EXTREMELY SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL 2025
Screenings: Friday, May 30 (8:30pm) / Saturday, May 31 (8:30 PM)
Online Streaming: Sunday, June 1–Friday, June 6
Sponsored by Saint Arnold Brewery, Glasstire, and Ice House Radio
Be a part of this famously adventurous and beyond-category festival experience! Aurora’s annual showcase of contemporary short films (3 minutes or shorter) features a wide range of creative approaches and genres. Selected by guest juror Ekrem Serdar (Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Center), the 28th annual Extremely Shorts Film Festival includes 30 films from across the United States as well as Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, New Zealand, and Tunisia. Screenings will be held at Aurora Picture Show on May 30-31, with some participating filmmakers in attendance and receptions featuring Ice House Radio DJ Jackson Allers. A program will also stream on this page June 1-6. Both in-person audiences and global streaming viewers may vote for this year’s Audience Choice Award. (Audience Choice and Juror Award winners will be announced on our home page on June 9.)
Audience Choice Award:
Layers Of Norms (Dir. Hanna Faridi, US, 2024, 2:50)
Juror’s Choice Award:
SANG TITRE (Dir. Wiame Haddad, France/Tunisia, 2024, 2:50)
Ekrem Serdar, Juror’s Award Statement:
Wiame Haddad's Sang Titre is a moving work, disquieting, mysterious yet direct, focusing on a donkey at night, and ending with children singing. The singular donkey is lit by an unknown, almost untraceable and artificial source. We know what this film is about – the genocide in Gaza – without it saying it; it is quiet not out of cowardice or fear, but thinking on how to honor, mourn the unspeakable violence we continue to see, eighteen months in. At the end, when we hear the children singing – excerpted from Khadijeh Habashneh's essential film, Children Without Childhood (1980) of Palestinian orphans following the Tel Al-Zataar massacre – it's clear. As some of the lyrics of the song go: "We were young, now we must grow up... we walk hand by hand, facing the breeze." Hold up this brief film as it holds our world.
