Top 10 Films to Watch from the HollyShorts Film Festival

HollyShorts is one of the most eclectic short film festivals in the world, and this year’s lineup proves it. From animated rabbit heists to Rwandan childhood, pelvic floor enlightenment to alien super fans, the 2025 program spans every conceivable genre, tone, and corner of the human and intergalactic experience.

Here are ten films you won’t want to miss.

Violet and Marlowe Rob a Bank – Directed by Wesley Wang

After a tyrannical President Rabbit monopolizes the world’s carrot supply, a husband-and-wife rabbit duo from the countryside launch a series of daring factory heists to take them back. Part political allegory, part action-comedy, Violet and Marlowe Rob a Bank is exactly the kind of wildly inventive animation that reminds you short film has no ceiling. Wang clearly knows how to build a world — and blow it up.

Echoes Beneath the Hill – Directed by Aimé Octave

Set in Rwanda just days before the 1994 genocide, the film follows Jeanne, a ten-year-old girl searching for her lost pet goat while her parents brace for what’s coming. The contrast — childhood play and mountain winds against the gathering storm of history — makes this an almost unbearably tender watch. Octave has crafted something that honors both innocence and truth without exploiting either.

Pale Sun – Directed by Adrian Moyse Dullin & Jawahine Zentar

A beach. Summer. A 12-year-old boy ashamed of his father’s cancer-ravaged body. Pale Sun doesn’t need a complicated logline — its power is in that single, precise emotional truth. Co-directed by Moyse Dullin and Zentar, the film looks at how illness reshapes the way we see those we love, and how children carry shame they don’t yet have the language for.

Take Me to Your Merch – Directed by Symone Baptiste

An “elder emo” band can’t get their act together — until a group of alien super fans shows up with a very apocalyptic ultimatum. Baptiste leans all the way into the absurdity, and the result is one of the most purely fun entries in HollyShorts this year. There’s real warmth in the premise too: a story about aging, nostalgia, and the strange immortality of music, delivered via intergalactic comedy.

Pangea – Directed by Mimi Davila

Set over a single day and night in New York City, Pangea follows two Latina artist ex-lovers whose reunion pulls at threads of race, kink, and displacement. Davila’s film offers the kind of raw, crackling drama that short form does better than almost any other medium — compressed, pressurized, no room for anything but honesty. A story about two people and an entire world of unfinished business.

Last Stand at Butte City – Directed by Natalie Schwan

In 1880 Montana, a solitary rancher receives a 30-day notice from the railroad to abandon her homestead — and refuses to go quietly. But this isn’t simply a Western standoff. Schwan’s film is about the trauma that binds people to place, and the cost of finally confronting it. Gorgeous in premise and scope, Last Stand at Butte City brings a deeply interior story to the wide-open landscape of the frontier.

Floored – Directed by Marchelle Bradanini & Emily Alpren

An aging actress, a Lorazepam-hazed ensemble, and a Westside pelvic floor guru walk into a room — and what follows is apparently a path to enlightenment and one very bold decision. Floored sounds like the sharpest comedy in the lineup, the kind that sneaks real pain and liberation in through the laugh door. Bradanini and Alpren have assembled what promises to be a wildly memorable cast of characters.

Mesopotamia, TX – Directed by Lucy Gamades

Two strangers. A solar eclipse. A crowd of eclectic Texans. Mesopotamia, TX is the kind of film that trusts its setting and its people completely — a slice-of-life story in which the cosmic event in the sky may be less significant than the one happening on the ground. Gamades has a feel for the texture of a specific time and place, and that specificity is everything.

The Liars of Black Mountain Road – Directed by Parker Croft

A couple runs over a stranger’s dog and immediately begins competing for the moral high ground. Croft’s film zeroes in on one of the most recognizable and uncomfortable dynamics in a relationship — the performance of righteousness — and takes it to its logical extreme. Sharp, uncomfortable, and probably very funny in the worst way.

We Were Here – Directed by Pranav Bhasin

In a sleepy Indian town, three retired men become convinced that machines are stealing their relevance — and decide to compete directly with household appliances for domestic jobs. When one of their children lands a role at an AI company, the personal becomes political fast. Bhasin wraps a very contemporary anxiety inside a deeply warm, comedic human story.