Reviews and exclusive coverage from the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival. Dive into filmmaker interviews, red carpet highlights, and behind-the-scenes stories that celebrate short-form cinema at its best.
At this year's HollyShorts, Eyal Roe and Shahaf Sinai's "Sand" turns heartbreak into a painterly, wind-blown landscape, asking whether anything — love, memory, a house made of sand — can hold together in a world that keeps falling apart.
At this year's HollyShorts, Simon Schneider's "Degree of Certainty" reconstructs the 1982 boardroom where an oil company buried its own climate research, asking how ordinary ambition curdles into complicity.
At this year's HollyShorts, Amir Zargara's "VITAL" follows two parents on opposite sides of the world into the shadowy economics of organ trade, asking how quickly our moral boundaries shift when someone we love is at stake.
At this year's HollyShorts, Ria Pavia's "They Haunt Him" follows a trio of clout-chasing teens who befriend a lonely ghost, and asks a sharp question about loyalty versus popularity, longevity versus the quick hit of going viral.
At this year's HollyShorts, Andrew J. Rodriguez's "El Tiguere" follows a Dominican father tending a mobile food garden under the radar in the Bronx, where the tenderness he gives his plants is the same tenderness he struggles to give his son.
At this year's HollyShorts, Eduardo Machado's "São Paulo, New York" follows an aspiring producer torn between a visa running out and a home he half-forgot, questioning whether the dreams we chase are ever truly our own.
At this year's HollyShorts, Lisa Steadman's "tAinted love" turns a stylish dinner party into a reckoning, using a near-future blackout to ask whether we will still choose real intimacy once connection comes without the risk of rejection.
At this year's HollyShorts, Mimi Lee's "Yaoguai" makes its world premiere as a 1970s-set horror about a Taiwanese American actress whose survival instincts summon something monstrous, asking what gets erased in the pursuit of universal appeal.
At this year's HollyShorts, Jacqueline Elyse Rosenthal's "EUROPA" sends three astronauts to Jupiter's moon in search of water, and asks who will decide the future of humanity when Earth's supply runs dry.
At this year's HollyShorts, Lola Glaudini's "Tu Viens D'où" screens in the Touch of Romance block, telling a long-distance love story in fractured, dreamy calls that trace how two lovers found each other later in life.
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, Daeyoung Kim's "Bleeding Edge" follows a young Korean-American figure skater through injury and expectation, tracing how a parent's dream can slowly consume the child sent to carry it.
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, Adam Peltier's "NEXT" drops two former classmates on either side of the audition spotlight, where a war of words and nerves decides which man survives the room.
