Posted by Beyond Salem Not Salem (Best Short of the Month), this edition also includes three exceptional projects recognized with the Award of Excellence (Special Jury Mention). These films — Paranoyya by Mike Glover (UK), Watching Walter by Mitch Yapko (USA), and Where The Shadows Wait by Riley Robbins (USA) — stood out for their clarity of vision, strength of craft, and distinct authorial voices, each approaching storytelling from a different angle, yet unified by confident direction and purposeful execution.
All three titles are also 2025–2026 Indie Short Fest Annual Awards Finalists, making them contenders for the festival’s upcoming annual nominations and further recognition. Together, they reflect the breadth of work celebrated by the festival, from dark comedy and historical drama to atmospheric genre cinema.
Paranoyya by Mike Glover (UK)
Set in a quiet British village where nothing ever seems to happen, Paranoyya turns everyday suspicion into a sharply observed dark comedy. The film follows the escalating tension between two unlikely neighbors: Colin, a curtain-twitching local birdwatcher, and Alexander, a drunken, deeply paranoid ex-Russian spy hiding in plain sight. What begins as mild distrust soon spirals into mutual surveillance, misinterpretation, and comic paranoia, revealing how fear can distort even the most ordinary environments.
What impressed the jury was the film’s ability to balance absurd humor with unsettling plausibility. Glover keeps the story constantly teetering between realism and farce, allowing comedy to emerge organically from character rather than punchlines. The binocular motif — watching, misreading, projecting — becomes central to the film’s visual and thematic language, as innocent details are reimagined as ominous signals. In this world, a dead pheasant can morph into a coded assassination warning, and coincidence begins to look like conspiracy.
Inspired by real-world geopolitical tension and events such as the 2018 Salisbury Novichok attack, Paranoyya draws subtle parallels between global anxiety and personal obsession. The jury appreciated how the film channels contemporary unease through a hyper-local lens, echoing the Coen Brothers tradition of unremarkable protagonists stumbling into situations far beyond their understanding. The influence of Fargo is evident, not as imitation, but as tonal kinship, where menace and humor coexist uncomfortably, and small lives collide with larger forces.
The film is anchored by strong performances from Andrew Caley (Peaky Blinders, The Crown, Downton Abbey) and Piotr Baumann (Spies of Warsaw, EastEnders, Coronation Street), whose sharply contrasted characters drive both the comedy and the tension. Made independently by a small, passionate team, Paranoyya marks Glover’s first narrative short and earns its Award of Excellence recognition at Indie Short Fest as a confident, distinctive debut with a sharp sense of tone and voice.
Watching Walter by Mitch Yapko (USA)
Based on the true story of Holocaust survivor–turned watchmaker Władysław “Walter” Wojnas, Watching Walter is a moving proof-of-concept short that traces moments of resilience, memory, and survival across two timelines: 1995 Philadelphia and World War II Nazi-occupied Poland. Rather than attempting to encapsulate an entire life, the film focuses on carefully chosen fragments, moments that collectively reveal the quiet strength of a man who endured profound loss and carried its weight into old age with dignity.
The jury was particularly drawn to the film’s measured restraint and emotional clarity. Yapko approaches the subject with reverence, allowing small gestures and intimate exchanges to carry the story’s weight. By shifting between eras, Watching Walter highlights the persistence of memory while maintaining a human scale that avoids sentimentality. The result is a film that honors history without becoming didactic, grounding vast historical tragedy in lived experience.
The film is led by a performance from Stephen Tobolowsky marked by complete command and restraint. Drawing on a career that spans Groundhog Day, Memento, Californication, and Silicon Valley, Tobolowsky brings clarity, nuance, and quiet authority to Walter. He is supported by a strong ensemble including Gareth Williams (The Resident, Mindhunter, True Detective, 20th Century Women, Hollywoodland) and Andrew Elvis Miller (The Young and the Restless, Mozart in the Jungle, Pretty Little Liars), whose performances help bridge the generational and historical shifts at the heart of the narrative.
For director Mitch Yapko, the project is deeply personal. With a background in History and International Relations and a family history touched directly by the Holocaust, Yapko approaches Watching Walter as both a cinematic and moral responsibility. His belief in the importance of remembering, particularly in a time of social and political division, gives the film a quiet urgency. The Award of Excellence recognizes Watching Walter as a work of historical awareness and thoughtful storytelling, a film that reminds us that behind history’s darkest chapters are individual lives defined not only by suffering, but by endurance and humanity.
Where The Shadows Wait by Riley Robbins (USA)
Set on a bitter winter night, Where The Shadows Wait begins with the deceptive calm of a routine police welfare check. Officers Ryan and Mike are dispatched to a decaying, snow-covered home, where an unsettling stillness suggests that something is already deeply wrong. Inside, they encounter Jonathan — unnervingly composed, watchful, and withholding — and soon uncover a haunting tableau: a corpse dressed for a long-forgotten prom, surrounded by withered flowers. As the power fails and darkness consumes the house, the space itself begins to feel hostile, closing in on both officers and audience alike.
The jury recognized the film for its disciplined control of atmosphere and tension. Robbins resists spectacle, allowing dread to accumulate through silence, shadow, and the slow erosion of certainty. Each step deeper into the house strips away procedural familiarity, replacing it with claustrophobic unease. Horror here is not driven by sudden shocks, but by the steady realization that the rules of safety and order no longer apply.
What elevates Where The Shadows Wait is its attention to character under pressure. As the night unfolds, the officers are forced to confront not only an external threat, but their own fear, doubt, and moral fracture. The line between duty and survival blurs, and the film becomes as much a psychological study as a genre exercise, a meditation on what happens when authority, reason, and control dissolve in the dark.
Director Riley Robbins brings to the film a visual and emotional sensibility shaped by more than a decade of work across music videos, commercials, fashion films, and narrative projects. Having collaborated with global artists and brands such as Pharrell Williams, Vogue, Nike, Adidas, Karl Lagerfeld, Dolce & Gabbana, and A$AP Rocky, Robbins applies the same precision and visual intelligence to his narrative work. His commitment to emotional realism and vulnerability in performance is evident throughout, making Where The Shadows Wait a work of genre filmmaking that is both unsettling and human. The Award of Excellence honors the film as a confident, tightly controlled exploration of fear, character, and the spaces where light, and certainty, fail.
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