2026 Tribeca Film Festival Review Roundup Part 1 & Interview w/ Rare Birds' Lily Weisberg and Michael Bloom

Tribeca will always hold a special place in our heart here at ShortStick. It was the first festival we ever covered back in 2023, which now marks our 4th year of ShortStick and covering the fest. We kick off our coverage with reviews of four of our favourite shorts we have seen so far. Check below to see our thoughts as well as our interview with Lily Weisberg and Michael Bloom of Rare Birds.

Rare Birds, dir. Lily Weisberg

Rare Birds sets an immediate tone. The warm crackle of a jazz record. The glow of vintage lamps illuminating a small antique shop. It's incredible work by production designer Theo Webb, creating a space that feels both lived in and delicate. The titlecard, in gold cursive, adds an aesthetic cherry on top as we are interrupted by the delightfully delinquent Jerry dragging a clamouring ladder through the store. 

We soon find out through a conversation between Jerry and his boss Henry (who Jerry hilariously refers to as Sensei), that Jerry is in hot water. He is given an ultimatum: one more mistake at the shop and he is out of a job...at the only place in town he hasn’t been fired from yet.

It’s at this point we meet the goggle-wearing Candice (played by Zoe Ziegler of Janet Planet), who enters the store like a whirlwind, feeling like an accident waiting to happen as she juggles a ball up and down while walking through the store. It is through Zoe that this short shines the most. With her acting as a precocious preteen girl, her line delivery, and a punchy script by Michael Bloom (who gives her zingiest of lines like “They kicked me out of the house so they could fuck,") she is relentless in her pursuit as she tries to convince Jerry to play a game of basketball with her - like he did previously as her counsellor at summer camp. It is with this careful balance between the ultimatum, Candice's explosive and daring personality, and an antique shop full of fragility - including Jerry's prized bird in a glass - that a palpable tension is created and felt throughout the entire length of the short. 

Rare Birds is utterly charming and has the feel of discovery. It’s the sort of coming-of-age tale you might see blossom at film festivals like Sundance. In what feels like the crux of the short, it cleverly uses a story of Henry’s dog named Cha-Cha to bridge the existential dread of trying to figure out where your life is headed and what life looks like at the end of the road. It is a short that forces you step back and wonder about your life’s calling and what doors may be getting in the way. It reminds us that maybe sometimes we need to take some time, have a little fun and take some shots before life gets away from us.

On the latest episode of The ShortStick Podcast, Pedro sits down with Lily Weisberg and Michael Bloom, director and writer of Rare Birds. Listen as they discuss the origins of the short film, what it's like to have a World Premiere at Tribeca, how they cast star-in-the-making Zoe Ziegler and her chemistry with Tony Macht and how important Production Design and Coloring are to the cinematography of a film.

Review by Brandon MacMurray

Interview by Pedro Lima

A Crime Across Four Landscapes, dir. Aiden Weaver

The elaborately conceived A Crime Across Four Landscapes happens in the aftermath of a crime gone wrong, but what the crime was, who committed it, and how, is left up to the viewers to solve. North Carolina-raised director Aiden Weaver (whose senior thesis film She Follows Close Behind was shortlisted for a Student Academy Award in 2019) digs into small-town life, twisting the commonplace and familiar to find images that are haunting, surreal and profoundly unnerving.

Evoking the crepuscular grandeur of American photographer Gregory Crewdson’s richly evocative photographs, Weaver creates large-scale, cinematic, psychologically charged tableaux set in rural landscapes to create mood, atmosphere, and an open-ended narrative. Like a slideshow of a trip through the American South, each of the titular landscapes—the front yard of some shady-looking characters, a dangerous railway crossing, am abandoned barn, and a spooky forest clearing—is presented from a fixed viewpoint, beginning in media res, with shadowy figures entering and exiting, lifeless bodies and abandoned cars, ominous sounds and unidentified objects, all in the aftermath of some unexplained crime.

Weaver pans from one landscape to the next as if moving down a strip of film, and the landscapes evolve with each pass, changing from dark to light, empty to full, moving to still. On reaching the end of the filmstrip, we whip back to the beginning like the carriage on a mystery novelist’s typewriter returning to begin the next paragraph of the evolving story. A Crime Across Four Landscapes doesn’t point viewers toward any concrete answers, you have to follow the clues to find a solution yourself. There are hints, like each of the actors being credited, winkingly, as either “Cops” or “Robbers,” but most of the evidence is left unremarkably in plain sight, for eagle-eyed watchers to discover and unravel.

With each trip through Weaver’s four ornate wide-angle shots, small story details start to fill in: events, people, locations—but they leave bigger questions…Who’s that guy? What’s in the bag? What happened? This push and pull creates an indelible evocation of a zone between the everyday and the uncanny. Weaver creates expansive portraits of people lost in thought, isolated and inaccessible, both to each other and to the viewer; A Crime Across Four Landscapes is the type of film that really makes you work for it.

With only a few collaborators (Weaver himself is credited as director, story, executive producer, editor, post sound, and composer) A Crime Across Four Landscapes evokes the ominously dreamy suburbia of the films of David Lynch. With its intricately composed shots, immaculate lighting, and detailed story, A Crime Across Four Landscapes is the sort of work that is projected on the wall of an art gallery so you can search for details, a feature film’s worth of visual intrigue packed into a dense seven minutes.

Review by Joshua Hunt

Imprint, dir. Ran Jing

The film is set in the near-future where humanity has discovered a way to transfer knowledge between two people, which has turned intellect into a form of currency that can be bartered with. To “ensure clarity of identity” the expertise is not only given to the receiving individual, but it is simultaneously taken from the donor. The receiving end of this equation is young Ariel from an affluent family in the western world, and the giving end is 33 year old Han, an Asian immigrant who in return gets granted citizenship. After the transfer Ariel seems to instantly adapt to her new skillset, meanwhile her mother Flora starts to notice some unintended consequences of the procedure.

In many ways this reminded me of the series Black Mirror. It has a singular science fiction focus that balances the familiar setting of societal pressure during the formative years, both internal and external, with a fantastical yet convincing element of a huge leap forward in neuroscience. Further emphasizing this is the aspect of our capitalistic society that would undoubtedly find a way of profiting off the breakthrough at the cost of those in need. The immigrant framing perfectly mirrors the mentality far too common in our far right political scene today, even with its fictitious extremes.

Adding to the parallels is the meticulously crafted production design. From the warm, extravagant home of the western middle class home, to the cold brutalist setting of the procedure room, the scenery really fills in the gaps between the relatively sparse cast. The result of which is a film where you would be hard-pressed to find an ugly frame at any point of the 15 minute runtime.

Last but not least I want to call out the framing, and how it works together with the soundtrack to steer and underline our emotional response. In scenes where we feel uneasy the shots have awkward angles, like heavily zoomed in partially visible faces coupled with eerie noises. In scenes where we feel warmth there are wide angle, dimly lit shots with classical music playing softly in the background. This is nothing new of course, but it is well crafted throughout and given the short format it becomes even more paramount to quickly capture and maintain the viewers attention, exactly the way that writer director Ran Jing demonstrates in Imprint.

Review by: Robin Hellgren

Vultures, dir. Dian Weys

In the context of late capitalism, every economic activity leans toward social exploitation. The aggressiveness of the economic cycle causes individuals to operate in a system that exploits their labor to profit from poor conditions and the low payment for that specific activity. 

In Vultures, Director Dian Weys explores the dilemma of an immoral situation. In South Africa, a tow truck driver promptly arrives at the scene of an accident, right after it occurs. The protagonists takes advantage of the incapacity of a wounded individual, offering to tow the car and stealing the service from another contracted tow truck driver. During this accident, the driver is attempts to tow a Mercedes car and chaos ensues. The man in the car crash has suffered a spinal injury, his wife wants to flee the scene, a separate truck is about to explode, and the other contracted driver physically attempts to defend his contract. 

The initial frames set the tone: an aggressively dangerous universe where looters are stealing from the crashed cars before any authorities arrive. Under an approac of dark cinematography, the road feels bleak and exposed to impromptu dangers. Evidently, the film's title refers to individuals profiting from someone's misfortune, in this case, the tow truck drivers. Still, the construction of that logic is not as obvious as it might sound. The director introduces events that add more elements to those conflicts, especially the violence between the two competing tow truck drivers. The grifting of a client is the central priority for them, while the safety of the client is the secondary focus. Hence, the editing and writing work thrives on creating a fifteen-minute story that benefits from the multiple dilemmas that the central character must judge morally. 

Consequently, the script simulates a fire in a forest, where the character must control the fire’s focus, while it jumps from one place next to it. While convincing the Mercedes driver to allow him to tow their car, the tow truck driver must decide which of the injured drivers to help first: the paying one or the one exposed to more danger? In this sense, the film gravitates towards the nature of that event, the grifting from someone severely hurt and the instinct to call for the first responders to examine a possible spinal cord injury. Throughout its duration, the film heightens the tension through aggressive performances, a lack of humanity in the situation, and the imminent desire to secure the tow. The Edwin van der Walt character represents the exploited work responsible for grifting for profit. The triumph of his work lies in the desperation in his eyes, especially in the last scene, where he notices his choice resulted in another’s tragedy. Morally judging; he is aware of his job and the exploitation of people in pain, but he is also a part of an economic cycle that needs to bear profit. 

In this sense, Vultures is a bleak and dry film about gravitating towards death and playing with other people's plights. The result is an immensely tense and utterly intriguing film on the nature of the human being and morality. 

Review by Pedro Lima