Splendid
SHORT FILMS
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Carlos Puig
Julia starts classes at a new high school, excited to meet new classmates, but what she witnesses will open her eyes: a classmate with visual impairment is bullied every day.
Sriram Emani
In a near future where immigrant workers promised freedom are secretly indentured, a model Indian coder smuggles his mother’s forbidden tamarind rice into work, uncovering why the company needs them to forget home.
SYNOPSIS: Sriram is the ultimate role model. Polite. Productive. Easy to love. As an immigrant programmer in a near-future America, he has spent years believing that if he works hard enough, he’ll earn the freedom to return home.
Inside Aurora Corporation, immigrant workers are tracked through biometric scores, movement quotas, and “travel credits” that quietly bind them to the company. When Sriram’s long-awaited trip to India is pushed out by years, he clings to the one thing the system cannot regulate: his mother’s tamarind rice.
What begins as an act of comfort becomes an act of rebellion. As memories of home resurface, Sriram uncovers a system built on erasing identity, forcing him to choose between the future he has spent years earning and the self he has spent years forgetting.
Blending psychological sci-fi, satire, and South Asian futurism, JAM BOY is an allegory about immigration, corporate indenture, and the hidden cost of trading belonging for acceptance.
Aneesh Sreekumar
Password: srfti
When a remote tribal school in Wayanad is partly destroyed in a natural disaster, a lone teacher’s quiet resolve to rebuild it is met with government apathy. Framed by the haunting voiceover of an elderly Paniya woman, the film begins as a lament for a vanishing language, a fading culture, and a long-marginalized people — but concludes with an affirmation of their resilience and hope.
Ashley Tabatabai
A bereaved immigration officer struggles with his role in the system after meeting a young Iranian brother and sister detained during the travel ban.
William Eguienta
To save the care center he works for from collapse, Akram, a driver for people with disabilities, finds himself drawn, against his will, into the world of drugs.
Caught between easy money and constant danger, his moral compass begins to crack: can the people he loves be worth the loss of who he is ?
Ekaterina
The beginning of the Great Patriotic War. To the sounds of cannon fire, children from the orphanage are evacuated to the rear. In the confusion, a girl named Adelaide (Ada) drops her doll, and a truck with children drives away.
In the rear, the girl’s mother works, and the girl goes to school. Every time she passes a toy store, she stops and looks at a beautiful doll with a price tag of 122 rubles. Sometimes she counts her savings, which are kept in a tin can. The girl’s mother alters a dress given to her by a friend “to fit” and goes to bed. Ada wakes up and notices that the dress is ready for her, and, taking the can with the money she has saved, she goes to the market with the dress, where she sells it for 70 rubles: “she really needs this money.” After that, she once again heads to the toy store.
When Ada returns home, her mother is angry: the dress she spent half the night sewing is neither in the house nor on Ada. The girl confesses something to her mother – and viewers see on the screen what happened before that: having once again looked at the coveted doll, Ada took the money she had collected to the post office and handed it over to the Defense Fund with a request to build a tank for the speedy expulsion of the fascists. In the letter attached to the translation, Ada calls on other children to do the same.
The plot is based on the story of the real tank “Malutka”, for the construction of which, on the initiative of Ada Zanegina, children from the Omsk region collected 160,886 rubles
Samar Jain
In a village entrenched in caste discrimination, Vishnu must defy years of silence, oppressive traditions, and entrenched power structures to fulfil his grandfather’s dying wish—to be cremated at the village’s only cremation ground, controlled by the Upper Caste.
Daddu Zindabad or Long Live Grandpa is a sharp satire laced with humour, tackling themes like caste discrimination, toxic masculinity, political opportunism, women’s agency, and the expanding power and influence of media. The story begins with a dying wish from Daddu — played by Durgesh Kumar (Panchayat, Highway, Laapataa Ladies) — that throws an entire village into chaos and sparks a revolution. At the centre of this storm stands Vishnu, portrayed by Pranjal Pateriya (Dupahiya, Laapataa Ladies, HIT 3), who must confront his own family and community, relying on wit and cunning to fulfil his role as a devoted grandson.
Harvey John
A young refugee desperately searches for her mother, who she believes to be a mermaid.
A modern fairytale about grief and displacement, from a child’s perspective.
Winner of Shore Scripts 2024 Spring Short Film Fund, recipient of Hessen Film & Medien Short Film Grant and Verein Südkultur Prize, supported by Emmy-winner Karina Michel and ARRI Rentals. The film is both BAFTA & BIFA qualifying for 2027.
Jean-Baptiste Le Hen
In a society where pollinating drones have replaced insects, 14-year-old Violette, mute for a year, is wanted for environmental activism. She flees with her father to a country where people live with concern for the well-being and protection of life. But her refuge has been discovered…
Arnaldo Stafa, William Allum, Iveta Drulyte
We all face trauma, some worse than others. It’s what makes us and sometimes breaks us. We follow Jason’s life as he enjoys his time with friends at the beach until it suddenly hits him in the middle of the game. Can he hold it in and hide it, or will it show and affect his life?
Mainul Siddiqui
“A single take short film set in pandemic-stricken Varanasi, Tikvah traces the silent grief and resilience of women across generations.
Through ritual, music, and stillness, the film enters a world where pain is endured but never spoken.
As Anshika journeys through loss and memory, tradition and suppressed identity begin to blur.
Amid ashes and silence, Tikvah reflects on womanhood, endurance, and quiet liberation”