanese Spotlight, with two programs dedicated to animation studio Studio 4°C, including a new short from Cowboy Bebop/Samurai Champloo director Shinichiro Watanabe, Baby Blue.

The Worldwide Short Film Festival is now in its fourteenth year, and will be showing 231 shorts (from 31 different countries) in several different programs, with others including NEU Europe, a program of shorts looking ad different perspectives in the European Union, Oh Canada! Canadian Comedy Shorts, Accidentally Funny: Order is Restored (a collection of now funny instructional films, including The Overfamiliar Subordinate and Penitentiary!) and the popular festival standbys Sci-Fi: Out There, Slap 'N' Tickle, and Midnight Mania.

While we'd love to already be able to go into deep detail about which films are going to be worth it, with 231 shorts, the festival has an almost TIFF level of bewildering choice for us to deal with. The flipside of that coin is that arranged into blocks as they are, it's one of the most accessible festivals for picking something at random and getting something good (after all, in a block of 7 or 8 shorts, you'd expect a few to be decent at least) but with luck we'll have more in depth coverage of at least some of the programmes before the festival.

In the meantime, you can watch the short above, The Squirrel Next Door, by Carla Coma. It plays as part of Midnight Mania: Freaky, so if you hate spiders, maybe give it a miss!

And be sure to check out the full schedule at the Worldwide Short Film Festival website, and tickets are already available. One final tip—if you head along to the website, be sure to check out the videos on the front page. They're really cute!