In the coming weeks, I will be exploring Egypt, so here's a taste from last year's trip.

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Stay with me, and by extension, with Sister!, a short film that I’ve come to adore, but which I recognize could be a hard sell for loyal S/W viewers. Not because of its lack of quality, of course, but because its sensibility is different in many ways from our typical featured short.

The story of a woman who pops in unexpectedly on her unsuspecting Brooklyn-based “sibling” (their moms supposedly share a sperm donor), Sister! is a fun, transgressive, and over-the-top queer comedy written by its stars, up-and-coming talents Julia Wendt and Tessa Belle, and is an unapologetic showcase for the duo’s comedic stylings.

So far so good, but, and perhaps I am projecting here, I was fairly resistant to the film early in my initial viewing. Partly, I recognize we’re chauvinistic towards directors, and this is, resolutely, a writer/performer film. We’ve sat through enough LA actor-driven web series to be trepidatious of this. Directed by John Onieal, notable as the creator of Grindr’s first scripted show, his direction is quite deft, but, between the film’s limited locations and the rapid pace of its joke delivery, the short presents more like a single-camera sitcom than an auteurist work. Onieal’s contributions are necessary but subtle, managing the reservoir of written comedy in a collaborative process that “involved a lot of riffing with each other, comedians, and department heads so to ensure that what we were making resonated,” and making sure the camera platformed the strengths of his stars.

Fortunately, Wendt and Belle deliver star turns. Part of the roughness of the early going is that Wendt is left to establish the initial tone by playing off of a deadpan Asha Ward, but the transfemme Wendt’s line delivery is very affected and can come off as stilted. However, like a stray note brought into harmony, Belle’s entrance into the film soon snaps the dynamic into place, and their chemistry is dynamic.

It’s also relentless. The pair’s comedy style, which is progressive, but playfully mocks the excesses and contradictions of Gen-Z wokeness in subject, is basically all-joke, all-the-time in practice. It’s frankly remarkable—the film has almost no standard exposition, no calm, sincere moments, it’s pretty much 13-minutes straight of jokes.

Naturally, your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of these—comedy is hard! But a ton of them land for me, and the great thing about a high-joke tempo is that if one falls flat, another is right on its heels. The production showed up to the shoot with a huge list of ALT jokes and planned for extensive space to improvise on set, so the team had a huge surplus of material in the edit to pick what was hitting the best, and it shows.

Even if the effectiveness of the comedy is questionable for you, I argue that it is deserving of admiration. Comedy is criminally underrepresented in shorts, and especially this sort of comedy, which is not ironic, surreal, or absurdist, but focused on jokes. Wendt and Belle blasting jokes to set up a joke which delivers a joke punchline is the closest I’ve seen to a short reaching something like classic 30 Rock, which I perceive as a gold standard. That the film also has heart is almost a miracle. In the midst of their bludgeoning, escalatingly hysterical final act, the film’s producer, Jeremy Truong, challenged the production to “find moments of emotional truth,” and while the “sisters’” ultimate catharsis and bonding is telegraphed, it genuinely lands.

A feature at last year’s Tribeca Festival, we’re pleased to present the online premiere of Sister! Take advantage of this opportunity to watch a very funny short, which we expect to be a launchpad for this impressive team, especially Wendt and Belle. 

The journey may be lengthy, but it's rewarded with a fantastic Chinese meal in Egypt at China Red restaurant.

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There is something about the locker – or changing – room that consistently proves fertile ground for storytelling. Perhaps it is a space defined by vulnerability, both physical and psychological, where social dynamics are heightened and identities are negotiated. In Ce qui appartient à César (English title: Changing Rooms), the César-nominated short by Violette Gitton, this environment becomes both a site where toxic masculinity festers and a space in which its young protagonist begins to process his emotions and mature.

Changing Rooms immediately immerses the viewer in its world, opening within the charged atmosphere of a fencing class. Our first clear encounter with 12-year-old César, the film’s lead character, sees him strutting towards the camera wearing only trousers and a chest protector designed for female fencers. As one of the boys is encouraged to “strip off,” César introduces the so-called “dick-o-meter,” a ruler used to measure the body part referenced in the device’s name, signalling early on the film’s engagement with performative masculinity and peer pressure.

Billie Blain (L) and Marius Plard stars as siblings in Changing Rooms

While this burgeoning toxic masculinity dominates the film’s opening moments and helps establish César’s social environment, Gitton soon shifts tone. A more vulnerable version of the boy is soon revealed as he addresses a video camera, marking a pivotal transition. From this point – particularly following the disclosure of his sister’s assault – the film develops into a layered exploration of adolescence, responsibility, and emotional confusion.

Gitton has stated that she hoped the film would interrogate “the way boys are confronted with violence and expectations about masculinity,” and this intention is clearly reflected in her narrative approach. By presenting the story through César’s perspective, she avoids depicting the assault itself, instead focusing on the internal turmoil of a young boy grappling with how to respond. This choice not only lends the film a distinctive perspective but arguably results in a more resonant and considered portrayal than a more direct representation might have achieved.

“I could see that something intense and confusing was happening inside him”

As is often the case with stories of this nature, the film is, unfortunately, rooted in personal experience. “I was sexually assaulted when I was 14, and I was struck by the reaction of my younger brother,” Gitton explains. “I could see that something intense and confusing was happening inside him.” Reflecting on later conversations, she notes that he described it as “strange” to grow up as a boy while also recognising that “men (like he was) could also represent a threat.”

Despite this traumatic event behind the film’s conception, Changing Rooms ultimately adopts a constructive and forward-looking perspective. Gitton emphasises that her intention was not to recreate the trauma itself, but to tell a story “that could feel useful for today’s younger generations,” adding that she wanted to “create something that young people could recognize themselves in, without simplifying their emotions or their contradictions.” An intention that’s especially significant in the context of adolescence, offering a nuanced reflection on the complex and often conflicting emotions young people must navigate as they grow.

What facts about your state’s history should be strongly told?

When a man has a country in which he was born… it becomes sacred to his heart, and it is hard to leave it.” (Seminole talks excerpt –1817-1842)

Our 2026 springtime roadtrip began in Tallahassee, the capitol city of the “Sunshine State.” This would be the first time that we actually spent more than one day in Tallahassee. So Ruth and I decided to visit Florida State University for a brief look around that would not take that much effort after our long drive yesterday. As it turned out, we found out at the visitor center that most of the campus would be shut down due to spring break with students gone and traffic minimal. That included the closure of their renowned Museum of Fine Arts, which I was most looking forward to see. So with plan B  in mind, we instead walked around the football stadium followed by a brief visit to the Student Union.

But what struck me most on this eerily quiet morning visit was the obvious presence of the Seminole Indian symbol everywhere I looked. These observations led me to  recall flashbacks to my former time as a history teacher when I briefly taught a few pages of textbook reference about the Seminole wars that took place in Florida during the early 19th century. For the facts noted then was that this was a tragic time in American History, which ultimately resulted in mass relocation of Native American tribes from Florida  along the “Trail of Tears” route to what is now as the state of Oklahoma. 

So as I resume my curious explorations of America as a road tripper again, I remind myself how such travels have a way of changing how history feels. For upon further reflection about this FSU visit,  I realize that the ubiquitous Seminole Indian imagery along banners , paintings, and statues I saw then  felt much deeper than an enthusiastic school spirit at the time. For these symbols stood for an unconquered people who’s loving spirit for their sacred land lives on today.

Anticipating another visit to the Grand Egyptian Museum, excited to see the difference of a year in its development.

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Today we marvel at the sailing felucca on the Nile, experiencing a rich blend of history and serenity

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What places you go to help you slow down and relax?

“Nourishing yourself in a way that helps you blossom in the direction you want to go is attainable, and you are worth the effort.” (Deborah Day)

Whenever I cross over the Lake Pontchartrain causeway into greater New Orleans,  I have entered what is so called the “Big Easy.” For this cosmopolitan city has acquired a reputation for its free flowing fun atmosphere of music, food, and constant motion indulgence takings place around Bourbon Street and nearby areas downtown. On previous visits,  I particularly enjoyed live music played along Frenchman Street, which although a little less crowded still can be a quite a raucous occasion. I also seem to have been drawn to that those energizing walks  along the Mississippi River shoreline  or hopping on a historic street car to gaze at old oak tree lined  streets enveloping  19th century antebellum homes  in the Garden District.

But on this particular vacation, I took a different point of view about how to replace New Orleans with a comparably fun experience on a smaller scale. Thus  we discovered quaint Mandeville and Albita Springs  along the northwest coast of Lake Pontchartrain as suitable replacement stopovers pictures  for two days on our  road trip. In particular, I took notice of the presence of live music being played Saturday night featuring several bands of interest from a variety of musical styles. I mean why put up with the New Orleans crowds on Saturday night when top notch entertainment like Tuba Skinny would take place a couple miles from our hotel at the intimate setting of Albita Springs Town Hall? As we’d have plenty of “time to kill “ in the morning and afternoon before the concert, we’d  also explore  the relatively pristine shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain at Fountainbleu State Park. Just water, sky and open space to slow down seemed the right formula at the time.

So travel for me I realize is not always about going to the places that I’ve heard the most about. No I didn’t indulge in New Orleans fun as I normally do. But in opting for the north shore Lake Pontchartrain vicinity to explore instead, I realized that this alternatively quieter version of “Big Easy” logically was the best choice at the time. 

In March 2020, during the first month of COVID-19 lockdowns, Greece’s SOS Line 15900 – a national service supporting those affected by gender-based violence – recorded 325 calls, a 370% increase from the 69 calls received in the same month the previous year. Confronted by this sharp rise in violence in her home country, Greek writer-director Markela Kontaratou turned to filmmaking as a means of processing and expressing her response. The result is Scorched Earth, a London Film School graduation project that went on to screen at the Locarno Film Festival.

“The film was conceived as a Neo-Noir/Giallo that subverts the trope of a male voyeur”

Drawing on the visual and tonal traditions of Neo-Noir and Giallo, Scorched Earth is set in a sun-drenched Greek seaside town. It follows Stela, who returns home to focus on her studies, only to find herself increasingly disturbed by the presence of her abusive neighbour. As his violence towards his partner escalates, Stela becomes entangled in a possible crime, prompting her to take action seek out the truth.

Kontaratou’s intention with Scorched Earth is not only to foreground the ongoing realities of gender-based violence, but also to interrogate the ways in which such incidents are often mediated and sensationalised. As she suggests, the film critiques how violence is transformed into a “serialized, grotesque sensation” within media culture. To explore this, she turns to genre, incorporating elements of horror and thriller in order to “create a world that reflects the way in which femininities are treated in real life and in film.”

“Artificial was also our choice of purple moonlight, creating a surreal, mysterious atmosphere, connecting to the character of Vicky who also wears purple”, director Kontaratou discussing the production

With regards to production, the film adopts a distinctive aesthetic. Shot on 16mm, with a pronounced purple hue in its night sequences, Scorched Earth embraces a stylised visual language that introduces a layer of artificiality to an otherwise grounded subject. For Kontaratou, this is a deliberate strategy: “I tried to portray the female experience of the male gaze by putting the audience in the place of being conscious that they are watching something constructed.” Techniques such as “dirty” point-of-view shots, zooms, and expressive camera movements work to unsettle the viewer, continually suggesting the presence of something hidden within the frame.

The result is a deliberately voyeuristic experience, in which both the protagonist and the audience occupy a position of uneasy spectatorship. Kontaratou acknowledges that the film resists narrative closure, offering more questions than answers. As she explains, the intention is for viewers to recognise that these narrative decisions were “plot points rather than plot holes,” inviting reflection rather than resolution. The core takeaway from Scorched Earth is a persistent and troubling question: “why we are all so often silent onlookers when faced with situations of gendered violence?”

How would you best handle a long lasting term crisis in your life?

“…Now, gentle flags that flutter on the graves

Recall the pain in blood where armies fell

And multitudes of tombstones line the hills

As somber spirits cast a ghostly spell”…

(Barry Middleton – impressions of Vicksburg battle)

As I set foot in Vicksburg on this road trip, I came across the above quote. Reading these words , it was easy to picture Vicksburg as a place that has seemed to stand still since since its iconic Civil War battle in 1863. Know then I imagined that Vicksburg’s setting straddling high cliffs above the Mississippi River was not the right place for a quick war resolution as time became the ultimate weapon itself. For what happened here was endurance under pressure as both Union and Confederate soldier losses mounted for over forty seven days.

So that’s what makes Vicksburg feel uncomfortably relevant today. So many conflicts nowadays don’t resolve. They linger, expand and settle into something prolonged where the question is no longer who wins quickly but rather how long can it go on? Consider, for example, the difficult terrain that the Vicksburg siege conflict was fought on. How much has war changed since then? Like a chess game, the advancing militia seeks to take advantage of strategic place positioning of troops in order to overwhelm the enemy. But that doesn’t always work so well for as in chess a stalemate often occurs when there’s no clear winner or loser in this battle . Meanwhile innocent people caught behind the scenes can only watch the bombs fall on their precious land.

So  Vicksburg’s bloody long history should not be underestimated. Inciting war in the Middle East now may seem to be a glamorous choice on the surface for ego driven power holders. But is it worth risking prolonged crisis which might threaten to erupt into a worldwide crisis?  We must learn to work out our problems peacefully together to sustain the ultimate survival of our human species. Perhaps  my travels might help in some way to accomplish that task. 

Margarethe 89 was a bolt out of the blue during the 2023 festival season. Its mature spy-thriller plot line and grounded, historical realism felt like a novel pairing for a stylish, adult-focused animation, making the film an instant splash at spots like Director’s Fortnight, Annecy, and Curtas Vila do Conde. Animation is often pigeon-holed as a medium for the fantastic—a way to represent the unreal via strange worlds and creatures or represent interiority through dreams and visions, but Margarethe 89 instead utilizes the control inherent in animation to recreate for viewers the stifling surveillance state of the East German Stasi, to wonderfully paranoid and claustrophobic effect.

Directed by Lucas Malbrun, based on a script co-written with his frequent collaborator, Marie Larrivé, the filmmaker was born in Munich in 1990, and grew up in a reunited Germany where “strange revelations about this vanished country were omnipresent.” Inspired by the regime’s tactic of “Zersetzung” or “dissolution,” he sought to transpose the story of Gretchen from Goethe’s Faust to a new context. In an interview with Vimeo Staff Picks for the short’s online premiere, he notes that, “Gretchen’s love for Faust is based on a misunderstanding: he comes across as a young and righteous man, but is in fact an old man in pact with the devil…exploring the figure of the manipulative male, himself under the influence of third party…was compelling to me.”

Heinrich is that manipulative male, but Malbrun sees him as a victim of the regime, too. The film intriguingly begins on a surreal note with a parade where, instead of figures from pop culture – Snoopy, or Mickey, and the like – Heinrich witnesses a giant floating bust of Karl Marx. Malbrun is emphasizing the totalizing nature of ideology and how indoctrination begins very young. The film’s visual look reinforces this concept of arrested development, deploying bright colors in the images, added to the film by the use of normal, school-standard felt-tip pens.

Revolution is currently in the air in our media, as the best TV show of recent memory served as an epic chronicle of a nascent resistance movement, while the recently crowned Best Picture winner is about what we build once revolutionary fires burn out. The tragedy of Margarethe 89 is a nice complement to this moment, and shows how animation can be a strength within mainstream genres and storytelling modes. I’ve often noted that period pieces, despite their popularity in features and television, are tough for short films to execute. Margarethe 89, which evokes the popular German series Deutschland 83 via its title, feeds audience appetites for this sort of mainstream genre, with the level of sophistication and style they are accustomed to. It’s another big swing for the French production company, Eddy, which, via pieces like this, Larrivé and Malbrun’s prior film Noir-Soleil, or 2018 S/W selection, Le Mans 1955, is leading the way in showing how animation can tackle genres associated with live-action in sober, but artistically progressive fashion.

As children, our parents can feel like the centre of our world – figures of stability and/or authority who are easily placed on a pedestal. Inevitably, however, there comes a moment when that perception begins to shift, and we start to recognise them as flawed, complex individuals, no less uncertain than we are. It is this quiet but profound transition that Dovydas Drakšas captures with sensitivity and restraint in his London Film School short, Praeis (It’ll Pass) – a film that had its World Premiere in the La Cinef section of Cannes in 2025.

A film focused on perception – how we see ourselves, how we interpret others, and how we are, in turn, perceived – Praeis unfolds with a contemplative rhythm, anchored by two finely judged performances. Ieva Kaniušaitė plays Ada, a daughter beginning to reassess both her father and her place in the world, while Šarūnas Puidokas brings a quiet vulnerability to the role of her father. At 27-minutes long, the film sits at the longer end of the short film spectrum, yet its duration feels justified, largely due to the emotional authenticity these performances sustain throughout.

Šarūnas Puidokas stars as a cigarette smuggler and father at a crossroads in his life.

This extended runtime affords the film the space to observe rather than follow its character, allowing the audience to gradually become immersed in their emotional terrain. While strained parent–child relationships are a familiar narrative framework, Drakšas approaches the material with a notable degree of empathy and nuance. Rather than privileging one perspective over the other, he presents both father and daughter as fully realized individuals, each navigating their own limitations, expectations, and emotional blind spots. The result is a relationship that feels lived-in and recognizably human, avoiding the reductive tendencies that often accompany such stories.

From a programming perspective, articulating precisely what distinguishes a film can sometimes prove elusive. While Praeis may not immediately announce itself through high-concept storytelling or formal experimentation, there is a quiet assurance in Drakšas’ direction that suggests a filmmaker with a clear and confident voice. This quality – subtle, but pervasive – manifests in the film’s pacing, its performances, and its willingness to sit with emotional ambiguity. It is, perhaps, less about what the film does, and more about how assuredly it does it.

When Ryan Coogler’s Sinners introduces a klansman and a vampire in the same frame, the audience is left with a choice: cower in terror or snicker at the absurdity. I chose the latter. Click for my take from a writer's POV!

Grief is a strange thing. It can lie dormant for years, settling beneath the surface, only to rise again when you least expect it. A sound, a place, a smell – and suddenly it spills over, pulling you back into something you thought you had long since made peace with. We’re told that time softens the sharp edges of heartache, that memories become easier to carry, but more often than not they simply shift and distort, changing shape as they move through us. And it’s within that fluid, unpredictable space that Telsche finds its flow.

Directed by Sophie Colfer and Ala Nunu (Ahead), Telsche is a conceptual short that conveys the strange, lingering ache of loss and nostalgia in a way that hits close to home, even though its storytelling is abstract rather than literal. In just eight-minutes it makes this weight of memory feel tangible without spelling it out, and the animation is a thing of beauty: shapes and colours change and shimmer, sometimes solid, sometimes fluid, so that a single blue can feel like water one moment and a yawning void the next. Every design choice feels carefully considered, and everything comes together to make the story feel both personal and universal. It’s easy to see why this beautifully rendered meditation on grief has already made waves at Annecy, Anima and more.

“We felt that the clean 2D digital style worked best to emphasise the bleak contrasts of this world” – Colfer & Nunu discussing their aesthetic

Telsche follows a young girl chasing a memory of her mother. The story is minimal and dreamlike, loosely charting her journey as she notices a stone carved with her mother’s face at home, rushes outside to the salt flats, and sees her vanish into a blue void. Determined to follow, she dives into dark, twisting tunnels underground, uncovering a hidden world that brings her closer to a reunion. 

The story is actually rooted in Colfer’s own memories. After moving back to Hong Kong, where she was born and grew up, she was reunited with the vast sea of her youth and the memories of her family, especially her mother, a Japanese diver, and her father, an English sailor. “One of her earliest memories with her mother was of watching pearl divers in Japan”, the directors shared with S/W.“They would dip and descend in their white uniforms, without tanks of air, and collect pearls from the depths. These concepts of memory and forgetting therefore permeate the entire film, reflected visually in the contrast between light and dark and in the choice of still, wide shots, wherein the subjects are barely visible, on the verge of being seen but as of yet unremembered.” 

But the film doesn’t rely on distance alone. It counterbalances these expansive compositions with close-ups that pull us into Telsche’s interior world, creating a push and pull between detachment and intimacy. While the wide shots place her within an overwhelming expanse, emphasising her smallness and isolation, the tighter framing invites us to linger with her, to feel the weight of what she carries. 

“Our collaboration took (and continues to take) place across a distance spanning thousands of kilometres and an eight-hour time difference” – the directorial duo discuss working together

Pulling back, beyond these compositional choices, there’s something to be said about the sheer level of craft on display here. What makes Telsche so striking is just how much care and precision sits behind its apparent simplicity. This is anything but effortless. Every scene carries the weight of countless hours of animating frame by frame, of trial and error and a good helping of raw talent, and you can feel it in the way the animation moves and breathes. The limited colour palette, rather than restricting the film, does the opposite. It forces a kind of creative discipline that pays off, pushing the animators to find depth, contrast and atmosphere in every scene. Shapes and colours become more than stylistic choices too – they act as storytelling tools in their own right, continually reshaping the space around the character. Paired with the eerie, echoing sound design, which seems to stretch and bend the space even further, the result is deeply immersive. It’s a film that understands exactly how to use its tools, and never wastes a single one.

And when it ends, Telsche doesn’t so much conclude as drift – leaving behind an impression rather than an answer. Like grief, it resists being pinned down, instead settling somewhere deeper, where feeling outlasts understanding.

How do you view the American Indian experience from past to present?

“Certain things capture your eye but pursue only that which captures your heart. “ (Choctaw Indian proverb)

The way I see it, it’s one side to read about the American Indian  experience throughout history by way of textbook facts about the various tribes existing in America. But it’s another matter to see up close the real Native American experience through through real life artifacts and other visual evidence of their actual living conditions from the past to now.  Simply put, as a past history teacher, my students memorized dates and event facts about Native Americans for mandatory testing purposes,  but in doing so they did not feel the real emotional story about the triumphs and tragedies of these people. Take for example the historic time in the early 19th century when the Choctaw were one of several civilized tribes to be forcibly removed by the U.S federal government from  their ancestral homeland in the southeastern lands of early America. In retrospect, why didn’t I adapt my curriculum to help students make personal connections to the hardships Indians faced in journeying thousands of miles on foot along the  famed “Trail of Tears” route to what would later become  the state of Oklahoma?

Take the Choctaw Indian nation in particular then as a teachable playback for this blog. For on our visit to the modernistic Choctaw Cultural Center in Durant, Oklahoma on day seven of our road trip, I of course took  academic interest in key historic events  concerning this Choctaw spanning several centuries of broken treaties, forced homeland movements and legal attempts to disband the Choctaw’s politically and socially as a united  nation. Yet it was quite revealing that I also found a distinct emotional connection to colorfully  designed artwork, symbolic emblems and banners along with some powerfully expressive  human and animal figures representative of Choctaw culture. See examples of these images in my photo set below.

Looking more to the present, it’s clear to me that the Choctaw nation recovered from those tragedies by reestablishing full territory rights and now remain strong and resilient as a fully functioning and united self government for its living residents today. Thus let history be retold in our education system with the positive Choctaw experience in mind to inspire more respect for our  Native American tribes. 

What’s your favorite road “off the beaten track?”

“Look for chances to take the less-traveled roads. There are no wrong turns.” — Susan Magsam

There are many fascinating towns scattered along the vanishing highway known as Route 66 in the American West. On day nine of our road trip, it was therefore an easy decision to choose Tucumcari, New Mexico, for a two-day stopover.

At first glance, there isn’t much to do in this quiet, almost ghost-town setting. Yet at the same time, Tucumcari feels very much alive—as if I’ve stepped into an authentic 1950s movie set. It’s a version of small-town America shaped by the years following World War II, where hometown diners, classic cars, and family-run motels still define the landscape.

So as I slowly cruised through town, several discoveries stood out. Eye-catching murals stretched across building walls, telling vivid stories of Route 66’s past and its rugged Western surroundings. A gigantic welcome sculpture commanded attention at the edge of town. There was also the full-size teepee at Tee Pee Curios, a giant sombrero jutting out from La Cita Restaurant, and an old Texaco station that felt frozen in time.

Even more striking were the vintage cars—an Edsel, a Buick, and a Chevy coupe—parked outside aging motels, as if waiting for travelers from another era to return and drive them around town.

I do wonder how long Tucumcari can preserve this time-warp atmosphere. But if you’re a cross-country traveler who appreciates places “off the beaten path”, this “Mother Road” town offers something rare—a breath of fresh, unhurried life far removed from the rise-and-grind routines back home.

Muscogee artist Dana Tiger shares her life story – the ups and downs, her career, her family and their iconic apparel company – with exceptional honesty and inspiring resilience. In Tiger, director Loren Waters paints an incredibly compelling portrait of this remarkable artist, poignantly immersing us in Dana’s perspective of the world around her, and revealing how art has served as a healing practice in her family.

“The biggest inspiration behind Tiger was Dana Tiger herself”, Waters candidly confessed. While that is true for most artist portrait documentaries, Waters explained that the film was “really rooted in speaking to her character and really trying to create a painterly image with her, but also a portrait”. Dana’s voice feels present throughout all the directorial choices in the film. From her unwavering positivity to the artistic legacy of her family, the film feels incredibly personal and invites the audience into her world with a rare sense of intimacy.

“This film is a tribute to Dana’s life and her family’s incredible journey”

Waters gives Dana a voice, allowing her to share her own story in her own words. Her resilience and energy is infused in the visuals and pacing of the film, with DP Robert L. Hunter framing her in a way that makes Tiger feel like a homage to her and her work. This approach also creates a space for Dana to share her challenges and successes with agency, making the film all the more empowering. Eva Dubovoy’s editing and Amanda Moy’s sound design further enhance the empowering feeling of the film, adding to a rhythm that creates an effective emotional journey. 

“This film is a tribute to Dana’s life and her family’s incredible journey. It seeks to honor not only their legacy of artistic innovation but also their resilience in the face of adversity”, Waters shared. Despite the grief and adversity captured, Tiger also show the hope radiating from Dana in every second of the short. Her presence is not only inspiring but drives the film in a deeply engaging and captivating way. Waters crafts a work that feels celebratory while carrying an undeniable emotional depth that takes the audience by surprise and makes the watching experience so powerful.

After its World Premiere at the 2025 edition of Sundance, Tiger made its way around the festival circuit with notable stops at SXSW, deadCenter, Seattle, Aspen and the Palm Springs ShortFest. It also picked up multiple awards along the way, and was eligible for consideration at the 2026 Oscars. Waters is currently working on a short narrative film called A Map to the Next World.

Trans films are no longer niche. Looking at our collection of tagged films on Shortverse, we see dozens of works that have been major awards contenders or are streaming on the world’s biggest services. There isn’t a need for any special treatment—these are amazing works that compete on equal terms with their peers in making us laugh, or think, or cry. 

They do serve an important additional function, however, illuminating a population and a way of life that feels very foreign to many, thus fulfilling the spirit of a famous Roger Ebert quote describing cinema as “a machine that generates empathy.” Recent political trends in America and elsewhere have raised concerns that the culture’s recent progress on trans-acceptance will be rolled back, and we know there is real anxiety and fear about this. 

March 31st is “Transgender Day of Visibility,” a relatively recent demarcation, but one that resonates with values we hold at Short of the Week around showcasing perspectives outside of the ordinary. Considering the larger context, it feels more urgent than ever. We’re happy to mark the occasion with this collection of short films our curatorial team has put together, a mix of recent films and old favorites. 

🏳️‍⚧️ Celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility

Click on Image to view the Collection on Shortverse.

Small companies are, by default, very transparent. When there are 4 people working in a room, you have a direct line of sight on what everybody else is doing, and why. Your docs, Slack channels, and repositories are open to everybody. When the CEO has an epiphany that changes everything, you all know right away – probably because you were at lunch together when it happened.

Thus, startup founders will often get religion about transparency. “Our culture,” they’ll declare, “is to be radically transparent! Everything defaults to open. We hire adults, expect them to do great work, and give them the context they need.” Yay transparency!

And this works pretty well. Transparent orgs tend to delegate more effectively, have higher accountability, less politics, faster trust, and just plain ship more. Transparency helps bigger orgs adapt more quickly to the ground truth, responding to customer signals that execs might not be directly exposed to.

But, at a certain scale, radical transparency strains.

Some idle musing by the CEO sends a team off on an unimportant side quest. A well-justified compensation anomaly upsets a group who is missing background information. A 450-message Slack thread about bike shed paint color choices devolves into factions, hashtags, and philosophical arguments about the morality of taupe. #nevertaupe

And if you talk to people at a large yet highly transparent company, you’ll hear about the hazards of the relentless firehose. A thousand shared Slack channels, to start. But also a glut of docs – some critical, most unmaintained. Then there’s the meeting notes, meeting recordings, and meeting invites. Plus proposals, requests for comment, and requests to comment on your proposals’ comments’ resolutions. “So, you like information, eh? Well, have all the information in the world!” How do you make sense of all this?

While some people are tenaciously able to find, within this chaos, the important info they need to do great work, a lot of otherwise-capable people get easily distracted by information that just might be urgent, provocative, or even just… shiny. 💫

Meanwhile, allowing everybody access to every historical doc is occasionally useful, but it also presents an ever-growing surface area for leaks and legal liability. Are you sure there isn’t something highly sensitive or disagreeable in those 99,999 unmaintained Notion docs?

So, as companies grow, they tend to lock information down. Some – Netflix, Stripe, Shopify – do their best to keep as transparent as possible while still complying with necessary guardrails. Others – Apple, Palantir, Oracle – move toward a need-to-know basis, ensuring information flows top-down. With more control over information, it’s easier to ensure that leaks or internal distractions don’t derail your plans for surprising product launches and/or world domination.

Of course, every company’s culture is forged by the market they operate in, but there’s always some tradeoff here. And as companies grow, they tend to regress to a boring middle ground.

However. As with many tradeoffs, the balance has recently begun to shift.

Given this firehose, please assess my plan

Recently, we’ve seen a revolution in tools that can make better use of the firehose. Slack can now summarize your unread messages, albeit with mixed effectiveness. Tools like Glean and Unblocked can consider a mountain of your company’s data and answer important questions about it, albeit limited to the data they can actually see. And large open companies like Shopify and Stripe have internal tools that let employees’ agents query, analyze, and act on the copious data any given employee has access to – albeit with some sharp edges and exfiltration risks.

Just as LLMs are making the world’s data more useful to the world, they’re making companies’ internal data more useful to employees.

Of course, this can be misused! In some companies we’ll see further secrecy – I’ve heard of AI search tools and MCPs letting employees find accidentally-visible compensation data and other spicy docs that hadn’t been audited. I’ve heard of support agents giving customers true-but-problematic information because they surfaced it with internal AI tooling without proper training.

But as we evolve past early growing pains, and into teams and processes fully making use of this stuff, the anecdata points toward this new tooling becoming a superpower. Agents’ newfound ability to effectively query and reason about far more data than can fit into context is making the long tail of communications and docs much more useful for decision-making – but only when people have access to the relevant data.

Given that, the maturation of AI tooling will motivate companies to become more transparent.

In 2024, the cost of being internally secretive was meaningful but manageable. Although Apple keeping information need-to-know sometimes leads to waste, or important changes being slow to diffuse through layers of management, they’ve done, like, pretty well for themselves? With all the scrutiny from press, competitors, and regulators, you can see why they’ve kept it up.

But as all companies increasingly have tools that can assess, consider, analyze, and make use of all the business’ communications and documents, what kinds of org are going to benefit most? Well, the ones that let their employees access more context.

Extremely transparent orgs like Zapier, GitLab, and PostHog that might have struggled to cope with their firehoses – and who often had gaps in the data due to untranscribed meetings and decisions – will increasingly be able to leverage it. Sure, not all of it, certainly not at first. (Some of it is just junk.) But increasingly more of it. And critically, it won’t just be executives that will be able to attend to all this knowledge.

Where we ought to be

The frontend dev working on your internal admin dashboard should be flagged that the React upgrade issue they’re battling right now was just solved by the customer-facing dev team. The intermediate developer who is incensed about a company-wide tech decision should be able to build their understanding of why it was made without booking a 1:1 with the responsible Principal Engineer. Your go-to-market team should be able to “see” through to the code, developers’ conversations, and the recent decisions around a given feature, letting them give customers correct and timely information about what to actually expect from the product today.

And everybody in your company should, when it’s useful, have key company-wide strategy docs available to their agents as they make plans and decisions. And then, when a new revelation motivates the exec team to improve those docs, then bam. All the product engineers’ agents will take this new strategy into account right away. Anybody who’s worked at a large company and/or used CLAUDE.md knows this won’t be a silver bullet – deeply ingrained habits and momentum can not be simply prompted away. But as the tools and the data improve, the advantage will accumulate.

When we launched a realtime meeting agent last month, we expected to get feedback about its defaults being too open – currently, Cedarloop defaults to sharing its collaborative notes and tools with all attendees live. But instead, we’ve seen two diverging kinds of feedback: many of our users want the tool to be less visible to external guests and customers, but more open internally within their companies. Which in retrospect makes a lot of sense: decisions and actions in your team’s work are increasingly useful across your company, but your customers shouldn’t need to worry about all that.

So long story short, more internal transparency is coming.

It will take some time. Apple isn’t doomed, and just because Zapier and Shopify are already working that way doesn’t mean they’re going to instantly be turbo-boosted. But it seems a new era is coming, where siloed knowledge, information hoarding, and secrecy-by-default will become less tenable.

The firehose will evolve from a spicy distraction to a useful input to important work.

A drummer is confronted with the reality that age is beginning to catch up with him, gradually affecting his ability to play and forcing him to accept the decline of his career. Drawing from personal experience and a deep connection to music, writer/director Dan Silver crafts a narrative that speaks to the universal experience of confronting the passage of time. Sensitive and emotionally resonant, this slice-of-life drama carries a quietly immersive quality.

“Artists so often associate their entire identities with their work, and to lose that due to age, is genuinely heartbreaking”

“Drumming has always been an integral part of my life”, Silver shared when we asked him what inspired the film. Two of his mentors were his grandfather, to whom the film is dedicated, and famous musician Luther Rix. The filmmaker reflects that his own journey of growing up and sharpening his drumming skills mirrored the experience of watching his two mentors growing older, noting that “the physicality of being a drummer certainly took its toll on both of them”. Witnessing that decline, he explains, prompted much introspection about time and how it can affect and restrict a passion. 

By interweaving the themes of age and passion, Silver taps into a complex identity crisis. “Artists so often associate their entire identities with their work, and to lose that due to age, is genuinely heartbreaking”, he notes – an idea that sits at the core of the film. Despite the specificities of the situation, there is an undeniable universality in what the protagonist of A Beat to Rest goes through. With Silver’s lens painting an emotional portrait of this character with subtlety and nuance, drawing us in effortlessly. The authenticity of the writing truly grounds the film and makes it so effective.

Shot on film, it is not surprising that DP Kevin Johnson gives the images a texture that complements the narrative perfectly. It also brings a melancholy and nostalgia to the visual language that enhances the depth of the story. Silver also challenges himself, embracing long takes and giving the audience the room to process events alongside the main character. While the editing – by Silver himself – gives A Beat to Rest having a pace that echoes the main character’s state of mind, echoing the fact that he is slowing down.

Luther Rix – the inspiration behind the narrative – also stars in the film

Given the subject matter, sound and music play a crucial role. Silver composed the music with Alexandra Funes and they never fall into the trap of having the score be too heavy-handed with a reliant on drums. Instead, it is carefully composed to embody the presence of the music in the protagonist’s mind and how his perception of it evolves throughout the film. 

At the centre of the film is a deeply affecting performance from Luther Rix himself. Silver had shared the script with him to get some feedback, and he ultimately took on the lead role. The relevance of the material made up for his lack of experience in front of a camera, as he brings an impressive rawness to both the character and the emotional turmoil he goes through.

A Beat to Rest is having its World Premiere today on Short of the Week and Silver is already working on a new short film titled Her Painted Gaze, while also developing the feature adaptation of his previous short film Benign, which explores living with a mysterious chronic illness while navigating the chaos of the US healthcare system.