MOVIATE Shorts #6: It's a Beautiful World

MOVIATE UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL 2025

SHORTS COLLECTION #6

83 min | 9 Short Films

featuring a Post-Screening Q&A with filmmakers

**Closing Night Shorts Program**

“A Beautiful Day” by Justin Dean, (USA), 6 minutes
A nice man has a nice day.

“Magic with small apparatus” by Paul Tarragó, (UK), 8 minutes
Super 8 stop motion, south London style.
Includes feats with cards and ropes, legerdemain, sleights of camera, a perky river, and rare insights into the activities of a local magician-ventriloquist from the 1930s.

“Dumpling: A stop motion comedy” by Laura Lewis-Barr, (USA), 8 minutes
When depressed cook HaHa chases a runaway dumpling, she finds a parallel world. Inspired by an Japanese fairy tale.

“Quietus” by Marissa Hernandez, (USA), 4 minutes
Quietus is a visual poem about the invisible you. The thing that separates us from life the moment we die. It's a stream of consciousness that provokes unanswered questions of the unknown the moment you fade into darkness or perhaps light?

“Bunny’s Family” by Chuming Wei, (USA), 18 minutes
A sister Isabel and brother Leo discover that that their parents are scientists who use black magic, and realize that they are the products of their parents' experiments to create them. So, they rebel against their parents, in order to protect themselves

“Toll and Spin” by Maureen Zent, (USA), 5 minutes
Cast off from shore. Into the dim, the dark. Away, away. Adrift in an oarless boat. And deep, deeper below the mirror surface. Then snap. Caught in eddies of regret, past slights, tasks undone, worries fresh and aged. Ever searching for a channel back to the elusive elsewhere.
Toil and Spin uses the visual language of minimalism to describe sleep and sleeplessness.

“Balancing on a Molecule (Dirt: Part Three)”
by David Finkelstein, (USA), 17 minutes
Balancing on a Molecule uses animation, music, and incantations to enact a series of video rituals, trying to strike a balance between rapture and vulnerability. In order for rituals to be effective, we need to place our trust in them, which can open the door to revelation, but also leave us open to manipulation and madness.

“Foot to Ground” by Christopher Thompson, (USA), 9 minutes
Minimalist frontiers proliferate from acquisition. Larping utopia, shedding skins, forging new luxury amidst shards of past lives. Embracing shadows, sculpting stagnant futures in the flicker of ancient flames.

“Untitled Unended” by Nicolas Novak, (France), 8 minutes. Vague details surround the situation of kids stuck in a house looking for their father. Suspense builds as the kids try everything, leading them to an unexpected reality.