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, Adrian Moyse Dullin and Jawahine Zentar's "Pale Sun" traces the moment a 12-year-old boy first sees his ailing father through the eyes of strangers, turning an ordinary summer beach into an intimate reckoning with loyalty and belonging.
At this year's HollyShorts, Ida and Remington Hoffman's "Christmas Angels" follows a homeless mother determined to protect her daughter's Christmas, tracing how acts born of love and desperation complicate our sense of right and wrong.
At this year's HollyShorts, Adam Moorman's "Snack Attack" follows a would-be hero whose good deed backfires and goes viral, mining our doom-scrolling, surveilled lives for something warm, dark, and genuinely funny.
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, Hannah Aslesen's "Scissors" flips the home-invasion slasher on its head, turning five loud, messy, queer women from prey into predators in a night their would-be killer never saw coming.
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, Alys Murray's "Beware C*ckblocking Ghosts" fuses horror, romance, and comedy into a goth teen ghost story, using a jealous poltergeist to ask what it really takes to let grief go.
At this year's HollyShorts, Adam Byrnes's "Viewfinder" turns a single photograph into a reckoning, following a grieving photographer who is forced to see herself through her grandson's eyes.
At this year's HollyShorts, Amber Schaefer's "Doctor Death Grip" dissects the viral autofiction essay and the intimate wreckage it leaves behind, revealing the paradox of art that mines the people we love at their most humiliating.
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, Ciara Tinney's "WildKind" carries a watercolour lullaby from the North of Ireland to Hollywood, tracing a mother's hopes for her daughters across the ever-turning seasons of life.
At this year's HollyShorts, Jorja Hudson and Ethan David's "Homebodies" imagines a near-future Los Angeles where stepping outside costs money, following a burnt-out woman who commits fraud just to buy herself a single night alone.
At this year's HollyShorts, Andrew Nolan's "This Conversation Has Been Removed" turns a late-night online flame war into a silent comedy about modern miscommunication, asking what we say to each other when we forget there's a person on the other end.
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.
