In addition to the top honor this season — Best Narrative Short awarded to Mr. Fleischmann (USA) — Cal Film Festival’s jury team highlights a select group of films that made a strong impression through their storytelling, craft, and creative vision. These Jury Picks are not awards — they are a recognition of distinctive filmmaking…
Wayward Journey by Don Carr (USA) Best Original Screenplay Wayward Journey is a gentle fantasy drama about grief, childhood, and the choice to return to the life that continues after a loss. Following his mother Elsa’s memorial, fifty-year-old Thomas visits the cottage where he spent summers with his grandmother. Edna, the current resident, recognizes his…
The Best Short of Summer 2026 at Cal Film Festival is a crime story in which the real investigation reaches back a lifetime. Mr. Fleischmann, directed by Frank Crim, tells the story of a reclusive Holocaust survivor in present-day Los Angeles whose new neighbor turns out to be the Nazi officer who executed his parents,…
The Best Short of Spring 2026 at Cal Film Festival is the film that doesn’t use death as the ending, but as the beginning. The Last Goodbye, directed by Kailey Wolf, tells the story of Basia, who hides behind her conservative family’s expectations, when she reunites with a woman she went on a date with at her grandmother’s funeral.…
In addition to the top honor this season — Best Narrative Short (Grand Jury Prize) awarded to The Last Goodbye (USA) — Cal Film Festival’s jury team highlights a select group of films that made a strong impression through their storytelling, craft, and creative vision. These Jury Picks are not awards — they are a recognition of distinctive filmmaking that…
Murder on Mute by Pete Johnson and Quinn Katherman (USA) Best Short Script Murder on Mute is a sharp workplace dark comedy that takes one of the most mundane experiences of remote employment — someone being stuck on mute during a Teams meeting — and turns it into a frantic story about corporate exhaustion, friendship, insecurity,…
Cal Film Festival is proud to name How to Rebury Your Friend by Chinese filmmaker Pengfei Fan as its Best Short of Winter 2025–2026. Built around a deceptively simple premise, How to Rebury Your Friend demonstrates how a local story can illuminate universal questions about memory, belonging, and change. What begins as an attempt by two men to rebury…
In addition to the top honor this season — Best Narrative Short (Grand Jury Prize) awarded to How to Rebury Your Friend (China) — Cal Film Festival’s jury team highlights a select group of films that made a strong impression through their storytelling, craft, and creative vision. These Jury Picks are not awards — they are a recognition of distinctive…
World With No Bargains by William Mariano (USA) Best Short Script World With No Bargains is an intelligent near-future thriller that explores surveillance capitalism, predictive analytics, digital profiling, and the erosion of privacy through the lens of a seemingly ordinary marriage. The screenplay follows Kado and Jenni, a couple whose relationship begins to fracture as Kado becomes increasingly…
This season, the top honor at Cal Film Festival goes to Spare!, a sharp, darkly comedic short film written and directed by Jules Cales and Balthazar Ullmann (France). What begins as a grim assignment for two hapless henchmen ends in runaway chaos: a story about luck, desperation, and the irresistible absurdity of two men who stumble…
In addition to the top honor this season — Best Narrative Short (Grand Jury Prize) awarded to Spare! (France) — Cal Film Festival’s jury team highlights a select group of films that made a strong impression through their storytelling, craft, and creative vision. These Jury Picks are not awards — they are a recognition of distinctive filmmaking that stood out within this…
Very Soon Now by Jeremy Heilmeier (USA) Outstanding Achievement Award A sharply constructed one-night horror thriller that uses primal fears — isolation, dead phone lines, a stranger in the house — to create a terrifying countdown. Jess, a college-age babysitter, finds herself in a secluded home surrounded by dark woods, spotty cell service, and a…
With breathtaking visual poetry and emotional depth, Lamp by Zoe Peng has been awarded Best Narrative Short (Grand Jury Prize) of the Summer 2025 season at Cal Film Festival. Originally created as the central interlude VCR for singer Angela Zhang’s 2025 Seeking Light world tour, Lamp reaches far beyond its concert-film origins. It unfolds as a mesmerizing cinematic fable—a space where stagecraft meets storytelling and spectacle gives way to soul.…
A quietly brilliant and emotionally layered film, Dolldays uses surreal humor and striking originality to explore the silent crisis of men’s mental health in rural Norway. Cal Film Festival is proud to announce Dolldays, written and directed by Morten Hansen (Norway), as the recipient of the Best Narrative Short (Grand Jury Prize) for the Spring 2025 edition. This gently absurd, emotionally resonant…
Precision-crafted and visually gripping, “Ice Cold Ricky” delivers raw emotion with striking cinematic control.
Interview with film director Qi Tan and writer and producer Peihong Situ, of “A Show of the Stray” (China), awarded Best Foreign Short (Grand Jury Prize) of Spring 2024. A powerful 15-minute drama, between reality and surreal, about someone who is pursuing his dream. But also about “love, marriage, personal growth, and how these elements…