Short International Competition - Program 2

Reef

Director: Ángel Morales Ballesta | Country: Spain | Running time: 13 min

Ángel has been living with his 89-year-old grandmother for two years. Now Ángel faces a new challenge: his mastectomy surgery, during which they will both have to take care of each other.

Voice Shift

Director: Roberto Duque | Country: UK | Running time: 25 min

What begins as a group of transgender women aligning their voices to reflect their gender identity unfolds into a powerful exploration of how voice shapes identity, survival and social perception. VOICE SHIFT was one of only two projects funded by both Aesthetica and Audible after winning the Listening Pitch 2025, selected from over 700 applications.

Blow

Director: Fernanda Beling | Country: Brazil | Running time: 14.5 min

On the seventh birthday of a child who lives with their "perfect family" in a "dollhouse" but doesn't fit into conventional gender norms, the social pressure imposed by their traditional family is so suffocating that the only way to escape is to make the magical birthday wish, before blowing out the candle on the cake.

I Ain't Your Grandmother

Director: Nim Shapira | Country: USA | Running time: 18 min

At 92, D’yan Forest is still working New York clubs with explicit material about her own sex life, refusing the polite invisibility expected of older women. She sang cabaret for four decades, turned to comedy only after 9/11 put the city’s musicians out of work for a year, and came out as bisexual at seventy-one - on stage, to a room of strangers, by which point everyone she had been afraid to tell was already dead. Back when she was starting out, an agent told her to get a nose job and change her Jewish name if she wanted to get booked. Cut against twenty years of her own archive, I Ain’t Your Grandmother is twenty minutes with a performer who has spent a lifetime being told who to be, and who keeps reshaping herself in public. What she wants now is not dignity or acceptance but fame, plainly and without apology - and sixty years in, she is more determined than ever to make it.