Monday Shorts

From its opening shot—a car interior bathed in red light, the protagonist small and blurry outside the windshield, hints of tree branches and utter darkness behind her—100,000 Acres of Pine sets a sinister mood that it never lets fade.

Diana Reichenbach's short is about "the relationship of light, sound, and space" — the feeling you get from how those elements interact, and the blurring between the senses when the synchronized sound and image hit just right.

Animation and dance share an obsession with understanding movement, breaking down complex acts into their component parts, and understanding the expressive potential of even the subtlest gestures.

Opening with an overhead shot of a grandmother's hands inspecting a tea set, the film is as patient and unhurried as its subject, and as comfortable as the most pleasant family gathering.

It's strange to say that a story about a one-eyed being who accidentally destroys a planet full of life feels deeply personal, but in this case, it's the truth.

Set in small-town Saskatchewan in the year 2037, it's the story of a trendy noodle shop exploring the newest frontier in hipster cuisine: psychedelic, polydimensional comfort food.

Frankly, some things are more fun when you choose not to overthink them.

A pair student films using fuzzy, felted puppets to explore the darker side of human nature, Mantzaris' films play like two sides of the same psychological coin.

Yearbook is a bittersweet film, but it’s a deeply affecting one, a reminder that life is more important than legacy, and how easy it is to get lost dwelling on the wrong things. That it can do all that while still being this briskly paced, this concise, and this funny is truly impressive.

A leafy creature roams the wasteland, a lone figure of life and warmth gathering its energy and releasing it in flame-like bursts, which eventually spread through the land, urging new growth from old roots.

The film's climax is a psychedelic trip, a glorious, glitchy vision of aquatic life and ego death that couldn't be further removed from the 2D scrolling of its opening.

Parks' ability to bring fresh eyes to her materials makes Foreign Exchange stand out. Zoomed in, cropped, collaged and recombined, her compositions force new perspectives as the most familiar elements become, well, foreign.

A feminine, feminist reframing of the act of creation, Ross’ film revels openly in its sexuality. Adam depicts the process as tender and tactile, not cold and clinical. It’s a creation fueled by desire, one just as linked to the needs of the body as any of the acts that would follow from it. 

The human form becomes plastic beyond belief, faces stretching and distorting, bodies opening up, skin peeling off and re-applied as clothing. It's a nightmare realm, as surreal and disturbing as Bosch's most vivid fantasies.

"Lighthearted" might not be the first word that comes to mind in a film that features auto-cannibalism, grubby parasites, and landscapes overstuffed with fleshy mounds, laughing cysts, and far too many teeth, but it fits.

You're bound to imagine faces and figures if you stare deeply enough, angelic or insect-like faces created by the brain's love of bilateral symmetry. It's a meditative experience, or maybe a transcendent one—the brightest moments certainly feel downright heavenly.

Flood is driven by a haunting, yet progressive sound design with two main characters Spider Woman and Thunderbird. They act as vessels, composing and carrying the story of an Indigenous youth named Thunder, navigating her way through a colonial flood.

Does the introduction of a fictional narrative in the film's visuals separate it from the truth of the situation? Or is it a way to strive for another kind of truth?

Like a fairy tale, it makes its point through simple storytelling and exaggerated elements. And like a thought experiment, it puts a friendly face to a thorny problem.

"When you’re out in the bush, especially at night with no light pollution, something shiny and bright tends to stick out."

Whether it's a good place to live, to die, or to end up in eternity, one thing that's unambiguous is the beauty of Onohana's creation.

Like its predecessor, How to Be At Home is a work of radical empathy. It doesn't sugar-coat the hardship of loneliness or the mental toll of living in a situation of extreme, almost unprecedented ambiguity.

The harmony between the creative visions of de Boer and Ill Considered is hard to deny, and the resulting film is striking enough that it doesn't really matter whether you see it as a reverse music video, an abstract animation, or something else altogether.

The harmony between the creative visions of de Boer and Ill Considered is hard to deny, and the resulting film is striking enough that it doesn't really matter whether you see it as a reverse music video, an abstract animation, or something else altogether.

By taking their path to self-understanding and depicting it with warmth, care, and directness, Charpentier-Basille has made an entertaining short that doubles as a gateway to understanding.

Like a feudal Japanese take on The Wind in the Willows, Yon Hui Lee's CalArts graduate film tells a tale of fantasy and mob justice in a world of frogs and toads.

Equal parts folklore and The Cat Came Back, Killing Time finds the amiable personification of time unknowingly tormenting its hero by just being itself.

Narrated with alternating cynicism and intensity by the gravel-voiced Vincent Macaigne, Devaux's film is a masterpiece of forced sincerity and simmering resentments, exploring the angst, regret and Freudian undercurrents that give this family's weekly gatherings their unique dynamic.

The story in L'homme aux oiseaux is storybook simple, but it isn't really about the plot. The heart of the film lies in the joy of watching colour and life spring from the soil.

The title refers to the two characters who open and end the film, but combined with the symmetrical structure and the mid-film inversion, it also points to 2's many dualities.

One of the wonderful things about a film like River Lethe is that no description can actually do it justice, and no interpretation is definitive.

Instead of trying to recreate events, Chandoutis uses animation to create his unsettling atmosphere, building a backdrop of video game-style wireframes and letting them stack up in innumerable layers until the tangle of lines is almost completely indecipherable.

Where most of Nkondo's previous shorts have played with the abstraction of 2D art's simplified perspectives, The New Exhibition opens up a new dimension—or at least half of one.

Âme noire isn't so much about the past in and of itself as it is about the way that past lives on in the present, how it shapes cultures and, as the title says, soul.

The loss of cultural knowledge is always a tragedy, but it seems doubly so when it comes to oral cultures where, once a story is gone, it is truly gone. That makes the very existence of Kapaemahu a bit of a miracle.

The film is a testament to her love for this eccentric, who was an artistic inspiration and played a key role in her becoming a filmmaker. A moving tribute to a poet of the everyday.

(caution: NSFW). Tides is a film about the relationship between light and dark within us all. It is about the person behind the smile, the exhaustion of pretending, and how it is sometimes needed to give in to our darker tendencies in order to survive

It's been a treat watching Hodkin's style evolve from short to short, and her first post-student animation, a music video for The Magic Gang, shows she can do unbridled joy just as well as she does offbeat dialogue and surreal humour. Whatever comes next, we already know it'll be worth watching.

The first half of Make It Soul constrains the marker to the background, lending an impressionist touch to the Chicago neighbourhood that sets the stage for the short — but once characters come into focus, they're rendered in crisp, digital lines. It's a smart way of introducing the aesthetic, but it still hardly prepares you for the moment Brown's performance starts.

The film feels like it's being viewed through a veil, or refracted through a pool of water—which is perfectly appropriate for such a drifting, dreamlike story.

The film examines humanity's view of the universe through the sweep of human history, depicting scenes from myths and legends along with our evolving scientific understanding, all in just under seven minutes, plus credits.

Structured around a mother telling her daughter about their struggles in post-dictatorship Athens, My Mother's Coat is a film full of regrets, but it isn't sour and it isn't even exactly sad, although it isn't happy either.