Hollyshorts 2026 Round 3: A slew of genres and styles

Hollyshorts continues to unfold in Hollywood, with new sections also being added to the online selection each day. Today, I'm taking a look at a truly diverse selection that come from various corners of the festival's program.

I'll start with Lea Favre's Hunting, which is playing in the Documentary III section of the festival. At first, I was wondering why the film is considered a documentary, as it doesn't necessarily reveal its nonfiction basis at first. But when it does, it becomes something really dark and distressing. I was actually holding my breath, holding back tears, almost shaking. 

Hunting

Rendered in wonderful stop-motion, with some other styles of animation peppered in here and there, the film begins as search for creative inspiration. The character, who I take to be Favre herself, is armed with her camera (which she refers to as her rifle) and on the search for someone worth filming. She prowls around public spaces, surreptitiously observing the people around her, wondering who might provide a worthwhile story, while also considering the production implications of this person or another. She has a creative impulse, a desire to film, but she needs to find the right subject, the one who sparks her curiosity.

Finally, she does find someone, a man who's wearing a flamboyant jacket, something that makes him stand out in the crowd. But Favre is a young woman, and this guy is an old man, and as is sadly an all-too-common story, our valiant filmmaker goes from hunter to hunted.

The way the film shifts from its light and almost fizzy search for a subject into its frank and horrifying presentation of the old man's disgusting come-ons is jarring, extremely effective. Suddenly, the image takes a backseat -- we're essentially staring at barely more than a blank screen-- while the audio takes precedence, revealing why this is indeed a documentary, the animated frame crafted to contextualize the horrifying recording. 

Spooky season has begun in my house (as it likely has in many others), so I was happy to find an animated short in Hollyshorts' Horror I section. Fawn is gorgeously hand-crafted. It's done in stop-motion with characters built out of various fabrics, giving everything a wonderful texture and dimension. It looks like dolls come to life, which is great for the genre, since dolls are so often the creepy stars in horror pics (though here, the main character is not at all scary, but rather quite sweet-looking).

The film follows a woman returning to her childhood home, presumably following the passing of her parents. She's walking through those empty halls and rooms, finding reminders of her unhappy, abusive childhood. In particular, she finds a broken plate that has been glued back together, one she remembers breaking as a kid, yet another episode that set her parents off on one of their tirades.

As she wanders through the unpleasant paths of memory, she reunites with her child self. Together, they face down the horrors and try to break free of them, looking for healing and brighter days ahead. This is a horror story that is deeply rooted in reality: sometimes, the most haunted house is your own. Chilling and beautiful.

With Tapes and Toasts in the Car is as strange a watch as its title suggests, full of vivid imagery that shifts and swirls. It follows Shari, a woman who visits the doctor and receives bad news: she only has a few months to live, if that. Her body seems to be fading back into the shimmering dust of the cosmos from which we all came: when she lifts her shirt, we see stars sparkling. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, stars to stars.

With Tapes and Toasts in the Car

Shari, understandably, isn't taking the news terribly well. But her family rallies around her, giving her a chance to connect to what's important, and she finds herself in a sort of imagined spiritual communion with Laika, the dog who was sent into space and died while orbiting the earth. Just as that precious creature's life was unceremoniously cut short, so Shari's will be (though through very different means). Laika's wisdom allows Shari to put her feet back on the ground and open herself up to her family's love, in the various forms it takes.

Not one of my favorites I've seen at the fest, but I appreciate its cool animation, and it's the better of the two Laika-focused shorts in this year's edition (the live-action Little Bug left much to be desired).

Metafear is one of the most eye-catching shorts I've seen through this year's festival. It follows an unnamed girl who is plagued by horrible nightmares, which she reclaims power over by writing them down when she awakens. But there's one recurring nightmare that she can't put into words, can't find a name for. The terror is so great that she finds herself almost unable to even leave her apartment -- the world feels scary, unknowable. And elements of her dreams are seeping into the real world, including transforming her cat into a bizarre creature which runs away with some of her pages.

The world is rendered in muted tones, lots of beiges and tans, and in great detail. It feels a bit steampunk in a way even though the setting feels more grounded, historical (particularly toward the end, which is fascinating and gives the viewer a bit to ponder as the credits roll). As the nightmarish visions start to take shape all around her, the film takes on a Lovecraftian bent, as though the humans are the playthings of these monstrous forces.

But the pen is mightier than the sword, and the girl is able to fight back by naming her fears and writing a storm of commands to take control of the narrative. It's all executed on a stunning scale.

The short left me thinking about one of my favorite lines from Hamlet:

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.