2026 Palm Springs International Shortfest Review Roundup Part 1

Next up on our festival tour of covering the very best at fests, we have the 32nd Palm Springs International Shortfest. Palm Springs always programs an incredible fest with an extensive lineup. There is truly something for everyone, stretching through all genres including comedy, horror and drama. In Part 1 Josh and Robin review 3 of their favourites seen so far.

Loynes, dir. Dorian Jespers

Since its premiere in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2025, the uncategorizable Loynes has continued to baffle audiences with its baroque absurdity. Without any warning, we literally fall into Dorian Jespers' remarkable story, in which a nameless corpse is put on trial before a boisterous court in nineteenth-century Liverpool. The accused, a corpse pulled out of the ground a few moments before, has no name, so they question the soul, which is still present and unspeaking, but “To be dead doesn’t mean not to be,” and the trial must go on.

Loynes almost never stops to focus on one person, the entire courtroom is shown at once, bodies packed together like the religious figures crowded into a Renaissance painting. The dialogue overlaps in the same way, every character’s voice fighting to be the loudest. The camera of brilliant cinematographer Arnaud Alberola roves around like it, too, is a spectator in the court, passing from face to face looking for answers of its own, or perhaps someone to explain what, exactly, is going on. The casting director seems to have actually gone back to nineteenth-century Liverpool to find this insane cast of characters—none of these faces look like they have ever seen an iPhone before.

Loynes has an intense spirit of anarchic energy; a man falls from the ceiling into the courtroom, judges, bailiffs and spectators all shout at each other, and at one point the defendant disappears completely. Like Kafka, Jespers turns bureaucracy into a form of metaphysical comedy. The court is less interested in justice than in perpetuating its own procedures, and the corpse's inability to answer only generates further questions.

Loynes is a project that unfolded over many years, beginning as a feature film—this compression into a short 25-minute runtime makes the film thrillingly dense, like no idea could be cut, so they all got packed into this smaller package and had to play out all at once. The next evolution would have seen Loynes as a video installation, and the suggestion of history of each figure in the densely packed film could have played on the walls of any number of art galleries. The short film that actually resulted from this evolution feels, thrillingly, like stumbling into the middle of a long-running series and discovering that everyone else already knows the rules. Nothing is wrapped up, and all the characters are left at loose ends.

Filmed on locations in the United Kingdom, North Macedonia, and China, the totally immersive environment of Loynes recalls the Soviet-era experiment called DAU, in which an enormous group of actors, with no script or takes, acted and reacted in meticulously designed replica of a Soviet institute, with its authentic smells, clothes, interiors, and circumstances, sometimes staying on set for months. Production Designer Lucie Beauvert and Costume Designer Rezvan Farsijani have created a meticulous, beautifully lived-in world. As the actors inhabit its rules and routines, they become the scene's first spectators, and the audience feels dropped into a semi-real space where performance and observation begin to blur.

As Jespers collapses time and space, drawing a line between nineteenth-century Liverpool and present-day China, Loynes abandons any pretense of realism altogether. The closing song by Einstürzende Neubauten suggests transformation rather than finality: "We didn't die / We are just back with a different song." It is an apt summation of a film obsessed with continuity across bodies, histories, and identities. Loynes is a film with many doors but few keys, all the more fascinating for refusing to unlock itself completely.

 Review by: Joshua Hunt

Tears Burn to Ash, dir. Natalie Murao

A camera positioned at a distant, almost surveillance-like remove slowly closes in on a woman wandering through Tokyo's bustling streets. The sound and images are disconnected, as a voicemail plays over views of brightly lit cityscapes. The woman, Tammy (Venna Yamano) came to Japan from Vancouver to learn about herself and her Japanese heritage; her grandmother has told her about her great-grandparents' grave in Mie Prefecture, and the trip becomes an opportunity to understand what being Japanese means to her.

Tammy exists in a liminal state in Japan.  She gets lost in the busy streets and can’t understand the language when people speak to her (or know the lyrics at karaoke when a lady sings a song her obaachan, her grandmother, sang in her childhood), but she looks Japanese “enough” that white tourists think she is a local. Walking through a crowded neighbourhood of Tokyo, Tammy bumps into… herself? The woman looks exactly like her, but where Tammy is lost in both the city and herself, her doppelganger moves through Japan with confidence, working, speaking the language, and seemingly belonging. She has what Tammy feels she is missing.

Both the character of Tammy and the film’s director Natalie Murao are Yonsei ("fourth generation"), a Japanese diasporic term to specify the great-grandchildren of Japanese immigrants. Due to being fourth generation and living in Vancouver, Canada, Tammy doubts her Japanese-“ness.” She embodies the distance many members of the diaspora feel from their ancestral homeland and, consequently, from the cultural, linguistic, and social identities associated with it. That sense of disconnection is also shaped by the legacy of Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War and the trauma that reverberated through subsequent generations; a Japanese identity is what Tammy feels she lacks but her doppelganger seems to have.

Tears Burn to Ash is an incredibly sensory film. Bursts of impressionistic flashbacks through different histories are shown in black and white halftones, like faded images from old editions of daily newspapers. When Tammy picks up her doppelganger’s dropped keychain in the street, it makes her imagine memories in an alternative past, rendered through step-printing that recalls the dreamy romanticism of Wong Kar-Wai's films. Murao really makes the most of the neon lights illuminating the Tokyo streets; every shot of Tammy in the city is beautifully evocative of bustling nightlife, lit in reds, yellows, and blues, the city's overwhelming brightness standing in contrast to her inward, uncertain search for selfhood.

Murao has said that the story of Tears Burn to Ash was inspired by a time when she was working in Japan and met a student who appeared to be her doppelganger, and it was that  surreal moment that made her imagine an alternative reality where she was actually born in Japan, which is a thought that many others of the Japanese diaspora also carry with them. Rather than treating that fantasy as something that can be fulfilled, Tears Burn to Ash explores the emotional space between longing and acceptance. Tammy's search is not really for a grave, a language, or even a country, but for a version of herself that feels complete. By the film's end, Murao suggests that identity is not a lost object waiting to be found. It is something assembled from memory, history, and imagination. In its dreamy images and moments of uncanny recognition, Tears Burn to Ash captures the ache of diaspora: the feeling of being connected to a place that is both familiar and unknowable.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

Earworm, dir. Patrik Eklund

The Merriam-Webster definition of an earworm reads: a song or melody that keeps repeating in one's mind. Patrik Eklund’s live action horror short shares the same title, but takes on a much more literal interpretation of the phenomenon. Here we follow Ulph Degerfors who is tormented by the medical condition of earworm, which in his case comes in the form of Rednex's "Cotton Eye Joe".

What started as a small annoyance, a melody you can’t quite shake, slowly takes over his entire life. Hallucinations of strangers slipping in pieces of the lyrics into everyday conversation, compulsively singing the chorus out loud even in the most inappropriate of settings, unable to sleep with music ringing in his ears, it is making Ulph quickly spiral out of control. Desperate for a solution he goes to see a specialist, but even the atypical treatments seem futile towards this “class three” tune.

Horror of this sort plays on the absurdity of taking a simple idea and cranking it up to 11, effectively looping back over to comedy, and this is a perfect example of just that. From the familiar song choice and struggle, to the awkward situations our lead character finds themselves in and the hilarious remedy suggestions from the doctor, this had me slapping my knee with laughter.

In many ways this is elevated by a really solid and fairly extensive casting. We have Adam Lundgren who we saw last year in the body horror The Ugly Stepsister here playing the lead role of Ulph. Other familiar faces include the comedian / radio host Kodjo Akolor, TV actor Mikael Almqvist and the director / actor Maria Sid who is trying to keep a straight face while delivering medical advice on Cotton Eye Joe.

Everything in the production is set up to sell this as a horror; dim lighting and grayish yellow tinted frames, Ulph face slowly wearing down as he grows increasingly sleep deprived, an eerie soundtrack with some quick, jumpscare-esque, editing thrown in ever so often. And sure, maybe some of the more squeamish audience will find this a bit unnerving at times, but for myself this was just heaps of fun, and I really hope I can catch it again with an audience at some point in the near future.

Review by: Robin Hellgren