Category: Short Films

Surprising how much can fit into so little.

IN WONDERLAND Review by J Perez

The story revolves around Nina, portrayed by Elizabeth Phoenix Caro, an 8-year-old Mexican child who has recently crossed the US-Mexico border with her father.
Review by J Perez

SEVAP/MITZVAH directed by Sabina Vajraca

Short films have become popular because they can provide a cost-effective learning experience for filmmakers and because of increasing audience diversity – though SEVAP/MITZVAH has the look and feel of a feature. That train of thought has this writer-reviewer imagining Director/Writer Sabina Varjraca’s 17-minute virtuoso SEVAP/MITZVAH is in the works to become a SEVAP/MITZVAH feature film. – Review by Gregg W. Morris

STREET REPORTER Film Review – An Award Winning Cinematic Gem 26 Minutes Long, Packing the Wallop of a Full Length Award Winning Documentary

Director Laura Waters Hinson’s STREET REPORTER is a captivating documentary about homelessness featuring a homeless person cum photo journalist pursuing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about homeless in the Nation’s Capitol. Advocacy, investigative and ethnographic journalism are fused transcendently in this 26-minute film short packing the wallop of those full length, five-star documentary films. Critics raves’ and reviews about this award winning film aren’t shy calling it as an Oscar contender.

Abigail Jean’s QUEEN OF THE DESERT Film Review Short

Director Mary Ann Rotond, who won Best Woman Directed Short at the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival this year, believes that the power of shared humanity, which is the essence of empathy, can overpower the centrifugal forces she believes are at the core of racism and bigotry tearing away at America.
 
She tells her visually stunning movie short through an encounter of a young woman Black and proud who is hitch hiking and the long-haul trucker, White, who gives her a lift. Once inside the cab of the trucker’s rig, the woman discovers that the truck driver is enamored with the culture and mores represented by the Confederate flag that is a banner inside his rig. And the sparks fly. – Film short review by Abigail Jean.

Luis De Leon’s THE QUEEN OF THE DESERT Film Short Review

QUEEN OF THE DESERT is Director Mary Ann Rotondi’s creative endeavor to make a movie commentary about what she believed are the dynamic social and political forces menacing this country, writes the WORD’s Luis De Leon. Rotondi, who won Best Woman Directed Short at the 2022 Poppy Jasper International Film Festival, uses two characters of different gender, ethnicity, personal values as well as social and political mores to express her point of view that the power of people’s shared humanity can ameliorate the centrifugal forces she believes are tearing away at America.
 
In other words, people living in the United States of America need to empathize more with people who don’t appear to be like them.
 

SHADOW BIRD (SONSI) Film Short Review

Those on the lookout for films with the cinematic magic to raise their spirits during these COVID-19 surges should consider this mesmerizing hallucinogenic & hypnagogic tale by Director Sivita Singh. It can make you feel as if you are experiencing a loopy de loop of phantasmagoric proportions during these perilous days. By Greggory W. Morris

FRIMAS – Short Movie Review

Kara, who lives in a dystopian country where abortion is illegal and the penalties are draconian for those who break the law, is desperate to get one, nevertheless, and that desperation has driven her to take risks that could get her imprisoned if not dead on a slab in an abortion clinic. She is willing to take any risk, face any peril – and she most certainly does in Director Marianne Farley’s foreboding but exquisitely made five-star edge-of-the-seat thriller. Is Dirctor Farley’s FRIMAS a prophetic foretelling of what is on America’s horizon because of TX SB8?