At this year's HollyShorts, Negine Sekandari's "Haram Salami" follows three generations of Afghan women through a single bold act that unearths buried tensions, asking whether making images can be a form of preservation rather than shame.
At this year's HollyShorts, Liron Topaz's "Saba" reimagines loss as a single continuous shot through a world where gravity flows upward, asking what we would say for one more moment with someone we've lost.
At this year's HollyShorts, Nellie Luna's "I Want to Hook Up With Dylan But My Social Score Is Negative Ten Trillion" turns a normie makeover into a blood-soaked battle for the soul, asking what it costs to shrink yourself for someone else's approval.
At this year's HollyShorts, Samantha Joia's "Before Anything Happens" turns a couple's disastrous first attempt at intimacy into a study of vulnerability, proving that the smallest milestones carry the largest emotional stakes.
At this year's HollyShorts, Ashley Gianni's "The Late in Life Guide to Modern Day Lesbianism" reframes coming out as a campy 90s training tape, using bureaucratic absurdity to honor the very real hunger for guidance and belonging.
At this year's HollyShorts, JJ Adler's "The Oracle" makes its LA premiere with a dark comedy about a rationalist psychiatrist, a con artist, and a message from beyond that asks whether any of us can really be moved off what we believe.
At this year's HollyShorts, Thomas Bernon and Julien Gamarde's "Breezeblock" builds a wall against an invisible threat, turning one man's outsized panic into a wry meditation on how every fear is a construction of the mind.
At this year's HollyShorts, Fiorella Vescovi's "Paper Pilots" traces an 18-year-old's coming of age under 1970s Uruguayan dictatorship, where small gestures of play and presence become acts of profound resistance.
At this year's HollyShorts, Junbo Qiu's "Oneiros" follows a wordless astronaut across an alien planet that seems to know him better than he knows himself, tracing how grief and distance can turn the love we long for into a projection we chase.
At this year's HollyShorts, Leonardo Cecchi's "Call It All Love" reconstructs a real Virginia killing to interrogate privilege and complicity, asking how a young man could destroy someone he loved without ever registering what he'd done.
At this year's HollyShorts, Aime Octave's "Echoes Beneath The Hill" follows a girl searching for her lost goat in the days before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, holding childhood and catastrophe in the same frame.
At this year's HollyShorts, Hannah Shealy's "Birth is For P*ssies" follows a rookie doula through her first chaotic night on the job, upending Hollywood's clichés about labor and the people who quietly carry others through it.
At this year's HollyShorts, Lewis Rose's "Beshert" — produced by Jason Solomons and Naomi Gryn — follows a grumpy old man and a reluctant Bar Mitzvah boy whose chance meeting sparks an unlikely friendship that changes both their lives.
At this year's HollyShorts, Johnny Russell's "A Scent" follows a Scottish scrub nurse who detects disease through smell, turning a true story into a meditation on credibility, care, and the quiet miracles of NHS nurses.
At this year's HollyShorts, David Harring's "Silver Anniversary" reimagines the werewolf film as a study in complicity and class, following a housewife who suspects she may be the next meal at her own carefully curated table.
At this year's HollyShorts, Renée Marie Petropoulos's "Souvenir" traces a closeted teen's reckoning with a girlfriend who photographs her without consent, mapping the cycle of abuse through an accumulation of small, painful moments.
