The 34th Florida Film Festival continues to exhibit carefully curated collections of live action, animated, and documentary shorts. As one of the handful of festivals to be Oscar-qualifying in all three shorts categories, the competition is fierce for the jury awards, and the non-competition shorts are no slouch either. It is not merely brochure padding, but an avenue for offbeat filmmakers and tastes. To me, this non-competition programming is where the Florida Film Festival truly shines, giving a platform to the most scrappy, transgressive, formally interesting, or all of the above.
The programmers at the Florida Film Festival claim they never show 1s, but how often do they show 5s?
Honorable Mentions:
– Make Me a Pizza (2024, dir. Talia Shea Levin)
– Spray Bottle (2025, dir. Jenna Kanell)
– Bunnyhood (2024, dir. Mansi Maheshwari)
– On Weary Wings Go By (2024, dir. Anu-Laura Tuttelberg)
– The Conscience Files (2025, dir. Brian Bolster)
- Have You Done It Yet? (2023, dir. Megan Brisco)
Nostalgic throwbacks that wear their influences on their sleeve are a shorts program fixture, but Have You Done It Yet? is more than a stylistic pastiche. Clips from a chaste sex ed tape are edited to seem as if the host is making cheeky double entendres, juxtaposed with sight gags such as a banana having a condom placed on it or a woman playing with coconuts. It holds two parallel thoughts: the sexualization of such basic bodily functions is ridiculous, and ignoring the inherent sexuality is just as ridiculous, a visual representation of how the mind wanders… even during (ahem) inappropriate times.
2. Don’t Talk to Strangers (2023, dir. Imanol Ortiz Lopez)
Midnight Shorts aims to shock, gross-out, or just plain confuse, but sometimes, a film that doesn’t seem like a good fit for any other program makes its way in. On its face, Don’t Talk to Strangers has a simple horror premise: a pedophile with a doll obsession. The real intrigue is structurally, where the narration of the little girl makes it clear that she is unaware of the abuse being done to her. She is simply playing with her “friend.” Though nothing shown in the film is too graphic (depending on your tolerance for eyeballs removed from their sockets), the suggestion of what happens outside the frame is just as terrifying. A workshop-turned-laboratory with doll parts strewn over the benches, blood going down a drain, and the sound of a saw lets you form your own conclusion. Once you realize the truth of her “friend,” it’s already too late. The girl’s objectification is made literal, transformed into a porcelain doll to sit at the front of a candy store.
3. The Devil is Busy (2024, dir. Greta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton)
The titular “devil” takes different meanings to each subject – to the protestors outside the abortion clinic, the devil is the people inside. Ironically, the title of the short is actually from a prayer said by an administrator at the clinic. To her, the devil is in every force preventing the women who visit from receiving proper reproductive care. Most viewers would think her religiosity contradicts her occupation, but there are few things closer to God than protecting the most vulnerable women from across the country. The style is pure documentary, walking us through an average day at the clinic. Though it seems the clinic serves many women daily (and it does), due to the restriction on abortion after six weeks, we see the workers deny many more in order to keep the operations legal. The acknowledgement of this gap makes it a minor miracle that they are able to serve any women at all. In the wake of Roe v Wade’s overturning (as well as America’s general political climate), abortion, reproductive rights, and female sexuality were a hot topic in the festival this year, but none were so matter-of-fact and direct as The Devil is Busy.
4. We Were the Scenery (2025, dir. Christopher Radcliffe)
One of my favorite documentaries of the festival wasn’t even in the documentaries programming, but the international showcase. Asian bodies in American film are often used as set dressing, but what if this scenery could talk? Apocalypse Now’s famous Vietnam scenes were actually filmed in the Philippines, with the Vietnamese extras hailing from refugee camps. The irony in a people from a country ravaged by America taking refuge in another country also attacked by America decades before being used in an American film production where the latter is used as a set piece meant to represent the former… Hollywood as a neocolonial power has never been so obvious. Overshadowed by stars like Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando, it’s easy for the extras to become obfuscated in the history of a film, especially one not particularly concerned with the ramifications beyond the trauma of white men. Taking descriptions of the people from the refugee camp identified by Hue Nguyen Che and Hoa Thi Che overlaid on their appearances in the film (the only good parts, according to them), Christopher Radcliffe invites us to imagine these extras as characters with lives of their own outside the film and outside the Vietnam War. An anecdote about Francis Ford Coppola: he ate mangoes like apples, biting into the skin instead of cutting it open.
5. A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers (2024, dir. Birdy Wei-Ting Hung)
Riffing on Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and Yang Chia-Yun’s The Lady Avenger, Birdy Wei-Ting Hung invites us to imagine a cinematic canon made by and defined by women. The beginning of the film is deceptive, luring you into believing it is yet another nostalgic high school romance, with warm tones and school uniforms with white shirts and black skirts. Like an apocryphal chapter of A Brighter Summer Day, we are again introduced to Ming, drinking watermelon juice and going to a matinee film. Upon entering the theater, this reverie is soon transformed into a nightmare, though for whom exactly is left to the viewer. We are only shown seemingly innocent scenes of snacking on watermelons, but the juice on her t-shirt is equated to blood. The connection between female sexuality and violence in rape-revenge is often meant as a dual titillation – shocking sex leads to shocking gore. Morally, these films seem almost cartoonishly feminist, even as rape-revenge primarily illustrates male fantasies of female brutalization. And yet, this brutalization is present in the highbrow, where Si’r murders Ming for her promiscuity in A Brighter Summer Day. Highlighting the female experience of viewing exploitation cinema, and, metatextually, one of the few female-directed exploitation films in The Lady Avenger, A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers argues that the sacred film canon and its trashy counterparts are not all that different from each other. What if there were an alternate universe where Ming murders Si’r? Is murdering her young love something to grieve, or a sign of liberation? The answers are held in a matinee screening of an exploitation film. (Not the film, but Birdy Wei-Ting Hung explored the same concept in another short film of the same name: A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers).
