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PEARLS wastes no time in plunging the viewer into a story that feels equal parts absurd, unsettling, and disturbingly relatable. With only fifteen minutes to make its mark, Alastair Train’s short film approaches the horrors of fertility struggles through a lens of body horror, distorted imagery, and the kind of creeping discomfort that stays long after the credits fade. It’s not a film that politely asks for attention—it forces it, much like the invasive presence of the oysters at its core.

This documentary manages to take something as familiar as baseball and remind us how much weight it can carry beyond the confines of a field. DIAMOND DIPLOMACY is one of those rare films that doesn’t just tell the story of a sport, but instead reshapes how we understand its place in the world. In under ninety minutes, it captures more than 150 years of history between the United States and Japan, demonstrating how the game became a vessel for unity, resilience, and repair.

The setup for BAD HAIRCUT is deceptively simple—a college kid, Billy, just needs a haircut, but instead finds himself trapped with a barber whose peculiarities are a shade of full-blown menace. What might sound like a punchline stretches into a full-length feature that balances bizarre humor, energy, and a surprisingly earnest core of coming-of-age. The film is tailor-made for a late-night crowd that thrives on outrageous genre hybrids.

OPEN WIDE is a ten-minute short that proves sometimes the scariest setups aren’t about haunted houses or supernatural monsters, but about what can happen when human desire collides with dysfunction. Directed by Sam Fox, who co-wrote and produced alongside Lara Repko, the film turns a seemingly playful night into a nightmare that gnaws at both faith and intimacy. It’s uncomfortable and intentionally disorienting, utilizing a limited canvas to create something with impact that extends well beyond its brief runtime.

This film explores topics and subject matter that may be incredibly difficult to watch and process. It’s not an easy watch, but it's a reality that feels true to the world. WEIGHTLESS finds tension in ordinary moments: a glance across a field, a joke that lands too sharply when you already feel too much. Set at a summer health camp bordered by forest and sea, the film follows fifteen-year-old Lea as she attempts to change her body and, more so, the way she inhabits her own life. That aim sounds simple; the execution is anything but. The camp’s routines—measured portions, group activities, quiet hours—promise control. What the program can’t regulate is attention, and the film understands that attention can be as intoxicating, as painful, and as formative as any number on a chart.

PRIDE & PRAYER is less about giving answers and more about daring to live inside the questions. In her debut feature-length documentary, Canadian-Kurdish filmmaker and performer Panta Mosleh turns the camera on herself, exploring the clash between two pillars of her identity: her Muslim faith and her queerness. The result is a deeply intimate film that offers no easy resolutions but instead presents a raw and ongoing negotiation of belonging. For anyone who has ever felt pulled in opposite directions by community, belief, and personal truth, this film will resonate deeply.

DOLLY never lets the heart settle. It’s a grim fairytale, a film that treats survival as a messy rather than a triumphant montage. Rod Blackhurst leans into folk horror with the confidence of someone who knows the lineage—Grimms, New French Extremity, the scrappy terror of 70s American horror—and then pushes the tradition into something thornier and more personal. Macy is our core, but this is also the rare monster story that invites the audience to look directly at the mask and wonder what fragile human needs might be hiding underneath. The premise is brutally straightforward: a young woman is abducted by a monstrous figure who intends to “raise” her. The execution is anything but simple. The film’s sting comes from the way it frames captivity not just as restraint, but as emotional reprogramming—a ritual of forced dependency that echoes the most unsettling fairy tales.

SHAPE OF MOMO is a patient, deeply human drama that draws its strength from silence as much as from dialogue. Tribeny Rai, making her feature film debut, crafts a story that feels intimate yet expansive, grounded in the textures of Himalayan village life but resonating with universal questions of duty, independence, and identity. The film is rooted in the community, tradition, and expectation. Yet, it also carries an undercurrent of rebellion, pushing against the constraints that women often inherit when family and culture collide.

BODY BLOW doesn’t just resurrect the heyday of the erotic thriller — it rips it apart, drenches it in excess, and rebuilds it through a proudly queer lens. Dean Francis crafts a crime saga that feels nostalgic for the audacity of the 90s and radical in its refusal to trim its edges. The film declares itself a work of defiance: dirty, dangerous, and designed for audiences hungry for something riskier than what genre cinema typically allows.

REDOUBT unfolds like a memory carved into stone, stark and inflexible, yet pulsating with a deep unease that never quite disappears. Director John Skoog has crafted a film that sits at the intersection of history and hallucination. In this story, a man’s compulsion to protect his community bleeds into obsession, blurring the line between vigilance and paranoia. Shot in black and white, the film captures not just an era’s atmosphere but the psychology of one individual whose life is bent under the weight of Cold War dread.

The documentary that you never knew you needed is here! There’s something inherently joyful about watching people surprise you, and SILVER SCREAMERS is built entirely around that feeling. The film takes what could have been a one-note gimmick—retirees making a horror short—and develops it into a celebration of creativity, resilience, and the unshakable urge to have fun, even when society has quietly suggested that playtime is over.

THE CURRENTS is a film that thrives on ambiguity. Milagros Mumenthaler’s latest feature resists the urge to explain itself, instead following a woman who is both at the peak of her professional success and at the edge of personal collapse. It’s a film about impulses—small ones that trigger tectonic shifts—and about how the past we try to bury finds its way back to the surface when we least expect it. The film is more a journey through time than a narrative construct; it’s about what life means to someone and the struggles they encounter.

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE arrives with the precision of a parable and the weight of a cautionary tale. Directed by Eugène Green, the film is steeped in his signature style — deliberate, poetic, and slightly otherworldly. Still, this time, it is framed around the cultural and social shifts reshaping Lisbon. While his visuals have often used spiritual allegories to comment on fractured societies, here the target is both timely and universal: unchecked tourism, the commodification of culture, and the moral choices left to those who inherit a changing world.

HANA KOREA opens with a question that lingers with you: What happens when the place you fought so hard to reach doesn’t feel like home? Directed by Danish filmmaker Frederik Sølberg, this feature debut blurs the line between fiction and documentary to tell the story of Hyesun, a young woman who defies her North Korean regime only to discover that South Korea is not the promised land she had imagined. It is instead another arena of rules, expectations, and subtle alienations.

A PLACE WHERE I BELONG begins in a way that feels both intimate and immense. What unfolds isn’t just another documentary about identity—it’s a feature debut that tells stories often neglected in both queer and disability cinema. Director Rheanna Toy captures the lives of six individuals—Amyn, Alison, Lyle, Noah, Peter, and Brian—as they navigate what it means to be LGBTQIA2S+ and living with intellectual or developmental disabilities. At the center is their participation in Connecting Queer Communities (CQC), a program that offers a sense of belonging, solidarity, and a haven in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland. However, with funding in jeopardy, the program’s delicacy becomes a chilling metaphor for how society treats its most marginalized members.

With STARWALKER, Corey Payette attempts something rarely seen in contemporary cinema: a fully staged, unabashedly queer musical that blends Indigenous storytelling, drag spectacle, and intimate drama. For Payette—already a respected Anishinaabe composer and playwright—this is both a continuation and an expansion of his mission to reimagine musicals as more than escapist entertainment. STARWALKER pushes forward into the present, marrying drag performance with the cultural grounding of a Two-Spirit identity. The result is messy at times, dazzling at others, but always bold.

Sometimes the most powerful stories come in the smallest packages, and TOO GOOD proves that six minutes is more than enough time to spark laughter, provoke thought, and challenge long-held ideas about morality and judgment. The short opens the door to an afterlife that is far from solemn, instead giving viewers a sharp-edged, comic spin on the eternal question: what makes a person “good enough”?

Every year, haunted attractions across America open their gates to thrill seekers eager to be chased by chainsaws and scared by masked actors. For many, they are temporary playgrounds of fear. For Keith Boynton, Markoff’s Haunted Forest in Maryland was inspiration enough to build an entire feature film around — one that not only delivers the screams of a slasher but also captures the humanity of the people who bring such places to life. THE HAUNTED FOREST is at once a love letter to Halloween culture, a horror drama, and a character study. In trying to juggle all three, it sometimes frays at the edges, but its ambition is what makes it stand out in a crowded festival lineup.

SELF-HELP opens with a setup that feels all too believable in the modern age: a daughter watches her mother slip under the influence of a mysterious figure, and in desperation, she infiltrates the very group that threatens to consume her family. From there, director Erik Bloomquist and co-writer Carson Bloomquist craft a story that is part cult horror, part family drama, and part commentary on the manipulation of trust. It is a film rooted in modern anxieties, dressed in familiarity, but clever enough to find fresh angles.

Where DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS lured audiences with sleek elegance and erotic menace, Harry Kümel’s companion piece from 1971, MALPERTUIS, plunges headfirst into a labyrinth of myth, madness, and surrealism. Adapted from Jean Ray’s novel, it is a film that wears its strangeness proudly, offering an experience that feels more like wandering through a fever dream than following a conventional narrative. With its star power, elaborate production design, and ambitions, MALPERTUIS is both a fascinating artifact of European genre filmmaking and a divisive entry that continues to split audiences to this day.

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS isn’t the kind of vampire film that lures its audience in with sharp teeth and spurts of blood. Instead, it glides into view with a quiet elegance, letting its atmosphere wash over you like waves against the Belgian shoreline where the story unfolds. From its very first moments, there’s a sense of unease lurking beneath the polished surfaces, as though the film is more interested in seduction than shocks. Harry Kümel, working at the height of his career, crafted something that plays as both a piece of Gothic horror and an artful exploration of desire, repression, and control.

Some horror stories rely on monsters, and then there are horror stories that reveal the monsters we’ve been taught to carry within ourselves. SKIN, written and directed by Urvashi Pathania, belongs squarely to the latter category. SKIN makes an immediate impression as a short film that utilizes genre tools to dissect a very real and corrosive issue: colorism and the pressures imposed on women of color to conform to Eurocentric ideals. This is the third indie film I've seen in the last two months that tackles this subject in one way or another, each equally as powerful with its own unique twists.