Shorts: Kindred Q&A

We grow up believing that humans are at the centre of the universe. But what if there was no centre. Only an open field where we live, teach, learn, and communicate with the life around us. What if we questioned whether giraffes can cry? Or taught our sons to listen to the bees? A world where animals could defend their territories, birds taught us more about love than our books, and the elusive wolffish took us along on its travels. These family-friendly films explore human connections with the more-than-human world, inspiring us to live this interconnection and pass on the wisdom to the next generation.

Amma, Do Giraffes Cry?

Far away from home, an Indian filmmaker calls his zoologist mother from the Prague Zoo. As he describes the mysterious lives of the captive animals he observes - a gorilla scared of cameras, an insomniac anaconda and penguins haunted by their own shadows - the zoo becomes a space for their memories to manifest. The distance between mother and son, human and animal, evaporates and the zoologist confronts a long-held belief.

The Boys and the Bees

The Boy and the Bees chronicles the changing seasons in the life of the Ray Family as they pursue their dream of freedom; raising bees on a farm in rural Georgia while teaching their young sons what they need to steward the planet they call home.

Stone Biter: Saving the Arctic Sea Forests

When an Italian photographer moves to Northern Norway, he carries a dream: to explore the icy Arctic waters and film the iconic wolffish amongst lush kelp forests. But beneath the surface, he finds a stark reality - an ocean floor stripped bare, where the once-thriving sea forests have nearly vanished.

Love Birds

In 1972, married biologists George Hunt and Molly Warner make an unprecedented discovery while studying seagulls on one of California’s Channel Islands. To their surprise, a great number of the nesting pairs they observe are both female. George and Molly’s research on “lesbian seagulls” quickly triggers both outrage and jubilation in a nation grappling with the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and it threatens to tear apart their own relationship.

I'll Need to Leave for a Little While

Combining the art of puppetry with documentary storytelling, this short film follows NoNose, a critically endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, on an extraordinary journey beyond the forest for the very first time. What begins as a search for answers becomes a window into the disappearance of his species.

The film is a collaboration between Malaysian and Vietnamese creatives, and was developed in collaboration with conservation partners and community outreach programmes in Vietnam, with the puppet itself designed to travel beyond the screen into schools and villages close to where the endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkey still survives. The project aims to make conservation emotionally accessible to children and families who may never engage with traditional wildlife documentaries.

A Little Story About Forever

This short film about forever unfolds from the POVs of father (max) and son (kip) as they attempt to write a book about what forever means. The father feels overwhelmed by all of the threats to forever, like forever chemicals, and calls an unlikely hero – Mark Ruffalo – to ask for help seeing the big picture.