This is What We Mean by Short Films: Opening Night 2025

Introverted and polite seventeen-year-old Azi Rahimi accompanies her best friend, Morgan, Morgan's father, and Morgan father's new girlfriend, Elizabeth, on a weekend vacation. As Azi spends more time with Elizabeth, a mysterious and electric connection is sparked. Soon their dynamic turns into a game—eventually impacting everyone around them.

Mia arrives at her sister’s veterinary clinic, carrying a heavy bag and an injured dog named Bubba. As the sisters prepare to leave together, Mia’s phone pings with messages from her controlling boyfriend, Mitch, demanding to know where she is. When Mitch unexpectedly appears outside the clinic, Mia is forced to abandon her escape plan and fabricate a story to cover her tracks. As tension simmers between the couple, Mia is faced with an agonizing decision: escape her abusive boyfriend or stay behind to protect her beloved dog, Bubba.

In a small village where people don’t seem to get enough entertainment, a young man is engaged to balance on his head at the top of the church tower and thereafter fall to the ground and die. For doing this he will receive a great deal of money. The people gather enthusiastically at the church to watch the young man perform the task. It’s all over in a couple of seconds. And to everyone’s dismay the young man really dies in the end. Now their enthusiasm is switched into disappointment. To put up with such horrors should actually be forbidden, the people say and leave dissatisfied.

With the sea and the urban Algarve as a background, we follow a complete cycle of the life of a special shellfish called Percebes, goose barnacle. From their formation, to the dish, in this journey, we cross different contexts that allow us to better understand this region and those who live there.

A middle-aged man reflects back on his tumultuous adolescent phase while sitting in his childhood bedroom. Through intricate and deeply personal musings somehow all tied to his hair - hair growing or hair receding - we, over time accumulate meaning into the larger journey of his life.

Tessitura explores the entangled ways that voice, character, and gender are continuously reformulated in opera by those who contend with these connections daily. Through the voices of singers Breanna Sinclairé, Lucas Bouk, Katherine Goforth, and musicologist Dr. Naomi André, contemporary narratives weave between opera’s historical conventions around gender, illuminating the traditions and transformations shaping the field today.

In the aftermath of an earthquake, the police find a man in the woods. A zoologist, a sound recorder, and a news team grapple with the truth that he may be the cause of all the natural disasters that devastated this small mountain town.