Hundreds of short films are released on the festival circuit yearly. We review those that spoke most to us here.
Elegant and deeply human, Atsushi Hirai’s Oyu is a carefully constructed homecoming haunted by loss.
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.
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.
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.
Kevin Biele’s short is full of subtlety: a quiet “no” has never sound so powerful.
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.
Yana Eresina’s family drama on toxic masculinity and femicide forces us to solve puzzle after puzzle.
