A force rippling across time and the world weaves the connective tissue of these eight stories. The distinct works in this collection examine the ways love brings us together even when a multitude of forces work to keep us apart. Love takes many forms: it bursts from the pages of a scrapbook preserving precious moments; it stays behind to comfort those grieving loss and brings us closer to those soon to be gone; it inhabits artifacts that carry meaning throughout our lives. In this group of electrifying, eclectic, and utterly ineffable films, love conquers all.

Directors María Luisa Santos, Noëlle Gentile, Taylor Sanghyun Lee, Pete Quandt, and Darian Woehr are expected to attend

Total Runtime 100 min

Salone Love
Tajana Tokyo (USA/UK 2023, 5 min)
This genre-bending short colors in between the lines of family, love, and marriage.

a film is a goodbye that never ends
María Luisa Santos (Costa Rica 2024, 13 min)
A woman awaiting her US visa befriends a dog named Turbo. When it’s time to part, she says goodbye the only way she knows how—she makes a movie.

I Was Here
Noëlle Gentile (USA 2023, 17 min)
A couple navigates loss and heartbreak as they visit a grief counselor to help them come to terms with their son’s life-threatening diagnosis.

Layover
Taylor Sanghyun Lee (USA 2024, 12 min)
Long estranged from the religious community his mother embraces, Solomon must wear a lie one last time on the day of his brief return.

The Medallion
Ruth Hunduma (UK 2023, 19 min)
Ruth inherits her mother’s medallion, an emblem of survival from Ethiopia’s Derg Genocide that also represents the living tissue of collective memory and resistance sewn across generations.

We Exist in Memory
Darian Woehr (USA 2023, 14 min)
Through the conversations between a grandmother and grandchild living in refuge, we witness the complexity of raising a new generation in displacement.

Weekend Visits
Pete Quandt (USA 2024, 9 min)
Mother and child spend a candid weekend together in a family lodging center attached to a women’s prison.

Battery Mommy
Seungbae Jeon (South Korea 2023, 8 min)
Mommy charges in to save the day in this so-cute-I-could-die follow-up to Jeon Seung-bae’s electrifyingly entertaining Battery Daddy, the 2023 Festival’s Shorts: Family Film Golden Gate Award winner.