The Way Back

Yasmine Rizk, United States, 2025

The Way Back is a personal essay film exploring love, diaspora, and healing from a non-Western perspective. Rooted in a Lebanese saying passed down through generations, the film uses the metaphors of trains, planes, and the “point of no return” to examine relationships, migration, and the emotional cost of moving forward when return becomes uncertain.

Yasmine Rizk

Free From Hunger

Sano Yang, United States, 2025

Free From Hunger follows a street cat who decides to choose an owner.

Sano Yang

My Little Peru

Shreya Mishra, Michael Han, United States, 2025

Juan Dios Soto, a Peruvian artist, sustains his passion for performative arts through Tradición Peruana Cultural Center. The film focuses on the importance of the community fostered by the center.

Shreya Mishra

Soup!

Ava Azarmi, United States, 2025

Soup! is an animated film that poses the beginning of life as a pot of soup. Everything is just an ingredient in the soup.

Ava Azarmi

When We Grow Old

Audrey Lopez, United States, 2025

When We Grow Old represents the changing family dynamics that occur as siblings grow up and eventually part ways to get married, seeing each other less frequently as they grow older.

Audrey Lopez

A Drop of Dew

Lu Ren, China, 2025

A drop of dew falls into the blue forest and chases her own shadow, which has turned into a fish, from a vibrant water source to a wasteland without grass.

Lu Ren

The Eyes Beneath the Clouds

Zarin Tasnim, United States, 2025

The film revolves around a Muslim mother and daughter living in the United States. At first, their life seems like the American dream, but it all comes crashing down. On the one-year anniversary of her daughter’s death, the mother struggles to cope with the tragedy. The film is a tribute to Wadea al-Fayoume and the victims affected by Islamophobia in the United States.

Zarin Tasnim

Not Yet Gone

Lacy Green, United States, 2025

This documentary short explores the aftermath of the Eaton Canyon fire, focusing on marginalized communities in Altadena—particularly senior citizens and African American residents—that now face a growing risk of displacement due to governmental negligence and inadequate insurance support. These circumstances threaten to push residents out of the place they’ve long called home and forever change the demographic of this historical Los Angeles town. The film is an intimate, unflinching portrait of a community coping with loss and confronting questions about the ability to rebuild.

Lacy Green

Let Me In

Sydnie Pitzer, United States, 2026

This music video for the original song “Let Me In,” by UC Berkeley Student Wade Hubbard, follows a man living in a surrealist house where all of the appliances are used in unexpected ways. He convinces himself he belongs even though nothing else does. Eventually the house rejects the man, and he must confront what he fears most: freedom.

Sydnie Pitzer

Toothtown

Kyle Johnson, United States, 2024

A brief visit to the dentist reveals a whimsical world inside the cavity in a patient’s tooth.

Kyle Johnson

La inocencia

United States, 2025

La inocencia explores the significance of my grandparents’ house in Venezuela throughout my childhood. The film treats the downfall of the country’s economy as a metaphor for the changes in my family dynamic after being forced to abandon this home.

Amelie Carolina Dougall

Take a Walk

Colin Johnson, United States, 2025

This survey of the parks of San Francisco and their “Ten Minute Walk” program espouses the physical and cognitive benefits of open space in dense urban areas.

Colin Johnson

Babaylan

Franny Trinidad, United States, 2025

Kiki Lopez, aka MxKikiKrunch, is the matriarch of one of San Francisco’s premiere drag houses, the Mabuhay Bitches—composed of diasporic Filipinos who integrate Babaylan spirituality into their lives both onstage and offstage. Babaylans, precolonial Filipino spiritual leaders, healers, and intermediaries between the physical and spiritual world, were often women or genderqueer. Kiki and the Mabuhay Bitches use artistry and political action to create a space for queer healing—just like the Babaylans who came before them.

Franny Trinidad