2025 Short Film Showcase Interviews

Identity is a big theme among five of this awards season’s short film favorites.

Amarela, which means “yellow” in Portuguese, is the third film in director Andre Hayato Saito’s trilogy exploring his Japanese ancestry. The short follows Japanese-Brazilian teenager Erika Oguihara as she manages racial microaggressions and the pressure of family expectations against the backdrop of the 1998 World Cup, and stars Melissa Uehara as Oguihara in her first film role. “The majority of the crew was Asian-Brazilians, so it was really beautiful to see each other on set, and seeing our stories being told by us because we’re used to hearing our stories being told by white people,” Saito said during a taping of THR Presents powered by MyMama Entertainment. “In recent years, Asian-Brazilians are getting the braveness to talk about racism towards yellow — Asian-Brazilian people,” he later added. “We’re starting to talk more, and it’s been a huge collective healing and release.”

With the documentary short Alice, director Gabriel Novis tells the story of the titular character, a Brazilian woman who comes into her trans identity and finds community following the death of her father. “Alice’s position is dangerous because it’s a dangerous country to be in, but people have to live, and that’s the whole point of the film,” Novis stated. “We want to make sure that she has a normal life like everyone else because she’s a normal person like everyone else.”

In Amal, director Eros Zhao chronicles the friendship and musical collaboration between Palestinian pianist Bishara Haroni and Israeli pianist Yaron Kohlberg, known professionally as Duo Amal, which means “hope” in Arabic. “It changed my definition of hope, the movie itself,” said Haroni. “I realized that when I hope for something, I actually imagine it. And in order to achieve or make something, I have to imagine it first, and this is what the movie is all about.”

Classroom 4, from director Eden Wurmfeld, centers around the experience of incarcerated students and those from a nearby college as they learn about the history of crime and punishment in the U.S. in a class taught by history professor Dr. Reiko Hillyer from inside a prison. “What Reiko did for me is something I can never pay back,” said Nick Fiveoaks, a formerly incarcerated student who’s featured in the film. “I am forever grateful for the opportunity to take this class. The reactions that people have had, the support that people have given me during some of these interviews, and the showings at these film festivals has been amazing. Not feeling judged is a big thing for me. Reiko mentioned something like, ‘You are not defined by the worst things you’ve ever done in your life,’ and that means a lot. I get to go forward, I get to move on, and I get to help people think about what they’re actually putting tax dollars into.”

In the final film, One Last Round, director Kor Adana tells the fictional story of a husband and wife, who are parents to a young daughter, and wrestle with the decision to turn the mother into a digitized version of herself, known as a Ripple, when she receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. “I’ve always been fascinated with this theme of whether or not the advancement of technology either helps or hinders our ability to connect to each other,” said Adana of his inspiration. “It got me thinking about how we deal with grief and how we remember our lost loved ones. What can you do? You can look at old photographs, you can look at old home videos. You can read archived text messages or e-mails or letters, but it’s not the same as having them there and being able to talk to them in a time of need. … What if we were actually able to deliver on that? What if we were able to create a digital AI that could actually do that?

Watch the conversations with each of the films’ directors and stars in the video above.

This edition of THR Presents is brought to you by MyMama Entertainment.