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, Wesley Wang's "Violet and Marlowe Rob a Bank" turns a husband-and-wife rabbit heist into a fable about creative freedom, following two countryside vigilantes who risk everything to return the means of production to their own kind.
At this year's HollyShorts, Tom Neish's "Miles of Life" follows a former athlete who turns personal failure into community purpose, tracing how one person and the discipline of sport can lift an entire town.
At this year's HollyShorts, Isabel Lamers's "kaya" makes its West Coast premiere with a female-led action story that trades spectacle for interiority, asking what it costs a mixed-race outsider to stop shrinking herself to belong.
At this year's HollyShorts, Hazel McKibbin's "Last Man Up" compresses a single night of male friendship into twelve pressurized minutes, tracing how one withheld truth can dismantle the fragile family three men have built.
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, Nita Blum's "A New Inferno" follows Phoenix paramedics racing to save heatstroke victims with a radical new treatment, turning one deadly summer into a street-level portrait of the climate crisis.
At this year's HollyShorts, Audrey Cicerello's "GROWN" follows three inseparable teenage girls through their first semi-legal night out in New York City, where a long-held secret erupts and a decade of friendship is tested.
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.
