2025 Palm Springs International ShortFest Review Roundup Part 2

Palm Springs International Shortfest has continued to overwhelm us with fantastic shorts. Congrats to all the winners at last nights ceremony. Later on this week we will have a post reviewing several of them, so keep an eye out for that. A list of award wInners can be seen here: https://www.psfilmfest.org/news/2025-palm-springs-international-shortfest-announces-festival-winners

But for now, we bring you three more reviews of personal favourites from the fest!

Century Egg, dir. Charles Barratt

In Charles Barratt’s Century Egg we follow Daniel (played by Justin Chien) as he returns to his childhood city in Taiwan, a place he left behind decades ago as his parents separated and he moved with his mother to America. Wandering the streets that was once his hometown, Daniel sits down on a park bench to grab a quick lunch when he encounters a stranger by the name of Xiao An (played by Chien-Ho Wu). From here much of the story is driven by Xiao An’s constant questions, and with fleeting and sometimes non existent answers we get glimpses into Daniel's life since he left. Like struggling to answer the question Are you American? Taiwanese? 

To quote my dear colleague and ShortStick founder Brandon:- It's a deep reminder that places hold memories.

Sometimes silence speaks loud, and answers do not exist, and that is perfectly fine. Daniel's story is not necessarily a tragic one, he is in a good place with a loving wife and a baby on the way, but at the same time it is not all happiness and tranquility. This film basks in the glory of stillness, masterfully paired with a reminiscing soundtrack, cradling us in the beautiful bitter sweetness of memories. The shots we see of the pair having conversation are focused and softly lit, like a brushed up portrait of a single snapshot in a lifetime. Intertwined we see shots overlooking the city, transitioning from gloaming to nightfall, mirroring the mixed feelings of familiar yet foreign.

Charles Barratt leaves a lot open for the viewer to interpret, and I think there are few more fitting stories to do so with. If you ever had a big change in your life, experiencing separation physically or mentally, you can relate to the feeling of a before and an after. There are traces of hurt there, but with enough time and distance we grow to appreciate what we had and where it got us. Transitions do not need to be from bad to good or vice versa, they can just be from one circumstance to another. Life is wonderfully complex and Century Egg shows it in all of its multifaceted glory.

Review by: Robin Hellgren

Little Goodbyes, dir. Justine Martin

In the wake of the success of her debut documentary short film, Oasis, director Justine Martin takes her talents in screenwriting and direction to a fictional tale in Little Goodbyes. 

Christmas is nothing short of magical as a child. Justine Martin wastes no time setting the holiday mood in her short: the room is aglow with Christmas spirit as two sisters, Florence and Simone, retreat under a table at the hair salon where their mother works. Their laughter and childlike wonder fill up the tiny space under the tablecloth as they create their own Christmas oasis, eating cake and cutting out faces from magazines to decorate a tiny tree with.  

Eager to follow some passersby dressed as elves, the two sisters launch out into the streets and promise their mom to be back in a half hour. Justine skillfully crafts a script of believable dialogue between the two children as they ponder whether if Florence lost her loose tooth that day, would Santa and the tooth fairy meet that night? One of the most skilled cinematographers in Canadian short film these past few years, Alexandre Nour (Invincible, Simo, Nanitic) expertly captures the twinkle of child-like wonder in the girls’ eyes. The magic continues through the short as they meet elves and even Santa himself and discuss his reindeer and whether he’s allergic to the yule log that they sat aside for him. 

Back outside, the girls meet a woman dressed as a winter fairy or elf of sorts. She hands them each a candy cane. The candy cane that Florence is given is broken in half. Perhaps this is coincidence or maybe it’s an act of foreshadowing, symbolizing broken belief. As Simone runs off to try out a swingset, a drastic event occurs that will change Florence’s perspective forever. 

Surprisingly, although one is an act of fiction and one is not, there are many throughlines between Martin’s Oasis and Little Goodbyes. They are both about siblings, one of whom is on the cusp of change and realization. In Oasis, Raphael says of his twin brother: “He protects me. And that’s awesome.” In a similar way, we see Florence shield her little sister Simone, in order to preserve her childlike imagination and joy. From this point forward in the short, the cinematography gets darker around Florence’s eyes and we no longer see that twinkle of childlike innocence. 

Little Goodbyes is a wonderfully tender film. It combines a stellar screenplay and cinematography with two gigantic heartwarming performances from Florence Séguin and Simone Bellemare Ledoux to create an unforgettable Christmas story. It reminds you of childlike joy and the desire to protect the ones you love at all costs.

Review by: Brandon MacMurray

Whose Woods are These, dir. Kate Nartker

The incredibly inventive animated short Whose Woods are These was created frame by frame from over 500 feet of woven fabric, and reimagines the story of Julianna Hofrichter who, in 1841, left her home in northwest Ohio’s Great Black Swamp, a wild untamed landscape filled with dense forests, wolves, bears, and marshy terrain to gather hickory nuts, never to be seen again. By literally weaving its story through textured imagery and poetic visuals, Whose Woods are These invites viewers to explore themes of memory, transformation, and the threads that connect family and place.

Traditional craft meets contemporary storytelling in director Kate Nartker’s retelling of the story of this missing woman—her great-great-great-great grandmother. Nartker’s family knows only fragments of the whole story of the disappearance, pieces together through genealogical records, a single newspaper interview, and maps of the area from the time of the disappearance. The story was passed down through her family through oral histories and fragments of lore. In this film, Hofrichter follows signs woven through the landscape to find solace and a deep connection to the wild.

The creation of Whose Woods are These was a painstaking creative process, with multiple complicated steps to create each second, each frame of animation. Nartker began by shooting footage on iPhone, mostly along the Eno River in Durham, North Carolina, reimagining the dark story from her family’s past. From this film she then renders a series of sequential frames and arranges them into a grid, designs a weave structure, and prepares the files for weaving on an industrial jacquard loom—an enormous loom traditionally used to produce home interior and upholstery fabric. Each of these single weavings is a 5-foot-by-4-foot blanket that has around 30 frames of action and looks like filmstrips.

Once the weavings are off the loom, Nartker paints color on to the black and white yarn. In Whose Woods Are These, she includes vibrant yellows and greens, to colour the grass and wildlife, signaling her protagonist’s walk into a new world, like Dorothy stepping from Kansas into Oz. Finally, once the woven fabric is complete, it is scanned into a digital format and animated at six frames per second. Textiles have been used to tell stories before: the famous Bayeux Tapestry, 230 feet of embroidery from the 11th century, tells the story of the Norman Conquest and is stretched out on display in a museum in Normandy, France. But Nartker’s combination of traditional folklore storytelling techniques with modern technologies brings this historical story into the present in a jarringly fresh new way.

Although it has the bones of a mystery novel, Whose Woods are These is not a mystery or thriller, Nartker’s focus is not really on the disappearance of Hofrichter, or on finding out the “truth” of what happened. Nartker has said in interviews that she is fine with not knowing the reality of Hofrichter’s fate; that not knowing allows her to explore and permits the “maybe.” With this freedom, Nartker is able to create a beautiful exploration of memory and heritage, weaving the literal and figurative threads that connect her family.

Review by: Joshua Hunt