Hundreds of short films are released on the festival circuit yearly. We review those that spoke most to us here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not a skateboard story, but a skateboard-inspired film: Cul-de-Sac urges characters and viewers to contemplate life, whatever that entails.
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.
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.
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.
A visual history of protest and grief, and a chronicle of the public square as an immutable witness to a cycle of revolt.
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.
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.
The history of a town and its people, exquisitely told through the life story of the filmmaker’s great-grandmother.
Portuguese filmmaker Jorge Jácome crafts something fresh and innovative in the beautifully restrained Shrooms.
Reflecting on the lives of dogs, Cecilie Flyger Hansen unlocks the true crux of their relationship with humans: affection can coexist with domination.
With an unpretentious approach to existential questions, Finnish filmmaker Hanna Hovitie offers a perfect example of what humility can do in art.
Awarded the Principi Award at Lago Film Fest, Simisolaoluwa Akande’s film is an ode to queer people from the Global South.
The ghosts of the past come face to face with the present and rural life is celebrated in Fermín Sales’ found footage documentary.
In exploring humankind’s intimate relationship with artificial intelligence, Inès Sieulle exposes our prejudices and tendencies as a species more than anything else.
While holding onto their innocence, Ukrainian child refugees become aware of the war in this German-Ukrainian documentary that masterfully depicts the impact of life in exile.
Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s striking visual poem proves how our capitalist way of thinking is unfit for human life and its sustainability.
