SHORTS
Shorts 3: I BARELY RECOGNIZE YOU
The phrase comes from the film in the program Lespri and summarizes the program’s philosophy: how one recognizes oneself and one’s families through archives, existing footage, and memories while reflecting on social dynamics and traditions, past and present. The program begins with Warm Shadows, where one feels an interlude of silence, longing and separation between a mother and a son in a Punjabi household. It continues with Thunder Bird, a documentary about a Burmese transgender leader and her traveling theater troupe, followed by Lespri, a grieving reflection on the filmmaker’s Black father. The next film turns to Tunisia, where the director attempts to reconnect with tradition through reenactments and family archives, later glitched and questioned in their portrayal of gender norms and naming in As Told by a Corpse. The journey continues through essayistic reflections and performative interventions on archival footage from Egypt and the filmmaker’s childhood. Like cruising along the Nile, time becomes non linear, yet the desire to return home remains persistent in Until We Return. The program reaches its final station with Dancing Fireflies, where Black Colombian queer friends imagine departure into the cosmos. Here they confront a final question: what if utopia exists somewhere else? To find joy, must one depart? And if so, is it ever truly possible to leave? The films leave us with these questions, suspended between memory, belonging, and the dream of another world.
Babylon Kreuzberg
29.05.2026 – 20:30
Warm Shadows (Nighiyaan Chhavan)
At fifty, Priya sees the sea for the first time. Standing at the shoreline at dusk, she faces an expanse she has never allowed herself to imagine. Across the world, Raag, in his twenties, rides through the outskirts of Busan in a taxi, suspended between movement and return. A fragmented voice-over binds them, revealing a relationship shaped by silence, care, and unspoken truths.
Raag asks Priya why she allowed her in-laws to change her name. She answers simply: there was never much of a choice. In memories that surface and recede, Raag photographs Priya as she washes clothes. On a rooftop where laundry dries in the wind, a hesitant confrontation unfolds about Raag’s sexuality. He withdraws, avoids her gaze, and in that moment, they unknowingly come out to each other. Only later does Raag understand that Priya, too, was revealing herself.
As Priya steps into the sea, allowing the waves to consume her, Raag arrives home and reflects on the image of his mother’s happy marriage, an inheritance of love that is both sustaining and incomplete. Across distance and time, mother and son share an intimacy born not of declarations, but of what is finally allowed to be felt.
Director: Anonymous
Writer: Anonymous
Country: Myanmar, 2025
Language: Burmese Language
Subtitle: English
Duration: 16:23 min
Thunder Bird
Director: Anonymous
Writer: Anonymous
Country: Myanmar, 2025
Language: Burmese Language
Subtitle: English
Duration: 16:23 min
In a wide field, beside the night market where the pagoda festival has taken place, there is a 65-year-old gay, is performing with the old songs on a shaky theatre stage underneath the spotlights. She has covered the wrinkles and smile lines with a thick makeup. Her performance and dance are as active as a youngster. She is the second generation and the leader of Thunder Bird troupe, which is established 50 years ago, Mommy Soe a.k.a Phyu Hnin Mg. It is the first and only entrepreneur artist group capable of making the conservative Myanmar society accepted them around in 1980s, in the socialist time ruled by U Ne Win. There were a lot of audience who accepted, loved and came to watch them. But there were also a few who threw rocks violently and shouted and mocked at them: ‘Homo! Faggot!’. When there was no dancing stage, Mommy Soe worked as an assistant make-up artist in her friend’s beauty salon.
LESPRI
An unnamed narrator uses found footage from his childhood in an attempt to paint a portrait of his father and their painful relationship. The film takes place at the International African Arts Festival, a celebration of the diaspora that I’ve attended since I was a child.
Director: Jard Lerebours
Writer: Jard Lerebours
Country: United States, 2024
Language: English
Subtitle: English
Duration: 5 min
(Undisclosed film name)
Director: Anonymous
Writer: Anonymous
Country: Tunisia,
Language: Arabic, English
Subtitle: English
Duration: 17 min
As Told by a Corpse
At a traditional naming ceremony, family members pray and swoon over the birth of an alleged baby girl, kicking off the demise of an entity resistant to the identity imposed upon them.
Director: Yace Sula
Country: USA, 2025
Language: English
Subtitle: English
Duration: 5 min
Until We Return
Until We Return drifts between memory and dream, moving from the flicker of a sixth birthday on VHS to the final unknowing farewell of a vanished home. Unfolding like a passage along the Nile, through dreamlike currents of Cairo where memory and presence blur, part vision, part yearning, part possibility. Upon its waters, a fragile utopia awakens, a world where separation never came to be, where return is still within reach, and the home once lost flows back into being.
Director: Huss Al-Chokhdar
Writer: Huss Al-Chokhdar
Country: Scotland/Egypt, 2025
Language: English
Subtitle: English
Duration: 11 min
Dancing Fireflies (Danzan Las Luciérnagas)
Babylon Kreuzberg
29.05.2026 – 20:30
Danzan Las Luciérnagas is a sci-fi rom-com short film focused on Keke, a wise black trans woman in Cali in 4021, who, after being accepted to be a biologist in the second generation of humans to migrate to Mars, doubts whether she will have the courage to leave Planet Earth and her three loves with it.
Director: Eleggua Luna Laverde
Writer: Eleggua Luna Laverde
Country: Colombia, 2025
Language: Spanish
Subtitle: English
Duration: 19 min
