Hundreds of short films are released on the festival circuit yearly. We review those that spoke most to us here.
Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker in Miranda Pennell’s concise desktop documentary.
Naomi Pacifique’s new short film dwells in melancholy and unlocks a form of intimacy that is unlike anything else we’ve seen bodies share on screen.
Elegant and deeply human, Atsushi Hirai’s Oyu is a carefully constructed homecoming haunted by loss.
In exploring humankind’s intimate relationship with artificial intelligence, Inès Sieulle exposes our prejudices and tendencies as a species more than anything else.
Through a composite montage of images from surveillance footage and body-cams, Bill Morrison delivers a chilling political investigation in search of the truth after a Black man is killed by police on the street.
Based on the real-life story of one of the filmmaker’s friends, Burul sheds a light on the brutal practice of bride kidnapping and amplifies the voices of oppressed Kyrgyz girls.
Gestures of love reach further than any demonstration of hate in Mast-del, an experimental poem about forbidden desires, both inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.
Awarded the Principi Award at Lago Film Fest, Simisolaoluwa Akande’s film is an ode to queer people from the Global South.
An exploration of the emotional divide between fiction and reality in the American sitcom, Philip Thomson’s Living Reality questions how we consume images at large.
Refusing any coherence, the campy DIY touches in In-Hyuk Jung’s latest alien-invading sci-fi action-romance are commemorative of 90s New Queer Cinema: feeling out of place is inherently queer.
A father takes his son to the funfair on Halloween. What should be the stuff of childhood dreams becomes, instead, the therapy material of adolescent trauma in Rachel Walden’s gut-punch roadtrip.
Photos from a family album reveal a city that perhaps used to exist. Sara Rajaei anchors these images not fully in reality but instead extracts the poetry from them.
Through sketch-like animations, Tomek Popakul and Kasumi Ozeki skilfully capture teenage rage and rural isolation in contemporary Poland.
In Eglė Davidaviče’s deeply personal film, the exploration of self-acceptance is intrinsically connected with community.
No hollow performances of masculinity to mask the realities of grief in Guillermo García López’s Roma family tale. By exploring insecurities, his coming-of-age story becomes a metaphysical quest for reassurance.
All the markers of artfulness seem to be in place, and yet this self-proclaimed study of empathy quickly wears thin.
In an attempt to tell a universal story, Nienke Deutz’s The Miracle arrives only at vagueness.
A constant bombardment of stimuli, Stephen Lopez’s dystopian talking fish bromance is all the more interesting for its political undercurrents.
Director-actor Kayije Kagame takes control of her own narrative, shifting our perspectives on Black agency in this blend of magic and social realism.
An unapologetic coming-of-age tale, La Perra dives straight into the paradoxes of female desire. A lonely and sometimes hurtful experience.
How do we find ourselves in such tumultuous times? Self-taught animator Cillian Laurence Green reminds us that the world is ours to make and that it’s not all doom and gloom.
Kevin Biele’s short is full of subtlety: a quiet “no” has never sound so powerful.
With an unpretentious approach to existential questions, Finnish filmmaker Hanna Hovitie offers a perfect example of what humility can do in art.
More than a photograph of an event, Isabel Medeiros’ Enlighten works as an evocation. It embraces the overwhelming fact that transformation and degradation are inescapable natural processes.
Shot in vivid 16mm, Barcelona native Christian Avilés turns a piercing gaze on young British holidaymakers, creating a reverie of surreal seduction out of the real-life phenomenon of balconing.
Not a skateboard story, but a skateboard-inspired film: Cul-de-Sac urges characters and viewers to contemplate life, whatever that entails.
French actor-director Léo-Antonin Lutinier’s debut short film guides us through beauty and destruction without judgement.
Zhang Dalei’s throwback to the 1990 Asian Games is inherently enigmatic yet rooted in ambiguity, leaving the viewer to fill in the emotional gaps.
Olga Kosanović sheds light on an immigrant’s reality in present-day Austria, a land where an Eastern European individual is forced to, figuratively speaking, move mountains to endure.
In this Finnish sci-fi love story, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage meets Philip K. Dick’s philosophies on the existence of android souls.
A haphazard episode of an introspective sitcom: All Gucci My Broski is a wild dive into the existential crisis of a single white man named Jonny.
A visual history of protest and grief, and a chronicle of the public square as an immutable witness to a cycle of revolt.
In his satirical take on reality TV, Sonny Calvento blends campy imagery with melodramatic plot twists.
Francesco Sossai builds a queasy claustrophobia in the neo-giallo The Birthday Party.
Portuguese filmmaker Jorge Jácome crafts something fresh and innovative in the beautifully restrained Shrooms.
Faye Tsakas and Enrique Pedráza-Botero’s incisive documentary incursion into the lives of teenage findoms is also a smart commentary on contemporary American society.
Two characters are trapped in a colourless existence of apathy, their reality slipping away without them noticing.
Alice Brygo mixes documentary footage with computer-generated imagery to produce an intriguing, genre-defying admixture of realism and the surreal.
The ghosts of the past come face to face with the present and rural life is celebrated in Fermín Sales’ found footage documentary.
Using archive materials, Chasing the Sun: El Shatt attempts to reconstruct a fragmented memory and touches on historical facts about El Shatt, the largest refugee camp in the Sinai desert in Egypt during WWII.
In an attempt to adapt two myths at once, Isabella Margara’s short fails to live up to its premise and instead drowns it under a convoluted mix of different narrative planes.
Though conceived long before artificial intelligence became the popular force it is today, Cristina Iliescu’s debut short offers a compelling reminder of our latent responsibility in the teething stages of machine learning.
Two nun-like identical twins go silently through life in an almost unconscious state, portrayed by two elegant actors that patiently wait for their portraits to be drawn.
Feminism and sex triumph at the same time in Flóra Anna Buda’s big winner of the Cannes, Annecy, and Sarajevo short film prizes.
Aziz Zoromba’s Simo offers insights into the dynamics of a culturally diverse family, but leaves out the most meaningful conversations.
Though devoid of any sound, Asteriòn is an exceptionally visceral and vivid cinematic experience.
Yana Eresina’s family drama on toxic masculinity and femicide forces us to solve puzzle after puzzle.
A gruesome and eerie stop-motion fairytale, aesthetically influenced by the Brothers Grimm
In his short film debut, Stephen Vuillemin explores parasocial relationships, highlighting the pervasive feeling of surveillance that has become increasingly prevalent in our digital age.
Ary Zara’s intimate, beguiling portrait of a trans sex worker takes trans* storytelling in new directions.
In the north of Colombia, a group of queer activists use extravagant performative actions to denounce the disastrous exploitation by the country’s largest coal mine.
Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s striking visual poem proves how our capitalist way of thinking is unfit for human life and its sustainability.
