Short Films

Short Films

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Short Films
  • The Water Murmurs

    Movie

    Directed by Story Chen • 2022 • China
    Starring Annabel Yao, Li Rongxi, Zhang Taiwen

    Winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or for Best Short Film, this dreamily poetic vision of aqueous apocalypse is a mesmerizing meditation on the fragility of both human connection and life on Earth. When an asteroid hit...

  • Short Films by Sophy Romvari

    1 season

    With her acclaimed debut feature, the heartbreaking family portrait BLUE HERON (in theaters this April), Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari builds on her early short works to reveal an astonishing cinematic sensibility exquisitely attuned to the delicate, sensory details that shape experience. Freq...

  • How to Shoot a Ghost

    Movie

    Directed by Charlie Kaufman • 2025 • United States, Greece
    Starring Jessie Buckley, Josef Akiki

    Part ghost story, part city symphony, this elegiac short directed by Charlie Kaufman traces the meeting of two recently deceased young people—a troubled photographer (Jessie Buckley) and a gay transla...

  • perfectly a strangeness

    Movie

    Directed by Alison McAlpine • 2024 • Canada

    The awe-inspiring majesty of the natural world—from the expansive desert to the star-streaked night sky—is captured through unexpected eyes in this sublimely cinematic, Oscar-nominated documentary short. In the vast Chilean desert, three wandering donk...

  • Three Short Films by Ja’Tovia Gary

    1 season

    The aesthetically dynamic, shape-shifting films of artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary combine everything from heavily processed 16 mm archival materials to TikTok videos and woman-on-the-street-style interviews to put Black women and their lived experiences, past and present, in dialogue with one...

  • Oh Yeah!

    Movie

    Directed by Nick Canfield • 2025 • United States

    In the mideighties, Swiss synth-pop duo Yello took American pop culture by storm with an offbeat anthem that became an unlikely cultural touchstone. With its glitchy electronic groove and bass-deep vocals, “Oh Yeah” was made famous by FERRIS BUELL...

  • Two Short Films by Charlie Kaufman and Eva H.D.

    1 season

    While Charlie Kaufman is best known for cerebral, intricately constructed metafictions like ANOMALISA and SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK, his recent collaborations with writer Eva H.D. find him working in a different mode: impressionistic, intuitive, and vividly sensorial. Both city symphonies of a kind, t...

  • Short Films by Jess X. Snow

    1 season

    The exquisitely textured, sensorially immersive films of Chinese Canadian artist and filmmaker Jess X. Snow are works of immense heart and healing, opening up a compassionate, imaginative dreamspace in which queer Asian American characters seek liberation from social and familial trauma through e...

  • Meshes of the Afternoon

    Movie

    Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid • 1943 • United States
    Starring Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

    Cinematic trance-maker Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid launched an underground revolution with this avant-garde landmark—shot in their Hollywood home, but a world away from the co...

  • Two Shorts by Dwayne Leblanc

    1 season

    In his acclaimed short films, Caribbean American director Dwayne LeBlanc has shown himself to be a rising talent already in full control of mood, tone, and visual texture. His mesmerizing CIVIC and its gorgeous follow-up, NOW, HEAR ME GOOD, each center on a young man named Booker (played by Barri...

  • My Back Pages

    Movie

    Directed by Nick Canfield and Paul Lovelace • 2024 • United States

    Meet Mitch Blank, the world’s foremost collector of Bob Dylan memorabilia and recordings, all kept in his tiny New York City apartment. This affectionate short follows Mitch as he donates his life’s work to the Bob Dylan Center i...

  • We Were the Scenery

    Movie

    Directed by Christopher Radcliff • 2025 • Philippines, United States, Vietnam

    In 1975, soon after the end of the Vietnam War, Hoa Thị Lê Chế and Huệ Nguyên Chế fled to the Philippines in a makeshift boat. There, they were held in a refugee camp and, along with nearly one hundred other refugees, ...

  • One Day This Kid

    Movie

    Directed by Alexander Farah • 2024 • Canada
    Starring Massey Ahmar, Mahan Mohammadinasab, Elyas Rahimi

    Spanning more than ten years, this stirring, deeply felt short alights on the seemingly small yet formative moments that shape Hamed, a young Afghan Canadian man, as he navigates both his queer ...

  • Two Shorts by Sofía Camargo

    1 season

    The complex dynamics between mothers and daughters is at the heart of these beautifully understated shorts by Colombian director Sofía Camargo. In BY THE RIVER, an unspoken grief hovers in the household of a newly single mother and her two daughters, while in NOSTOS, a young girl acts out in defi...

  • Holiday Shorts

    1 season

    A stocking stuffer of holiday shorts captures both the magic of the season and the melancholy of what can be the loneliest time of year. From a cozy stop-motion treasure (A CHRISTMAS DREAM) to striking early works by renowned auteurs like Lynne Ramsay (GASMAN), these by turns festive, funny, and ...

  • Caring Cabin

    Movie

    Directed by Chelsea McMullan and Douglas Nayler Jr. • 2025 • Canada
    Starring Beverly Glenn-Copeland

    Starring electronic-music pioneer Beverly Glenn-Copeland and conceived by his wife and creative partner Elizabeth, this never-before-seen pilot for an unproduced children’s show is a joyous, color...

  • 7 Films by Suzan Pitt

    1 season

    Enter the wild and wondrous world of the late Suzan Pitt, an independent animation visionary whose oneiric psychosexual odysseys are direct channels to her dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and inner desires. Straining a diverse array of influences—from Leonora Carrington to Betty Boop to magical re...

  • LGBTQ+ Shorts

    1 season

    Stories of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and the simple but radical, often dangerous act of just existing as a queer person are on display in these empathetic and innovative shorts, which reflect the wide spectrum of experiences that make up the LGBTQ+ rainbow.

  • August Visitor

    Movie

    Directed by Ifeyinwa Arinze • 2023 • United States
    Starring Odera Adimorah, Isley Key Brison, Lauralie Mufute

    When her widowed mother has a male friend over for dinner, an observant Nigerian American teenager acts out, setting up a clash that ultimately leads her to a deeper understanding of her...

  • Prismatic Ground Presents

    1 season

    One of the most exciting and adventurous film festivals to emerge in recent years, Prismatic Ground brings together aesthetically innovative, politically radical work at the intersection of experimental and documentary cinema. This selection of shorts from the festival’s first five editions offer...

  • Burnt Milk

    Movie

    Directed by Joseph Douglas Elmhirst • 2023 • United Kingdom
    Starring Xavier Alexander Keating, Tamara Lawrance, Clover Webb

    “When we dream, we dream in patois.” Una (Clover Webb), a Jamaican woman living in 1980s London, reveals her feelings of alienation through a poetic, patois-inflected inner...

  • T
    Movie

    T

    Movie

    Directed by Keisha Rae Witherspoon • 2019 • United States
    Starring Koko Zauditu-Selassie, Kherby Jean, Jesus Mitchell

    In this stylistically dazzling, deeply moving, and unclassifiable short, a film crew follows three grieving participants in Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model R...

  • Open Mic Solitaire

    Movie

    Directed by Julius-Amédée Laou • 1983 • France
    Starring Serge Ubrette, Marilyne Canto

    Playwright Julius-Amédée Laou’s first foray into filmmaking is an explosive call to revolution in which a young Black artist—after learning that his brother has been murdered in Paris by far-right racists—hijac...

  • Oscar-Nominated Shorts

    1 season

    These exuberant and inventive Oscar-nominated shorts span animated, documentary, and fiction work, including eye-catching early films by Andrea Arnold, Richard Lester, and Shirley Clarke. At an awards show often dominated by stars and industry titans, the short-film Academy Award categories tend ...