2026 Palm Springs International Shortfest Review Roundup Part 2

Palm Springs International Shortfest always brings the heat with it's diverse array of short films. Here are another three reviews of short films that have really stuck out to us so far in Imago, The Liars and Everything Must Go.

Imago, dir. Ariel Zengotita

In Imago, a woman’s birthday takes a turn for the worse when her mother calls, demanding that her daughter come and tend to her needs. Ana’s (Didi Romero) best birthday party since childhood is followed up by an infuriating visit to her self-absorbed parent. Through inventive filmmaking and a deeply personal script, Imago effectively shows the frustration of growing up around a narcissist. 

Ana’s mother is introduced through a scene in which she calls Ana’s boyfriend when she can’t reach her daughter, then spends almost a minute scolding her daughter for not answering her phone and demanding her presence because of some mysterious ailment. As Ana enters her mother’s home, the location is like a horror set: dark, sticky, and claustrophobic. Ana’s mother berates her constantly while complaining about her own victimhood, repeatedly twisting Ana’s words against her. Ana herself is reduced to helplessness. Their conversation isn’t really a dialogue, but it’s also not a monologue. Rather, it’s maliciously one-sided, like a game Ana’s mother is trying to win, and Ana has decided not to play. 

Imago reinforces its ideas through repeated motifs of silverfish, a common household pest notorious for eating a lot and destroying property. Ana’s bedridden mother, who seemingly exists only to take, resembles a silverfish in more ways than one. Ana’s evening with her mother keeps her from watching Little Shop of Horrors with her boyfriend, a film about a man-eating plant that also constantly demands to be satisfied, proving itself an annoying, unbearable burden on lead character Seymour. Director Ariel Zengotita makes use of several split diopter shots, occasionally to a distracting degree. “Distracting,” of course, often being the point: even when the focus should be on Ana, her mother can’t help but demand attention. 

Zengotita writes from a Latino perspective, but Ana’s situation will resonate with anyone with a narcissistic parent. Ana’s feelings toward her mother read as fear, disgust, even hate, all complicated by an unshakeable sense of duty. Her mother, meanwhile, already knows all of Ana’s insecurities, playing on them to manipulate her daughter. “I’m your mother, I took care of you your entire life!” she says in the middle of a long screed, and the rest of her lines might as well just be variations on the same theme.

Review by: Jeff Bulmer

The Liars, dir. Eduardo Braun Costa

From the first seconds of The Liars (Los Mentirosos), the newcomer director Eduardo Braun Costa invites us into his particular world. A mother (Mariana Chaud) gets tired of her noisy children, Matias (Noah Roja) and Jaime (Filippo Carrozza). Therefore, the two boys leave their house and wander through the streets of Buenos Aires in the early 2000s. From the get-go, the director sets this unique story of childhood boredom, intriguing the audience through the journey of the young boys and their abilities to enjoy themselves in the world of adults. 

In this sense, the film gravitates towards the enormity of the Argentinian capital juxtaposed with the diminutive size of those individuals, who, despite their ages, feel too empowered to attempt to buy tickets to watch Me, Myself, and Irene in a theater. Obviously, the kids are too young to watch the Farrelly brothers' raunchy comedy; still, they attempt to convince strangers to buy them tickets. Throughout these interactions, Braun Costa introduces us to the older brother's ability to persuade others and achieve his wish. He is a natural talker, while his brother, Jaime, only practices the ideas that Matias planned. Inherently, somewhere down the line, they get caught in their threads of lies, leading Jaime to the office of the security chief. Thus, that event sets Matias on an odyssey to find a stranger to play his father and get his brother out of there. 

Despite an intricate, tight screenplay, the charm here lies in the construction of Buenos Aires in the early 2000s as an exercise in memory. It sets the chronology sometime in the last quarter of the century, historically, it is a recent moment; urbanistically, it is too long. Plenty of the buildings, institutions, and streets have changed or no longer exist. Hence, the precise directing of Braun Costa centers those boys in the immensity of a foregone era. Even surrounded by its melancholic nostalgia, the one weighing on the good years that passed by, the film centers itself as a piece produced in that timeframe. During the conversation between Matias and a street vendor (Esteban Bigliardi), Burger King is the background. It drives you to the masterpiece by Edward Yang, Yi Yi, which features an iconic scene in a McDonald's. Despite the differences between the fast-food chains, the newcomer Argentinian director nods to the Taiwanese classic with respect, attempting to encapsulate that era of Argentina similarly to how Yang framed Taipei. 

The thriving force here is the ability to capture the urban enormity of the Argentinian capital, centered on the camera work by Federico Lastra, who previously worked with Martin Rejtman, another visual similarity, especially in his iconic 2001 film, Silvia Prieto. Shot on an Arri Alexa Mini LF, Lastra achieves the texture of that era throughout the possibilities of digital filmmaking. Utilizing the tones of darker blue, especially in locations like the theater, and a pastel, worn-out light on the shopping mall, the cinematographer and the director emulate the moments of their childhoods, the infantile desire to explore the world, while facing the boredom of the day-to-day. When we are children, we want our days to go by fast, so we can grow up. Meanwhile, when we get older, we miss the boredom of the empty days. 

In this sense, mastering the directing of child actors and the quirkiness of the bodily acting by Bigliardi, as well as managing to capture the 2000s Buenos Aires, The Liars is a film that led us to the classics like Yi Yi due to its visual compositions, but still acknowledges the elements of the Argentinian reality. Most of all, it is a bold debut short by a filmmaker interested in capturing memory, despite its inherent melancholy.

Review by: Pedro Lima

Everything Must Go, dir. Tiffany So

Everything must go starts off with Reza (Saba Saghafi) wandering through his home in the middle of the night. Whether he is sleepwalking or sleep drunk having just woken up is not quite clear, but he unlocks his front door and heads out under the light of the starry sky, looking for his couch which appears to have been misplaced. Continuing down the street and into a diner, he spots Lucy (Nora Garrett) sitting at a table inside repeatedly putting box tape over it. She is similarly floating in a dreamlike state of in-between, and the two are oddly familiar with each other for two people having just met. After enjoying a half conversation, half monologue together, the pair head onwards to new nightly adventures.

As we go on there are snippets of a life together spilling out into the conversation. Loving moments like “we should kiss” blend with relational squabbles like “you always forget your keys”. The closer we get to daylight, the more apparent it becomes that they have shared a life together, one that is now coming to an end, and they are in their own ways dealing with the aftermath of the breakup, working through the clutter both physical and emotional.

Director Tiffany So has created a piece that makes you lean in and reflect. The framing of a dream or sleepwalking lends itself perfectly to a mood which is familiar yet inquisitive, where you can’t quite put your finger on where we are heading until we get there. The writing which was done together with the co-lead Saba Saghafi reads like poetry that was once a cohesive story, yet now it is cut into fragments and mixed with other snippets to a point where you can just about make out the underlying themes.

In this juxtaposition of the whole within itself we as viewers share the dreamlike feeling of something being not quite right, evoking the sensation you often get just before you wake up when reality and fantasy jumbles together. This buildup towards clarity hits hard in the final scenes where we get to see the real life equivalents of where these situations and words originate. Compounded by the angst you feel moving through the mess, is the sorrow of coming out the other end only finding yourself in the actual shambles of your life and what it has become.

A tagline I saw described the film with “What happens to the emotional clutter we accumulate in a relationship when it’s about to end?” and I found that to be incredibly striking. The framing of letting all these emotions out and mix together in the world of dreams is to me a perfect way to attempt an answer, because at the end of the day we are all just humans trying our best, and sometimes that means that everything must go.

Review by: Robin Hellgren