At this year's HollyShorts, Marissa Velez's "Birds of Paradise" turns one woman's thirty-year feud with wild turkeys into an unexpectedly tender study of displacement, loneliness, and the universal need to feel heard.
At this year's HollyShorts, Alana Duqum's "It's Complicated" follows a friendship between a Palestinian-American screenwriter and a poet in Gaza, tracing how diaspora, sisterhood, and sudden loss test the responsibility of bearing witness.
At this year's HollyShorts, hazart's "Stay for the Q&A" takes a routine post-premiere Q&A and lets it devolve into something familiar and unhinged, a sharp, affectionate send-up of the absurdities every filmmaker knows too well.
At this year's HollyShorts, Catherine Joy White's "Swim Sistas" turns a poetic meditation on swimming into a study of belonging, following four Black British women and girls who find healing, sisterhood, and joy in the water.
At this year's HollyShorts, Jack Salvadori's "Blondi" watches history's darkest chapter through the eyes of the Führer's German Shepherd, asking whether ordinary devotion can survive proximity to unimaginable evil.
At this year's HollyShorts, Pranav Bhasin's "We Were Here" follows three retired uncles who protest automation by impersonating household appliances, turning a silly premise into a warm meditation on family, obsolescence, and why AI doesn't feel right.
At this year's HollyShorts, Yarden Lior's "Chocolate" follows a young immigrant couple selling sweets on the subway across a single day, tracing how financial hardship and homesickness press against even the most intimate love.
At this year's HollyShorts, Parker Croft's "The Liars of Black Mountain Road" watches a couple compete for the moral high ground after killing a stranger's dog, tracing how shame and fear pull thought, speech, and action apart.
At this year's HollyShorts, Jesse Smolan's "Fjallferð" follows a multigenerational group of Icelandic farmers on a centuries-old sheep roundup, trading spectacle for the intimate human weight of a tradition facing an uncertain future.
At this year's HollyShorts, Angad Aulakh's "Aurora" turns a survivor's isolation in deep space into a meditation on grief and faith, asking not what happens to us after loss but how it transforms us.
At this year's HollyShorts, Kat Butterfield's "Life Goes On" reimagines the time-loop as a story about a dying man who cannot die, turning a taboo subject into a tender case for saying the important things while there's time.
