Category: Films in Competition

Calvin, a young street thug, must do whatever it takes to come up with 800 dollars by 6 PM.
Directed by Emerson Duggan (USA)

In today’s world, trying to move from place to place has become a battle to prove one’s integrity. To find your place in this world is an even greater struggle. But it can also appear in an instant, as a magical gift of fate – As Mali struggles to flee her homeland and the abusive men in her life, she fights to be accepted into the land of the free, and serendipitously discovers the feelings she thought she’d never share.
Directed by Brian Drillinger (USA)

A reminiscence of a faulted relationship through the eyes of a grieving woman and a regretful man.
Directed by Mason Bowen (USA)

A jealous husband decides to take action against his cheating wife.
Directed by Guilherme Filipe Régio (UK)

“La Llorona” (“Ser mujer”) is an interdisciplinary art project to raise awareness for feminicides in Mexico. A group of artists, researchers, teachers, mothers, activists, and journalists from Netherlands and Mexico concerned about this situation, where involved in its making, to support change.
Direct by Adriana Ronquillo (Mexico)

A FaceTime abduction leads Keith on a hysterical hunt to find his friend’s killer. FaceTime starts as a light-hearted Black gay comedy about two friends and a misleading kidnapping turns it into a suspenseful psychological thriller.
Directed by Delius Doherty (USA)

A woman reveals how she built an increasingly close relationship with her eccentric mother-in-law. But what is the truth of the matter, and who is telling it?
Directed by Dana Offenbach (USA)

Inspired by Emma Lazarus’s famed poem welcoming immigrants to the United States, this experimental video short captures small moments of humanity within the quotidian carriage of the NYC subway. Titled in reference to a computational “for” loop, the video poem speaks to the holding pattern we occupy and take passage through—equal in our anonymity, hurriedness and small sufferings. Amid this current era of nationalist scapegoating, we persist in the quiet ethos of multiplicity. We (us) are greater than US in the lived experience of equality and freedom.
Directed by Jess Irish (USA)

A typical sibling relationship, full of comedic rivalry and heartwarming moments, as two sisters wait to board a plane to Chicago.
Directed by Poppy Shaw (USA)

“I think therefore I am,” says Descartes’s thotonic skeleton of the past. Tetrastatum is the ultimate test of Descartes’s philosophical truth. We are transported through the tunnel of institutionalized insanity as helpless voyeurs perceiving existence through Smith’s eyes as a non-matter image freely flowing in all space-time universes. Dr. Smith’s complete mental meltdown takes us on a dualistic journey as a “Time Smith” exploring the meaning of reality and the human psyche.
Directed by Dr. Richard and Tim Smith (USA)