Poetic Portraits 2025

WARNING: This film contains imagery of anorexia and eating disorders that may be disturbing to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

“Hey, let’s go on a diet together.” As kids in a small Quebec town, Eisha and Seema were more than sisters, they were soul mates, and a joint diet offered a shared sense of purpose. But their carefree project would take a dark turn, pushing Eisha to the very brink of death. Consumed by anorexia, she found herself battling her own fragile body—stranded between childhood and adulthood. Decades later, she revisits her past in an exquisitely crafted work of auto-ethnography, evoking her unusual youth with aching lyricism. In addressing a tender love letter to the troubled girl she once was, she reaches contemporary audiences with a timely reflection on body image and self-acceptance.

An Ivorian father and his American-born daughter set out to continue the book he never finished about a war he experienced as a child. With the help of the children living in his village today, the three generations make a film together and create a mythical tapestry of entwining timelines, nightmares, and memories.

In Central Africa, a young domestic worker suffers daily emotional abuse within the confines of her employer’s walled compound. Isolated from her family and community, she finds fleeting refuge in pirated Filipino comedies and holds tight to her dream of opening a boutique for new mothers.

In a Cuban pre-university school, a group of girls called "Las Perdularias" deal with the daily life of an increasingly empty school. All of them have the absence of someone who left. They know that adolescence will soon be over. It remains for these friends to freeze time and face the contradictions of living on an island that can no longer contain them.

The story of Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che, who, in 1975, after fleeing the Vietnam War by boat and docking in the Philippines, were utilized as background extras in the filming of Apocalypse Now. Winner of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction, and recipient of the 2022 Rooftop Films x Untouchable Short Film Scoring Grant.

Having built a colorful queer life in an American prairie town, an aspiring costume designer visits their island homeland of Guam to make costumes for a children’s theatre while reconnecting with distant parents.