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| The poster for Drew Marquardt's Act of War. |
American Drew Marquardt’s Act of War (2022) is the perfect no-budget student film. On the morning of 9/11, an accountant (David Theune) working at the World Trade Center’s insurance company discovers a loophole that can help them avoid bankruptcy due to payouts: if the attacks are declared an act of war, then military conflict voids the policy. For most of the 8-minute runtime he debates with an in-house lawyer (Johnny Ray Meeks) in a bare office with only a desk, two chairs, and a phone, first about whether to get their Washington lobbyist (Richardson Cisneros-Jones) to act on this information, then about who should call him. The moral weaseling and self-justifications are compellingly scripted and enthralling to watch. Ultimately, they decide to do it, the call is made, and we hear George W. Bush use the key phrase in his televised address to the nation. An opening title card elevates the proceedings: “This really happened.”
Brit Charlie Shackleton gives us another platonic ideal, this time of the video essay, in his Copycat (2015), which argues that Scream (1996) ripped off There’s Nothing Out There (1991), an obscure self-funded horror by Rolfe Kanefsky whose release got buried. Drawing on an audio interview with Kanefsky and accompanied by reference images and clips, the film makes a convincing case. At just 8 minutes, it’s an aesthetic achievement, too. Not only are the images and clips judiciously chosen, but the audio interview has been interwoven with Shackleton’s narration to achieve a kind of academic quotation effect, wherein you can hear inserted brackets, sentences being finished off by the narration, and at one point even the interview and narration overlapping when Shackleton makes the same point that Kanefsky does. The film literalizes the video essay.
We know that films often stitch together different shooting locations into one scene, most famously when Orson Welles had to do it for Othello (1951); American Sean Louis Kelly’s Tunnel (2011), cowritten with Spencer Fappiano and also 8 minutes by sheer coincidence, makes this process part of the plot. A photographer (Fappiano) goes into the daytime woods and comes across a tunnel that echoes his voice. But then another echo anticipates him. Intrigued, he enters the tunnel and discovers, on the other side, the same entrance. But something feels off. It’s basically the same alternate reality idea as in Coherence (2013), but instead of mixing up tokens and clothing, the film rearranges the shots of the photographer traveling through the woods, so that this path no longer leads to that river, and so on. We realize that we’re lost alongside him, because the opening sequence of shots was never reliable to begin with. Chilling.
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| A still from Sander Joon's Sierra. |
Estonian animator Sander Joon’s Sierra (2022) is our first entry longer than 8 minutes (it’s double that time), and it uses its time well. A surreal silent animated short about a boy who suffers because of his father’s race car obsession, it evokes the idyll of childhood for an only son, only to shatter it when the boy is stuffed into a car tire, replacing its spokes. The opening scenes of him pretending to be a greenhouse plant watered by his mom, or conversing with the local frogs from a tire swing hung on the only tree, showcase the child’s imagination; but his father, stirred up by television coverage of a local race (interposed black-and-white stop-motion footage shot by Heikki Joon, Sander’s father), weaponizes that imagination into a vision of glorious victory. Hijinks ensue, they lose (though the winning car and drivers are in flames, to no detriment of theirs), and the mother can’t get her son unstuck, but the ending offers the consoling thought that a family changed is still a family.
I saw all thirteen live-action shorts at the 2025 Taipei Film Festival, but only three are worth writing home about. First is Taiwanese Wang Yan-ping’s 15-minute Till Next Time (2024), inspired by when a member of the K-pop girl group Girls Generation quits, and written in response to a subsidy prompt. Xi (Teng Yun-xi) has finally worked her way up the fandom hierarchy to become an events staff member for her favorite boy band, only for her favorite member (Jake Hsu, who looks exactly like an East Asian boy band member) to jump off a building, caught on livestream (cinematography by Amber Hsiao Yi-fan). (Digression: why do boys have bands but girls only have “girl groups”? Neither gender in the current popular iteration plays instruments.) The film dives inside Xi’s mind as she seeks to come to grips with this tragedy via an imagined conversation with her idol. Parasocial relationships are all the rage these days, and it’s spellbinding to imagine what your idol might be like when recognizing you as an equal, not just as a fan or employee. Xi becomes privy to his depression while still allowing him to comfort her, and she achieves catharsis when he invites her to join him in doing the group’s trademark dance. What really sells the film for me is the detail. The song that they dance to is catchy, with music by the guitarist who goes by the stage name 95 (吳宗諺); and all the paraphernalia of fandom is here: the light-up wands, the tee-shirts, the tie-in drinks, the alarm clock featuring his voice, and so much more. It gives a strong sense of how deeply he and his band are part of Xi’s identity, adding stakes to what may strike some as a frivolous hobby. It’s anything but.
Taiwanese Wu Hung-yi’s 23-minute The Fishbowl Girl (2024), written by Bernd Chen, takes a clichéd story and adds a queer twist, though that doesn’t entirely save it from cliché. Lesbian Wei (Chen Ching) joins her college class on a graduation trip to Thailand, where she joins her male classmates on a trip to an erotic massage parlor. The fishbowl is where the sex workers are put on display – a similar scene appears near the end of Tár (2022). The first surprise, which we didn’t see in Tár, is that if the client is a woman, the masseuses can say no. The power reversal is carried further when we learn that Wei is a virgin (define that however you will), so her masseuse (Prapamonton Eiamchan) takes the lead in a deliberately awkward sex scene. But then the masseuse’s nipple piercing scratches Wei, forcing a pause while they clean the cut and have an honest, human conversation. This scene veers closest to cliché, namely the one about the prostitute with the heart of gold, and it’s not helped by Wei’s atypically good English, but it recovers by having the heart-to-heart spark an actually exciting sex scene, even more emotionally genuine than the one in Bound (1996). Such erotic solidarity could only have been achieved via a lesbian encounter. Yet the ending sequence of Wei walking the dawn streets in the aftermath of her epiphany (cinematography also by Amber Hsiao Yi-fan) strikes me as more of a post-coital glow.
The last festival short I want to highlight is Taiwanese Deborah Devyn Chuang’s Strawberry Shortcake (2024), a twisted psychoanalytical . . . let’s call it fantasy about high schooler Lolo (Heme Liao) and her feelings about her mother (Rou-Ming Huang). We start with an Ari Aster-esque scene of domestic bliss at the kitchen table over breakfast, but the mother’s smile, full of praise yet empty of warmth, suggests darker developments. As she brings out a strawberry-topped birthday cake (not a shortcake) and the sink overflows, we cut to an incestuous erotic scene featuring the cake, feet, a DV, and even some light cannibalism (if cannibalism can ever be called light). Then we get a scene of the same kitchen, now filthy beyond description, and Lolo bringing the birthday cake to her mother’s room, where she lies paralyzed and barely breathing. How can someone in this state eat cake, you ask? She can’t, but that doesn’t stop Lolo from stuffing it into her mouth, recreating another scene of love and death, from Amour (2012). The film’s sheer chutzpah in going to extremes left my jaw on the floor multiple times. Completing this deeply researched portrait of the female Oedipal complex are brief glimpses of photos of an absent father figure. As the end credits play, we get a completely typical school morning breakfast scene, with Lolo stuffing her face full of the cake as her mother calls from the car that she’s going to be late. What an accomplished 21 minutes.
Finally, American Liane Brandon’s black-and-white documentary short Betty Tells Her Story (1972) seems straightforward enough: the camera rolls on middle-aged Betty telling the story of the one and only time she bought an expensive dress that made her feel pretty, and of how she lost it. You can see that she’s told this story many times before, as she hits the highs and lows and includes key details without breaking her stride (aided by Brandon’s selective zooms). It’s a wonderful oral performance that I feel fewer and fewer people can deliver today. But then her story ends, and we still have half of this 20-minute film to go. The second half observes Betty as she tells her story again, and this is where things turn magical. Having just told it once before, Betty naturally seeks to avoid repetition, but as her performance has become so polished, this pushes her into the now-estranged territory of actual emotional introspection. We can see her picking up each moment and story beat and examining it anew in her mind. Different details are emphasized, and the triumph of a story well told morphs into ambivalence about the events themselves: the unique, sparkling experience, and the subsequent loss that somehow felt fated. What a strange and beautiful thing human memory is.
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