2026 Toronto International Film Festival Short Cuts Roundup: Part 3

Moongirl, dir Victor Boccard

The visually arresting Moongirl captivates in both its cinematography and story. Shot on 16mm film, Moongirl blends French and Japanese culture as it pulls from French poet Victor Hugo’s 1847 poem “demain dès l’aube” and Japanese myth “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya." 

The beautifully melancholic story starts off following an old man, a painter, on a journey. It then flashes back to an earlier time where a young woman and young man are walking through an icy landscape. The young woman describes a story she's writing and the two stories, that of the old man and young couple, pull closer and closer together. As the young woman describes the predicaments a girl from the moon is facing, she makes them sound as though they're her own. Fiction and reality blur as the emotion the woman and man display make everything seem real despite how illogical it may sound. 

Whether or not the woman is truly from the moon is clearly not the point. The director leaves the conclusion in the audience's hands. This devastating encounter changed one man's life forever and set it on a new path in which he would obsess over for years. He finally returns, years later, to that same place the original conversation took place. The cyclical nature of the story is pure kismet as the story ends in “the place of beginnings and ends."

Overall, Moongirl draws a beautiful line between myth and reality. It’s stunning and meticulously planned, picture perfect in every shot. There wasn’t a short during TIFF that quite took my breath away like this one and is one I will be thinking about for a long time.

Review by: Brandon MacMurray

Forgotten Spaceman, dir. Elham Ehsas

Forgotten Spaceman is a striking documentary that uses the story of an almost-forgotten astronaut to explore Afghanistan’s history, war, displacement, and relationship with the wider world. Rather than simply telling the story of a man who went into space, the film constantly moves between the past and the present, showing how easily extraordinary achievements can disappear beneath decades of political upheaval.

Director Elham Ehsas begins the documentary with a computer screen recording of old VHS footage, creating the feeling of clicking through fragments of a forgotten history. One important date appears: 19 August 1988, the date that Abdul Ahad Mohmand became the first and only Afghan to travel into space. The film points out the strange contrast between what people remember about Afghanistan and what they do not: people know about its wars and refugees, but few know about the Afghan who flew into space. Mohmand was taken by the Russians to the Mir space station at a time when Russia occupied Afghanistan, and Ehsas chooses to place his journey against the enormous human cost of that occupation, in which nearly one million people died.

Mohmand’s journey therefore becomes more than a scientific achievement. Sending an Afghan into space was also a political message, as Afghanistan was still within the Soviet sphere of influence, or, as the Ehsas implies, “still in their orbit.” Yet there is an unsettling contrast between Mohmand’s experience above Earth and what was happening below. While he was in the sky, chaos continued on the ground as the extraordinary journey happened at the same time as Afghanistan was experiencing violence, political instability, and displacement.

Visually, Forgotten Spaceman makes this contrast especially powerful. The film combines old news footage with cultural performances, Google Maps, drone-war camera footage, and other contemporary materials with lines of interlacing running across the video giving a retro feel to all the recordings. However, the documentary is not simply an archival film, as the old footage is continually viewed from the perspective of the present, making the documentary feel like an act of looking backwards and trying to recover something that has been forgotten.

One of the film’s most moving details is that Mohmand made Pashto the fourth language spoken in space. His greeting, “Salaam to the universe,” becomes symbolic of Afghanistan reaching beyond its borders, yet the film challenges the importance we attach to those borders: from space, we cannot see the lines separating countries and the borders that people fight and die for suddenly become invisible. The documentary also draws attention to how frequently Afghanistan’s national identity has changed. The Afghan flag has changed 15 times, while the memory of its astronaut has largely disappeared and this is one of the central ironies of Forgotten Spaceman, that a country can change its political identity again and again, while an extraordinary part of its history can simply be forgotten.

Ultimately, Forgotten Spaceman is not only about an astronaut. It is about memory, identity, and displacement. Mohmand’s journey into space contrasts sharply with the experience of the refugee, someone forced to cross borders rather than rise above them. From space, borders disappear; on Earth, they can determine whether someone has a home at all. By connecting the astronaut’s forgotten story to Afghanistan’s history of war and refugees, the film asks us to reconsider what gets remembered and what gets lost. Its most powerful achievement is showing that the story of one Afghan in space can also become a story about an entire country struggling to find its place on Earth.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

BID16, dirs. Mick Robertson, Margaret Rose

BID16, a heist-gone-wrong comedy, starts off with an entirely different type of heist as we meet protagonist Carmen as she attempts to break her brother Anthony out of work. The scene shows the type of person Carmen is. She is a smooth-talker, manipulative and demanding - all traits that we see continually throughout the film. The reason she needs her brother out of work soon becomes clear: she needs his help to perform a heist of her own belongings. It’s been months since she has paid the fees on her storage locker and now owes $1,500. Since the fine hasn’t been paid, her storage locker has been padlocked and her belongings are going to be auctioned off.

Carmen and Anthony are able to break the lock on the storage but things quickly go downhill when they are caught and thrown out. Paired with a hilarious script, actress Annie Luján uses unhinged physical acting (attempting to slam the soft closing door at the loan agency) and comedic hysteria (trapped inside the locker yelling instructions to her brother) to build her characters' arc and bring comedy to the unfortunate situation she has landed herself in. She plays the role perfectly as a sister who is a lot of fun to be around but creates chaos in every relationship in her life. 

Anthony, played by Christopher Rivera (who may be hard to recognize as one of the child actors from The Florida Project, now a young man), acts as a steady force and the perfect balanced counterweight to Annie’s madness. Annie’s desperation puts their familial relationship uneasy as she forces him to measure the cost of being a sibling. It’s the type of manipulation we saw from Annie’s character at the very beginning, now turned against her brother. 

After the chaos has settled, the final minute leaves you in a moment of dismay as you see Annie, now alone, dragging a mattress along the ground in a parking lot. The short leaves you with complicated feelings. It’s hard not to empathize with her for losing all her possessions, but at the same time, you realize her toxic traits have brought this on herself. In the end we're left to ponder, was her actions worth the cost, it if it means losing those you love at the same time? 

Review by: Brandon MacMurray

Splits in Two, dir. Simon Liu

Splits in Two uses 16mm and 35mm film to explore a difficult question: how can Hong Kong be represented? His work suggests that the answer is not simple, because the city cannot be reduced to one recognizable picture. Even so, this image of a busy, wealthy, and commercial city remains deeply connected to how Hong Kong is understood. Liu’s rough film texture challenges this polished image. The blurry, flashing, layered, and fragmented visuals in Liu’s city symphony interrupt what we normally expect to see, making the viewer pause and question the way Hong Kong is usually represented.

Director Simon Liu, born and raised in Hong Kong, is a filmmaker and artist whose work focuses on the changes happening in his home city. His films explore Hong Kong’s physical environment, politics, and the emotions connected to living there. Rather than presenting these subjects in a traditional documentary style, Liu experiments with film, photography, video installations, and live 16mm projections, editing moments without context into an unsteady rhythm that give Splits in Two a lomographic immediacy.

Since 2014, Liu has created a series of short experimental films during a period of major political and social change in Hong Kong. He combines different images and sounds to create layered and personal views of the city and changes the film during shooting, developing, and printing, creating unusual effects that interrupt the normal movement of time and space. From the first frames, Liu’s images literally split in two, images piled on top of each other, two shots at a time. This double exposure even recurs inside the frame, bodies in shadows, reflected in water, passing by mirrors, tessellating the city into repeating fractals. By combining his own memories with Hong Kong’s colonial past and its current political situation, Liu shows how the city is constantly changing.

Liu has said that Splits in Two was informed by traditional Cantonese ghost stories, and this eerie inspiration is felt in every ghostly frame. Liu overlays neon-soaked modern cityscapes with washed out memories of pastoral countrysides, Hong Kong’s present haunted by its own past. Splits in Two combines science fiction, urban imagery, and performance to portray Hong Kong’s underground creative and activist scenes. The film also looks at people’s historical and family ties to the land while showing how these communities have become quieter over time. As Hong Kong’s cultural identity continues to change and fade, the film reflects on this loss and explores the desire to find a sense of balance in a constantly changing environment.

Splits in Two does not try to define Hong Kong through one fixed representation. Instead, it creates strange and dreamlike worlds that reflect the unusual reality of the city itself. Liu’s personal experiences and images are closely connected to Hong Kong, allowing his experimental films to reveal a different side of the city. Beneath its bright and modern appearance, there are feelings of division, uncertainty, and lack of control. Sound also plays an important role in Splits in Two, mixing voices, music, background noise, and everyday sounds with the rough, damaged appearance of the film. Ominous science fiction sounds mix with the static of turning through a radio dial, like searching for a city that no longer exists. The flashing lights, shadows, and sounds work together to highlight the social and political conflicts within Hong Kong.

Liu’s use of old or reused film materials can be understood as a way of challenging the usual ways Hong Kong’s past and cinema have been represented. Much of his work since 2019 responds to the social and political changes that followed the protests. Rather than directly showing pain and trauma, as many other artists have done, Liu communicates these changes through more subtle and abstract images.

Liu’s films often avoid a clear beginning, middle, and end, instead, ordinary moments, memories, and political events are brought together without separation. This creates a more personal picture of what life in Hong Kong feels like during a period of change and by presenting these different experiences together, Liu shows that everyday life and political events are deeply connected. His approach also suggests that experimental art can be a way of expressing political ideas without having to state them directly.

Review by: Joshua Hunt