Doors open at 10am.
A shorts program of boundary-pushing filmmakers with a sharp, curious eye for the world hiding in plain sight. Followed by a filmmakers talkback.
Please note: this program contains material that may not be suitable for young audiences.
Narrative Short | Iran | 24 mins
Sahand is a soft-spoken engineer with a strange compulsion: he finds peace in watching people sleep. Unsettling his girlfriend, triggers a surreal unraveling of reality. Voices speak to him. Scenes reset. Characters shift roles. And gradually, Sahand realizes he’s not living his life… he’s starring in a film that is being written as it unfolds.
Narrative Short | United States | 11 mins
As Juliana and Reynaldo meet to finalize their divorce, they struggle to say goodbye to their assets, relationship, and hardest of all, their imaginary children.
Narrative short | United States | 13 mins
A grandmother leaves her home in Southern India and stays with her daughter and granddaughter in the US, while she recovers from a hip replacement. The family try to grapple with the grandmothers recurring visions of a Yakshagana performer. The film explores the ways in which isolation can permeate the lives of South Asian woman, and their intergenerational dynamics when forced to face the revelation of their circumstance.
Narrative short | United States | 15 mins
A peaceful morning of art-making turns into a highly inappropriate roundtable discussion of epic proportions as three male artists let their mouths run amuck in front of their unsuspecting female model. Actress and creator, Charlotte Bydwell, is featured in all the roles — shifting from the overly demure young model to each of the wildly offensive men, and back again.
Narrative short | United States | 10 mins
In a wasteland of rubble and ruin, J. Doe—a Black Patient Zero—navigates the wreckage of a nation haunted by its own reflection. Pursued by histories of violence, erasure, and resistance, he confronts the ghosts of an unfinished reckoning. Blurring archive and hallucination, Disordered is a visual requiem—part ritual, part rupture—that confronts the consequences of a soul that cannot forget, yet refuses to remember its past.
Narrative Short | United States | 8 mins
Commuting follows a suburban dad and filmmaker whose daily drive to work becomes an existential battleground. Armed with coffee, radio presets, podcasts, and unresolved ghosts from his past, he navigates envy, erotic insecurity, self-help culture, artistic regret, and competitive masculinity—all before 9 a.m. Blending satire, memoir, found footage, and a pathetic use of artificial intelligence, the film explores how the modern mind tries to curate the perfect morning.
