The 21st edition of Oscar Qualifying short film festival HollyShorts—a golden ticket for filmmakers offering exposure, awards and career momentum—opens its doors on 7th August for 10 spectacular days of cinema. Under the iconic, hallowed eaves of the Hollywood TCL Chinese Theatres, the festival will screen a staggering 427 short films from across the globe. Renowned for spotlighting emerging talent—such as the Oscar-winning I Am Not a Robot, which screened last year—and delivering a programme packed with practical insights, HollyShorts truly has it all. After highlighting our ten must-see shorts for 2023’s edition, Directors Notes has been granted an exclusive preview of this year’s lineup and today we’re sharing our 10 favourites. With a truly commendable smorgasbord of talent playing, including several titles you’ll have already seen featured in DN interviews such as Stomach Bug, Rock Paper Scissors, Everyone Does It and Rocket Fuel, to name a few, there is literally something for everybody regardless of taste in this year’s offerings. While we wouldn’t say a particular pattern surfaced when submerging ourselves in HollyShorts’ rich programme, the following 10 picks bring you compelling reflections of grief, the mess and agony of family, mental illness, death-defying thrill seeking and everything that lurks in between, and is the perfect touchstone to guide you through the festival’s bountiful offerings.
1:10 – Sinan Taner
From the very start, I could feel the simmering tension pulsating out of Sinan Taner’s graduation short 1:10. His brilliantly executed film marks an exciting future for the director as he brings us a tale of adults behaving badly in front of the very young minds they are supposed to be moulding. The camera work is instantly striking, acting as an omnipresent eye in the sky observer, with sharp editing vociferously bringing the unfolding drama to an unexpected breaking point.
Loss – Sivan Levy Zakin
A coming-of-age tale set against the striking, stark beauty of the Israeli desert, Sivan Levy Zakin’s Loss seamlessly brought me right back to those heady days of adolescence where nothing makes sense, the world is against you, and emotions seem overwhelming. Hazy colour-washed visuals capture the melancholy engulfing a nine-year-old girl who suddenly loses all sense of belonging and retreats into her memories to find sanctuary.
Synthesize Me – Bear Damen
After premiering at SXSW, Bear Damen’s heartbreaking, emotionally charged Synthesize Me is a visceral short imbued with loss and longing. Damen explores the chasms of grief through the eyes of a father and his young daughter who finds herself lost in her mother’s music studio, attempting to reconnect whilst unwittingly causing widespread chaos as a power cut blows through their small town.
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Voices from the Abyss – Irving Serrano & Victor Rejón
As a (slightly obsessive) viewer of the Red Bull Cliff Diving Series, Voices from the Abyss gave me the cinematic beauty and ritualistic practices I crave from those spectacular heights and imposing rock faces. Irving Serrano and Victor Rejón’s rich, penetrating black and white visuals—shot from the very precipice from which the divers jump—perfectly capture the beauty and the danger experienced by the Quebrada Cliff Divers in Acapulco. This short doc is an homage to their bravery and community with poetic testimonies and words, matched only by their welcome diversity as they recount their passion and worship of their compulsive plunges into a roiling sea.
Shithead – Riley Donigan
If a body horror doesn’t make you baulk away from the screen whilst your eyes are concurrently glued to it, then it isn’t doing its job properly. Riley Donigan’s absurdist body horror Shithead imagines a bizarre world where a man literally has shit for brains, but beneath the laughable premise is a deep dive into mental illness, loneliness and the uncanny ability we have of looking the other way when something makes us feel particularly uncomfortable.
Candy Bar – Nash Edgerton
I love nothing more than being utterly surprised by a short film, which comedy Candy Bar from Nash Edgerton—the director of one of DN’s longstanding favourite shorts, Spider and member of filmmaking powerhouse Blue-Tongue Films—did with simple but highly effective and delightful sincerity. Featuring actor and writer Damon Herriman as a hapless victim of a young cinema goer’s black deceit, I gleefully laughed and celebrated the ingenuity of a very unsavoury but epic twist.
Bloody Mess – Megan Wennberg
I find stop motion fascinating and awe-inspiring due to the time and love the creators have for their craft and I immediately found myself captivated by Megan Wennberg’s animated short doc Bloody Mess. Featuring a pearl-adorned, very vocal and long-suffering uterus who has to go through a series of medical and psychological battles, Wennberg has found a manner in which to explore her own struggles with a sincerity that live action could never replicate.
Unholy – Daisy Friedman
Family get togethers are often too much to handle both physically and mentally, but in Unholy (a film which also featured in our Sundance Best of Fest back in January), filmmaker Daisy Friedman—whose black and white queer couple drama As You Are made our 2023 NFFTY list—brings us a truly overbearing gathering where a young adult battles a complex disorder, a pushy grandmother, undigestible food and religious reckoning. Made from a place of personal experience and as an ode to those living with disabilities and chronic illnesses, Unholy is a prime example of the evocative on-screen representation I am always thrilled to see.
Hero – Andrew Cutcliffe
I watched Hero, then immediately went back and watched it a further two times. In an impressively short run time of just over four minutes, Andrew Cutcliffe made me sigh in frustration, hold onto my desk, and inadvertently gasp in horror and shock at what just unravelled in front of me. This film simply solidified my already ingrained love and respect for the short format, and I don’t want to ruin a single moment of it for you.
The Second Time Around – Jack Howard
Thanks to Jack Howard, beef milk is now a welcome addition to my lexicon and will remind me of the vast breadth of emotions I experienced watching his debut sci-fi short, The Second Time Around. I often find myself with his voice in my ears due to the Kermode On Film podcast, and it was truly a delight to see his beautiful writing through the immersive performances in this film.
You can find more DN film festival favourites in our Best of Fest collections.
