by Jessica Haas
Thanks to Aaron and Michael literally forcing the festival badge onto me, I ended up catching four different shorts programs. And honestly, what a treat it was! The shorts wound up being some of my absolute favorite things I saw all festival long. I think I have a higher than average patience (or obsession?) for shorts thanks to my time screening for CinefestLatino and my annual Sundance marathons, but even by my standards I had craaaaaazy good luck this year. Three out of the four programs were straight-up fantastic.
I cannot recommend enough making time for at least one shorts block next year. And hey, if one doesn’t vibe with you, it’s over quickly enough and then it’s onto the next. Perfect for anyone whose attention span has been completely fried by a week of slow burn features, like me.
I would love it if they did an award winners shorts showcase. Imagine seeing all the jury winners in one go! A dream.
Of my top five things I watched at IFFBoston this year, two of them are shorts. Let me gush about a few of them below:
Paper Trail
Animated
Trailer: PAPER TRAIL – teaser
Paper Trail is the new 14‑minute, Sundance‑award‑winning short from everyone’s favorite melancholy animation wizard, Don Hertzfeldt. I’m going to stay a little vague here because this is one of those shorts you truly need to experience with zero prep to feel its full impact, but I will say it was my #2 favorite thing I watched at the entire festival.
Using brand‑new animation techniques developed specifically for this film, Paper Trail tells the story of a man’s life entirely through paper and somehow manages to be both simple and emotionally annihilating. If you, like me, walk around with a tiny storm cloud of existential dread hovering over your head at all times, this short will hit you so hard you’ll be ugly crying to the point where the guy next to you glances over like, “Is she okay…?”
I had to sprint to the bathroom after the program because my makeup had melted into full “my husband just died under mysterious circumstances” territory. And I’d happily do it all again because I loved it!
Paper Trail is being released on May 20, and is screening as part of Bleak Week on June 6th at the Coolidge with It’s Such A Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow.
5 out of 5 cats
A Derailment
Documentary
A Derailment is the latest short from acclaimed archival documentarian Nathan Truesdell. His past credits include an academy award nominated documentary Ascension and the camera department head for my all time favorite pay cable masterpiece, How To With John Wilson. (John Wilson also executive produced this.) So when I saw this on the IFFBoston lineup, I was PUMPED in a way only a very specific type of documentary sicko can be.
Told entirely through archival footage, the short dives into the 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and the absolute circus of mismanagement that followed. The local government decided to burn off the chemicals instead of letting them cool, causing an avalanche of health problems for the residents of East Palestine and destroying local flora and fauna.
Norfolk Southern is also just as guilty. During CEO Alan Shaw’s senate testimony, a senator casually informs him in real time that yet another Norfolk Southern train has derailed in Alabama. During the hearing. Barely a month after the Ohio disaster. You truly cannot script this stuff. Here’s the statistic that broke my brain: there are over a thousand train derailments every year. From 1990 to 2021, the U.S. averaged 1,704 derailments annually. That number feels like it should come with a laugh track.
The short leans into heavy metal aesthetics with a deathcore soundtrack by Longmont Potion Castle, and by the end of it you’re so fired up you could probably walk straight into a mosh pit and start windmilling. Nobody is doing archival documentaries like Nathan Truesdell. No one.
5 out of 5 cats
Domingo Familiar (Family Sunday)
Narrative
Trailer: #DISFF48 Family Sunday, Gerardo Del Razo
A short so phenomenal it walked away with both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for narrative short and it deserves every ounce of that love. This film gutted me like one of those fish in Rose of Nevada. It’s been a week and I still cannot stop thinking about it. I was so obsessed that I messaged Sabrina (who runs CinefestLatino) the second I left the theater to beg her to try to program it. And when I talked to Brett Melican, IFFBoston’s shorts programmer, he told me it might be the greatest short they’ve ever programmed. I think I’m right there with him.
I’m going to stay vague because this is another one that benefits from going in blind, but I will tell you: I screamed in the middle of the showing. Tonally, it’s giving major Ruben Östlund energy. Like if Incident by a Bank happened in CDMX. Some might say Gerardo Del Razo reheated Östlund’s nachos… I would say he devoured them and then licked the plate clean.
This was my #1 favorite thing I watched at the entire festival. Do. Not. Sleep. On. This.
5 out of 5 cats
Beast of the Seine
Animated
Trailer: Beast of the Seine
I know, I know… we’re all cat people here. But I swear this short is fantastic despite being about a dog. Beast of the Seine is (shockingly) based on a true story from 1908, and it follows a mischievous little dog who keeps pushing children into the river… so he can “heroically” save them and score beefsteaks from the butcher. An icon!
During the Q&A with animator Jon Portman, he said that the second he stumbled across the headline “Dog a Fake Hero,” he knew he had to animate it and he had to do it fast before someone else snatched the idea and did it better. Fair enough, because the result is ridiculously charming.
I don’t think I saw anything cuter at the entire festival. There’s a moment where someone puts a worm on a fishing hook, the worm lets out this tiny audible scream, and the whole theater absolutely lost it. Full body laughter. It was beautiful.
Highly recommend catching this one whenever you can. It’s pure joy.
Read the original article from the New York Times in 1908 here.
5 out of 5 cats
Rooftop Lempicka
Narrative
Trailer: MINT CFF 2026 Trailer of Rooftop Lempicka （2025）
Feels a little on the nose that I’m writing this while eating a bánh mì from Phinista Café, but honestly it’s delicious and it’s helping me lock in so I can finish this. Anyway… Rooftop Lempicka is exactly the kind of short I wish I had made myself.
Set in Ho Chi Minh City in 2002, it follows a young girl named Thi whose parents rent out their spare room to help support the family as her mother prepares for another baby. A woman named Auntie Ngọc moves in, and Thi becomes instantly, innocently fascinated by her. Through an art book of Tamara de Lempicka’s female nudes, Thi starts to learn about female sexuality — the beautiful parts and the complicated ones.
This short felt like a Vietnamese iced coffee on a hot summer day: refreshing, warm, a little sweet, a little bold. Honestly, this is what I wanted Filipiñana to be. Just a tender, sun‑drenched story about girlhood, sexuality, and humid tropical air.
While watching it, I kept thinking, “I wish this was a feature.” And then, as I was writing this, I found out it is actually being developed into one. How exciting!
4.5 cats out of 5
Toxic Tides
Documentary
Watch here: TOXIC TIDES: The fight to save King’s Beach | Short Documentary Film
Toxic Tides might be the short that blindsided me the most. Mostly because I spent the first 21 years of my life living in Revere, right on the beach. My dad and I used to drive up to Nahant every morning with our coffee. I was absolutely not expecting to see my hometown pop up during the festival, and definitely not like this.
The short follows a community fighting back against pollution on its coastline. King’s Beach in Lynn has always had a smell to it. Growing up, everyone insisted it was seaweed. Turns out… nope. It’s toxic waste runoff. The Stacey’s Brook sewage outfall keeps dumping wastewater into the beach because the storm sewer and sanitary sewer were combined, and the sewage system is over a century old. Even on dry days, the sanitary system leaks into the ocean. Love that for my childhood self, who spent countless afternoons climbing all over those rocks now covered in toxic sludge.
And as if that wasn’t enough, residents of Revere, Saugus, and Lynn also have to deal with the toxic ash from the Wheelabrator trash incinerator — the oldest one in the country — and its unlined ash landfill sitting in the Rumney Marsh. It was supposed to close in 1996. And it is… very much still running.
When I talked to Brett Melican after the screening, he said they wanted to program this short because they hoped it might help someone. And it did. I had no idea about any of this. A lot of my friends didn’t either.
After the showing, I joined the Facebook group mentioned in the film and ended up connecting with Loretta LaCentra, who appears in the short. She lives downwind of the incinerator; her husband has had three different cancers, and she’s had an autoimmune condition since her 30s. Loretta actually knows my family in Revere (if you know the Haas family, you know), so it genuinely felt like I was meant to come across this short when I did.
This one hits close to home. Literally and emotionally.
4.5 cats out of 5
Projecting Protest
Documentary
Watch here: Scripps News Reports: Projecting Protest
Projecting Protest was one of the less depressing entries in the documentary shorts block I attended, but it still packed a punch. The film opens in Washington, D.C. in January 2024, where an activist sets up outside the Capitol and projects “Not 1 more f’n bomb for Israel” onto a government building and is immediately shut down by Capitol Police. I perked up in my seat at the display of unabashed free speech.
Reporter Tom Clement decided to make this short after a projection activist accidentally appeared in the background of one of his news shots, and he found himself wondering why the police didn’t shut it down. From there, he fell down the rabbit hole of projection activism, something many of us first saw during Occupy Wall Street, which helped popularize the tactic as consumer projectors got more accessible to your average consumer.
The throughline of the short is the legal gray area: is projection protest protected free speech, or is it a nuisance? Trespassing? Something else entirely? As projection activist Robin Bell puts it, “Just like any technology, it can be used by either side.”
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened when a member of National Socialist Florida (they’ve since rebranded as National Socialist Front,) a violent extremist group responsible for spreading hateful and racist propaganda, decided to use projection to display their disgusting Christo-fascist ideology on prominent Florida buildings. The film makes clear the harm these groups cause and does not platform their ideology. It shows how dangerous it is when hateful actors exploit legal loopholes. Can I just say how absolutely STOOPID it is that Josh Nunes wants to hide his face in the interview the whole time like you can’t go online and Google Josh Nunes Nat Soc Florida and find a picture of his face (right).
One of the most striking moments comes when Clement tells longtime activist Bill Moyer that neo‑Nazi groups have started using projection too. Moyer looks physically pained before saying, “I haven’t seen it, and that would break my heart a little.” It broke mine too.
Projecting Protest is sharp, timely, and unsettling in all the right ways. A reminder that activism evolves, technology evolves, and unfortunately, so do the people trying to twist both for harm.
4 cats out of 5
Born Secret
Documentary
Trailer: Born Secret | NFMLA May 16th, 2026
I’m going to try to keep this one brief because I’ve officially written six pages and I’m still running solely on iced coffee and movies, and I just know you’re all exhausted by my yapping. But I had to take a second to highlight this one because it’s executively produced by my favorite up and coming sad boy director, Derek Cianfrance.
Born Secret follows director Riley Fitchpatrick as he returns to his hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Sounds simple enough, right? Except Oak Ridge turns out to be a major site of the Manhattan Project, the American, Canadian and British collaboration program that developed the atomic bomb. Imagine finding out your childhood home was basically sitting on top of a historical fault line of nuclear secrecy.
Through a beautifully balanced mix of archival footage and interviews with locals, Fitchpatrick explores a town where the past isn’t just lingering, but breathing down the neck of the present. Despite the heavy subject matter, the film feels incredibly personal. Fitchpatrick treats every subject with such gentleness that the whole short becomes almost meditative. You can feel him wrestling with the weight of history and the intimacy of home at the same time.
The cinematography is gorgeous, the interviews are revealing in that quiet, devastating way, and the whole thing just… hums. It elevated this short into “Best of the Fest” territory for me.
One line that really stuck with me and will probably stick with me comes from a teen resident reflecting on the Y‑12 nuclear facility:
“They’re not protecting Y‑12 from us, they’re protecting us from Y‑12.”
4 cats out of 5
After living in a movie theater for a week, I am positively thriving. If you’ve made it this far, bless you, because I don’t know how to shut up. And yet, his year’s lineup earned every single word. IFFBoston always programs incredible stuff, but something about the shorts this year felt so exciting, like everyone collectively decided to level up at the same time. If you’ve ever skipped the shorts block because you were too busy with features, I’m here to lovingly bully you into making time for at least one block next year. You might walk out with a new favorite filmmaker. You might learn something about your hometown you wish you didn’t. You might ugly‑cry so hard a stranger checks on you. You might even scream in the middle of a screening (oops.)
But I promise: you won’t forget them.
Now go watch some shorts. Or at least pretend you will so I feel validated.
Special thanks to:
Michael & Aaron for not letting the badge thing go. I am so, so glad I did this and I hope I get to do it again next year.
Brett Melican for having killer taste and programming some of the best shorts I have ever seen.
Brian Tamm & Nancy Campbell for putting on the best damn film festival I have ever been to, it really feels like coming home to a warm hug when I walk through the doors of the Brattle/Somerville/Coolidge every spring
The rest of my Chlotrudis crew for loving me and actually caring about what I have to say, there’s really no words for what that means to me and I love you all so much.
Cheers to next year!