Role Play

In his splendidly uncomfortable short Role Play, director Kyle Jon Shephard transforms a couple's stilted attempt at intimate reignition into something far more intriguing when an uninvited stranger unexpectedly appears in their home. We welcome Kyle back to DN to discuss his use of hidden-cam angles and hard cuts to guide audiences from cringe comedy into genuinely unsettling territory.

Just a Boy

Edie Amos talks to us about collaborating with poet, activist, and speaker Sam Browne on her 16mm documentary Just A Boy, a vital and topical short film about Sam's experiences of masculinity, challenging the norms men have traditionally grown up with, how toxic that has become in the modern manosphere era, and how misplaced or repressed emotions are hurting both women and men.

Ceres

In her latest short, director Amelia Sears collaborates with writer/actor Hannah Morrish, who performs opposite Juliet Stevenson in the heartbreaking, nuanced two-hander Ceres, which reimagines an ancient myth to explore the invisible weight of coercive control. With a 90% female-identifying crew, the production found power in stillness and the charged space between bodies.

The Unexpressed

Somewhere between therapy session and fever dream, The Unexpressed (Dom outtryckta) follows two women who meet, bond and proceed to dismantle themselves in search of whoever might be hiding underneath. Co-directors Lena Stamm, Sandra Medina and Nicklas Wedin explain how they built their sismance feature through radical trust, cross-border Zoom calls and gloriously unhinged improvisation.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls

For the first in our series of video interviews with the 2026 Oscar short film nominees, co-directors Maciek Szczerbowski & Chris Lavis reveal their animation approach of no storyboards, just actors, 3 cameras, and the hunt for human nuances, to create the living pulse inside their stop-motion puppets for The Girl Who Cried Pearls by workshopping every scene live with actors in a black box theatre like environment.