Max Distance

"You are making something out of nothing, and the closer you can get to constructing more and more specific minutiae in front of your eyes, the more it feels like witchcraft."

Marissa Goldman explains how obsessive storyboarding and a meticulously staged play of mirrors let her turn the weird and indescribable into 'Max Distance', a wry comedy short about loneliness and online dating that follows a programmer fixated on the enigmatic stranger across the courtyard.

Karupy

"The film becomes a portrait of a family struggling to confront the possibility that Karupy may have an inner life that exists beyond their understanding of her."

Crafting a fragmented portrait through chapter-based shifting viewpoints, Kalainithan Kalaichelvan reflects on his Tamil family drama ‘Karupy’, exploring how a matriarch’s assertion of agency unsettles intergenerational dynamics and exposes the growing gap between her role within the family and her inner life.

Family Man

"People find transcendence in different experiences—drugs, dance, music, prayer—for me, water is my way there."

Kalani Gacon reveals how that pull towards water runs through 'Family Man', his near-wordless Himalayan myth where a missing father's spirit may drift home on the first storm of the season.

The Space Between Us

"I wanted a kind of timelessness to occur with this project, as the choreography is conceptual and contemporary; I wanted to capture it on a more antiquated medium, like 16mm, to create a slightly juxtaposed visual identity."

In his haunting dance film 'The Space Between Us', director Tony Farfalla pairs conceptual, contemporary choreography with the raw nostalgic grain of film and Balmorhea track Oscuros to picture two lovers, a single shared cigarette, and a duet about love, loss and return.

Ball Face

"In every storyboard I was making, there was always someone getting unexpectedly and dramatically hit in the face by a ball and it was my favorite part. It kept coming back. So I decided to dig into what that image could mean and go all in with it instead of keeping it as a final twist."

Fresh from winning the Cristal for a Graduation Film at Annecy Festival, Laurence Thérien joins us to discuss how a simple metaphor led them to explore themes of resilience and the adapt-or-die mindset in their RCA short film ‘Ball Face’.