This year's independent short film circuit produced an unusually strong crop, though as usual, most of it will be genuinely difficult to see again outside the festival screenings themselves — few shorts secure any streaming distribution, and rights issues can keep even award-winners off the internet entirely.
A standout was a fifteen-minute documentary following a night-shift security guard at an empty shopping mall, shot almost entirely in static wide takes, that says more about isolation and routine than most feature-length films manage in two hours.
“Half of these films will never stream anywhere. Catch them while a festival still has them.”
On the fiction side, a tense, dialogue-light short about two estranged siblings splitting their late father's belongings drew the longest post-screening discussion at the festival we attended, largely for its refusal to resolve the siblings' conflict by the film's end.
Several of the strongest shorts this year came from first-time directors working with budgets under what a single day of a commercial shoot would typically cost, a fact that came up in nearly every post-screening Q&A we sat in on, usually framed by the directors themselves as a constraint they'd choose again.
Our full list of six, with where each is currently screening, runs below. Track them down at a festival if you can; a few of these may simply not have another life after this circuit ends.
