Shorts Block 3: Shapes of Love

In stories of queer love, intergenerational love, self-love, and love across borders, filmmakers deftly mediate between intimacy and universality. Seven films weave a fabric of love in many languages: phone calls, imagined conversations, home videos, handwritten letters, and stolen glances. Puppeteer Zach Dorn considers CGI-mediated closure in The Sopranos, while Mars Verrone assembles a portrait of their late grandfather as textured as the forests he cultivated. Some films imagine boundless queer and trans futures while others grieve parents and partners. At every stage—even when it doesn’t announce itself—love moves us and inspires new creative methods. From before greetings to after goodbyes, these films trace love’s ever-evolving shapes. —Sabrina Kim

Films are in alphabetical order rather than order of play. Total runtime 95 min

Betty St. Clair
Syra McCarthy, Kyle Casey Chu (USA 2025, 12 min)
A drag queen searches for the courage to perform at a senior center upon realizing that a special guest is in the audience.

Buckskin
Mars Verrone (USA 2026, 17 min)
Filmmaker Mars Verrone crafts an experimental love letter to their late grandfather, Carroll B. Williams, a pioneering forester of African American and Kiowa heritage.

Can I Put You On Hold
James Cutler (USA 2025, 11 min)
Matthew plans to reunite with his partner Dangmo, a Thai national, once her immigration to America is approved—but one question keeps standing in their way.

Living with a Visionary
Stephen P. Neary (USA 2026, 15 min)
In an elegiac epic at the end of a couple’s life together, John cares for his Parkinson’s-afflicted wife Diana and enters the world of her bottomless imagination.

Long Live Livia
Zach Dorn (USA, South Korea 2025, 16 min)
Puppeteer Zach Dorn reconstructs scenes of love and loss in his Italian American upbringing mirrored in the iconic television series The Sopranos.

Rehearsal for an Encounter
Dahee Kim (USA 2025, 5 min)
A transnational Korean adoptee rehearses greeting his birth mother.

Una Notte
Rob Harris (UK 2025, 19 min)
Strangers Luciano and Rory spend a day together in the English countryside, glimpsing through their bittersweet fleeting connection the possibilities of who they might become.