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, Natalie Schwan's "Last Stand at Butte City" reframes the Western around an aging woman's grief, trading gunfights for the quieter, harder battle of learning when to let go.
At this year's HollyShorts, Callum Adams's "Townies (or, My Little Town)" pulls two people who share a resort town into a single tense encounter, asking who really gets to call a place home.
At this year's HollyShorts, Brian Barnes's "Hide" follows a father and daughter clinging to a nightly ritual in a town visited by unfathomable horror, asking how routine can both protect us and lull us into complacency.
At this year's HollyShorts, Caroline Friend's "Poisoned Skies" places a 1954 scientist at the center of a moral reckoning, tracing how one woman's choice to tell the truth becomes a matter of courage under pressure.
At this year's HollyShorts, Emily Frances Kaplan's "In the Flesh" transforms a housewife's obsession with expensive meat into a study of repressed desire, mapping the distance between what we crave and what we allow ourselves to want.
At this year's HollyShorts, Logan Fields's "Fennel" sits us down at a tense lunch between a father and son, turning the quiet distance between them into a study of the things we leave unsaid.
At this year's HollyShorts, Kristian Mercado's "Mataron a Pedro" traces the collision between Pedro Albizu Campos and U.S. police chief E. Francis Riggs, turning a suppressed history of colonial repression into an intimate portrait of resistance.
At this year's HollyShorts, Meriem Sakrouhi's "Mon Taxi" listens to grief as a living rhythm, tracing eleven voice notes to a late father and the tenderness of a bond that refuses to end.
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, Leah Nanako Winkler's "Get Her Back!" takes the persistence we've been taught to read as devotion and follows it to its logical, unsettling end, asking why we keep mistaking entitlement for love.
At this year's HollyShorts, Mekhai Lee's "Them That's Not" turns a grandmother's repass into a fragile reunion between an estranged father and his daughter, asking who counts as "our own" when isolation runs deepest.
At this year's HollyShorts, Rana Roy's "Night Feeds" collapses the wall between a new mother's private paranoia and the violence flooding her screens, asking whether the madness lives in her mind or the world around her.
At this year's HollyShorts, Chelsea Collazo Garcia's "Why Do You Hate Me?" mines the manic search for validation for its funniest and most honest material, following a young woman whose reckless ambition turns every opportunity into self-inflicted catastrophe.
At this year's HollyShorts, Jeremy Max's "Bleeder" follows a man who earns a living by taking beatings, using brutal violence to trace the emotional wounds he can no longer outrun.
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.
