“All this shit actually happened.” That opening declaration lands with a sting, immediately setting the tone for Stacey Sargeant’s sharp, funny, and quietly infuriating short film Stand Clear ’ the Closing Doors. It’s a deliberately blunt replacement for the more familiar “based on a true story,” and it perfectly captures the film’s mentality: exhausted, self-aware,…
Grief, closure, and control collide in Holo, a quietly unsettling sci-fi short from Alexander DeSouza that feels unnervingly close to our present reality. Built around a deceptively simple concept – a company offering artificial encounters with the dead through performance and facial technology – the film quickly reveals itself to be something far more intimate,…
There’s an undeniably sharp hook at the centre of Deepfake – a near-future (or arguably present-day) world where friendship, identity and self-worth can be outsourced with the tap of an app. It’s a premise that feels both heightened and uncomfortably familiar, tapping into a culture where validation is currency and the lives we curate online…
A very specific kind of panic defines Last Minute – the kind born from a pre-internet world, where deadlines couldn’t be solved with a quick search and “doing homework” often became a family-wide emergency. Set in 1989, the short leans into that pressure with warmth, humour, and an undercurrent of genuine affection for a time…
What begins as a simple story about a kid leaving his homework until the very last minute becomes something far more poignant in Last Minute. Set in 1989, before smartphones, Google, and instant answers, writer-director Michael Cusumano‘s charming short follows a single mother racing against the clock to help her son complete a major school…
In a city already bursting with energy, colour and larger-than-life personalities, it takes a particularly special creature to stand out. Enter Kaboom, a fluffy pink force of magical chaos who descends upon New York City in ChikaBoom!, a delightfully inventive animated short that combines heart, humour and a striking visual style. At its centre is…
