Tina Kakadelis
As part of the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, there are a series of short film collections that will screen during the run of the festival. Below, you’ll find selections from the Animation, Documentary, and Midnight Short Film Competitions.
Baggage
Everyone has insecurities that follow them around wherever they go. They’re heavy weights on the soul, and it’s how we manage these weights that shapes our lives. Colloquially, we call this baggage, and it’s these insecurities that take center stage in the aptly titled short film, Baggage. Written and directed by Lucy Davidson, Baggage follows three friends as they begin their vacation at an airport. The characters have regular heads, arms, and legs, but their bodies are made of suitcases. When each of the friends is put through the security scanner, we see all of the things, good and bad, that they’re carrying.
Baggage is a charming stop-motion short film that speaks to the essential nature of friendships. It’s exhausting to carry around the aspects of ourselves that we struggle to love, and sometimes being so close to what we perceive as our shortcomings doesn’t allow us to be kind to ourselves. When the weight of these insecurities becomes too much and they spill out of us, who is there to help us carry on? Baggage has an answer to that question, one that’s simple and beautiful. In the sub-five-minute runtime, Davidson is able to reflect on female friendships, lingering grief, and how we live with the parts of ourselves we don’t yet love.
Retirement Plan
We all have plans for our lives when we finally get to leave the rat race. When we no longer have a clock to punch and the entire day is ours. Director and co-writer John Kelly (with co-writer Tara Lawall) has crafted a short film, Retirement Plan, about this looming sense of freedom. The short narrative film follows Ray, an older man who vows to make changes at this new stage in his life. Ray’s actions are accompanied by a soothing, almost musical narration from Domhnall Gleeson.
Humans are guilty of putting off the things we really want to do, waiting for a miraculous point in the future when we’ll finally have the “time.” Ray dreams of spending his days reading all the books that have accumulated throughout his lifetime, traveling the world, and learning the names of trees. His desires are large and small, epic and comforting, but all things that he’s spent years deeming inessential. In reality, it’s the opposite. These desires we have to explore, to try new things, and to embrace what we enjoy are often tamped down in order to make a living. There’s a deep richness to Retirement Plan that just makes your heart ache. There are pieces of Ray in all of us, and perhaps that’s what makes this short film all the more potent. Retirement Plan is a stunningly simple short film that gets to the heart of this little thing called life.
Tiger
Life is full of echoes from our ancestors. As much as we’re all our own people, we are also the sum of those who came before us. Tiger, the short documentary film from Loren Waters, examines those echoes in the Tiger family. In the 1980s, everyone wanted a Tiger T-shirt. They were available in massive retailers like J.C. Penney. The design came from Jerome Tiger, a legendary Muscogee Creek artist, although he passed away before the family began the T-shirt company. It was started in the ’80s by Jerome’s wife and her brother, but came to an end not long after, when another death rocked the family. Now, Dane Tiger, daughter of Jerome, is resurrecting the Tiger brand.
“It’s just full of memories, full of ghosts.” It’s this idea of echoes once again. Ghosts are not inherently bad or evil, it’s just the idea that something lingers after its tangible body is gone. Dana talks about the circular magic of seeing her son silk screen the design made by her father with the same tools her now-deceased brother used. Time brings us closer and further away from the people we’ve lost, yet they can stay alive through our art. Tiger’s documentary style plays on the idea of these echoes by having archival still images overlaid on contemporary videos. Tiger creates this duality, a rip in the time continuum that speaks to the Tiger brand and the family behind it.
Shanti Rides Shotgun
One of the rites of passage for young people is the driving test. With a car comes freedom. All that’s standing in the way is hours upon hours of practice before a final exam. Some people will rely on their parents to teach them the dos-and-don’ts of the road, while others will turn to a professional driving instructor. For the past three decades in New York City, there is perhaps no more prolific instructor than Shanti Gooljar.
An employee of Shanti describes her as “very disrespectful, but in a funny way.” Isn’t that how one could describe any New Yorker? Shanti spends as much time teaching these young people the rules of the road as she does talking back to other drivers (who cannot hear her) on the road, giving life advice to her instructees, and asking them to drive to Dunkin’ Donuts. It might seem like an unorthodox method, but it’s proven to be a successful one. In Shanti’s career, she boasts a 99% pass rate for her students.
Not every documentary has to be a massive political statement or the beginning of a societal revolution. One of the most incomprehensible aspects of the human condition is that all 8.2 billion people on earth are living their own deep, complicated lives that are as rich as our own. It’s easy to forget that when we’re wrapped up in our own minds and our own trivial things. The biggest strength of Shanti Rides Shotgun is that it forces the audience to realize that the people we briefly come in contact with are filled with their own hopes, dreams, and loves. The documentary introduces Shanti in the most New York way possible: with an elongated car horn and a “fuck you!” Beneath her tough, foul-mouthed driving instruction is a woman who misses her husband, who has spent thirty years teaching people to drive, who is immediately recognizable to generations of New Yorkers, and who feels her loss every single day. Shanti Rides Shotgun is a reminder that even those who are in the passenger seat are in the driver’s seat of their own lives.
Armed with Only a Camera
For as long as humans have had written language, people have taken it upon themselves to document the goings-on around them. From the mundane to the extreme, journalists through the years have created a written log of humanity’s history. One of the most dangerous events to cover is war. Brent Renaud dedicated his entire life to documenting conflicts around the world with his younger brother, Craig. Together, they traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Libya, and other countries to meet those affected and share first-hand stories from the heart of conflict. Armed with Only a Camera is the Renaud brothers’ final film together. It’s a collaboration that showcases the last pieces of footage shot by Brent before he was killed in Ukraine in March 2022.
Brent Renaud was the first American journalist killed in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. As much as this short documentary is about the important nature of his profession, Armed with Only a Camera is also a thoughtful ode to Brent himself. He came to this career naturally, with a genuine compassion for the people whose lives he was documenting. The purpose of documentary filmmaking is to encourage people to be empathetic to lives they will never experience. In every piece of footage Brent shot, he focused on the people because he believed their stories had to be told. Brent was right, and Armed with Only a Camera is his brother’s effort to turn the lens on Brent. To celebrate his life, his dog, and his work, but to never lose sight of the other journalists like Brent who have lost their lives in the pursuit of peace.
The Beguiling
It’s the age-old story: guy meets girl, girl invites him back to her apartment, things start to get weird. In the case of ishkwaazhe Shane McSauby’s The Beguiling, weird might be a bit of an understatement. The guy and girl in question are Billy (Benairen Kane) and Riley (Kim Savarino). They’re both Native and are enjoying swapping stories from their different cultures. They talk about the food they miss, their families, and their traditions. The more they share, the more suspicious one of them grows about the other’s supposed Native heritage.
The Beguiling straddles the line between horror and comedy, satire and reality. It’s heightened to an intense level, but only because of the sense of urgency that inspired it. Every day, non-Native people pretend to claim Indigenous heritage for personal gain and don’t understand, or likely don’t care about, the harm this lie causes to actually Indigenous people. The Beguiling takes this scenario and adds bloody mayhem to ensure that nothing is missed in subtlety. It’s a short film that takes the phrase “culture vulture” pretty literally. Even though the film’s ending reveals itself fairly early on, it doesn’t take away from the experience. What The Beguiling excels in is showing the insidious nature of these sorts of lies and the harm they inflict on everyone who hears them.
