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PRETEND I EXISTED is a deeply personal short that understands how memory becomes its own kind of storytelling — fragmented, emotional, shaped as much by feeling as by facts. In just under six minutes, filmmaker Quoc Huy Tran reflects on his relationship with his mother during her cancer treatment in Japan, capturing the fragile space between fear and love that emerges when illness alters the roles of parent and child. It’s a film built on reflection rather than drama, and that restraint gives its core remarkable strength.

ASCENDING BEYOND SHADOWS is a reminder that the most powerful journeys don’t need massive runtimes or sweeping narration to feel profound. Through the lens of rock climbing, this short documentary explores how one person turns a physically demanding pursuit into a lifeline — a means of coping with hardship and refusing to let struggle define his future. Director Patrick Civitelli approaches this emotional reality not through sentimental overstatement but through earned perspective, showing how climbing becomes less a sport and more a path toward healing.

VIVISECT is a smart, unsettling thriller that understands how fear doesn’t always come from loud scares or sudden shocks. Sometimes terror grows slowly, like discomfort creeping into a room where you initially felt welcome. In just eleven minutes, writer-director Ava Dell’Orfano explores that shift with precision, crafting a story that begins with relatable stress and spirals into something much darker. Here, the familiar setting of a study session becomes a breeding ground for manipulation, obsession, and survival.

THREAT wastes no time establishing its stakes. In under ten minutes, it takes on the emotional and psychological strain of espionage — a life where orders clash with personal values, and consequences ripple far beyond the mission. Stories about covert duty often lean into spectacle, globe-trotting action, or elaborate gadgetry. Director Arthur Dupuis and writer/lead Michael-Eoin Stanney aim for something more grounded: a human caught between loyalty and identity.

There’s a unique kind of pressure baked into emergency stories — every moment is a countdown, every decision potentially irreversible. LIFE SUPPORT manages to bring viewers into that reality in just ten minutes, proving that a film doesn’t need a long runtime to leave a heavy impression. Centering on an emergency physician and a young medical student watching and learning in real time, this short explores more than the mechanics of saving a life. It aims at the human cost of being responsible for the outcome.

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.