Anpharmanl.com
Hundreds of short films are released on the festival circuit yearly. We review those that spoke most to us here.
The petrol station at the heart of Bleifrei 95 feels like its own universe: a cruising spot imbued with lesbian life and possibilities, and a place to come of age for the film’s protagonists.
In Blue Heart, the final instalment in Haitian filmmaker Samuel Suffren’s paternal trilogy, doubling becomes a continual quest: a return to himself through the figure of his father.
Moving between personal recollection and cinematic reflection, Abdellah Taïa’s Cairo Streets traces an intimate journey through a city marked by absence and desire.
Different perceptions of technology serve as a starting point for uncovering intergenerational conflicts and long-forgotten family threads in Anastazja Naumenko’s animated desktop documentary.
In a not-too-distant future ravaged by a climate crisis, a team of scientists analyses archival footage of farmers from the past. Common Pear’s world-building occurs through a meeting point between fictional imagination and cinematic artifice.
Despite its retro aesthetics and nostalgic Eurovision Song Contest hits from the eighties, Equal Dust ultimately stages a form of anti-nostalgia, resisting the comforting allure of the past even as it mobilises its found-footage imagery.
Brought to life by Japanese guro animation traits, Ariel and Paul pass the time sketching their deepest fears until their game takes an unexpected turn in Jocelyn Charles’ festival hit God is Shy.
In this desktop documentary, Fırat Yücel chronicles the activism fatigue of a group of activists, eyes fixed on screens as they follow the news from Palestine and across the region. happiness was nominated for the New Critics & New Audiences Award 2026.
Does performing daily routines before a camera shift the meaning of your work? Recreating labour in informal Moroccan mining pits in collaboration with the town’s residents, Randa Maroufi’s L’mina draws from Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect.
To be or not to be in the pantry? That is the question haunting Luis Hindman’s Magid / Zafar, in which a queer South Asian man is constantly code-switching to fit in.
Three Iranian refugees are dropped off by a smuggler near the Austrian border. In Reza Rasouli's short film, a night of passage unlocks questions about the rights of passage: whose, and at what cost?
Simon Schneckenburger’s graduation film cracks open a blood-soaked world that is coolly violent yet surprisingly tender.
A one-year-old discovers the world: with a curious, carefree gaze, everyday moments become a poetic journey of discovery. But the idea of constructing a narrative that encapsulates the things the filmmaker most admires from childhood gets in the way of genuine exploration.
In Their Eyes, screen recordings testify to the experience of online micro-workers from the ‘Global South’: their job is to train AI for self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the ‘Global North’—a labour process that, by design, steers towards a real abstraction, and a looping nightmare.
Schwedler-apotheken.de