Join us August 27–30 at The Frida Cinema for four exciting days celebrating independent short films and the filmmakers who bring them to life.

This year’s festival will feature a wide variety of short-film screening blocks, filmmaker Q&As, educational conversations, industry panels, networking mixers, special events, and an awards ceremony!

From experimental films, animation, drama, horror, and comedy to student films, Reel Ladies, and Rainbow Reels, audiences will have opportunities to discover bold independent work and connect directly with the people behind the films.

In the underworld of 1970s Rio de Janeiro, the feared The Devil Queen rules a drug cartel from the back room of a brothel. Draped in green eyeshadow and menace, she commands loyalty with a jackknife that serves equally for shaving legs and slitting throats. Her grip on power begins to falter as rival factions–favela gangsters, drag queens, and sex workers, turn on one another in a violent struggle to claim her throne, exposing a world where those excluded from bourgeois society fight for dominance on the margins.

Directed by Antônio Carlos de Fontoura during Brazil’s military dictatorship, this lurid tale is loosely inspired by the legendary 1930s gangster João Francisco dos Santos. The film reimagines the figure in a 1970s setting as an early, provocative representation of queerness. As The Devil Queen, Milton Gonçalves delivers a striking performance that destabilizes rigid notions of masculinity, dissolving the binary of macho and queen into something volatile and unforgettable.

Our Spielberg Summer series takes a more sobering turn with Empire of the Sun, a sweeping coming-of-age epic full of chaos and loss of wartime innocence.

Based on J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel, the film follows young Jim “Jamie” Graham, a privileged British boy living in Shanghai whose life is shattered when World War II erupts and he is separated from his parents. Alone in an occupied city, he survives in a brutal internment camp while clinging to the fading grandeur of his former life.

One of Spielberg’s most ambitious and emotionally complex works, Empire of the Sun transforms war into a surreal landscape of endurance and disillusionment. Anchored by a remarkable early performance from a young Christian Bale, the film reveals Spielberg expanding his visual language to capture not just wonder, but its disappearance. Rarely shown theatrically, this 80s gem demands to be seen big and loud! 

Before Na Hong-jin returns to the big screen with his long-awaited new film Hope, revisit the modern masterpiece that cemented him as one of the most visionary filmmakers working in genre cinema. Released in 2016 to worldwide acclaim, The Wailing is an ambitious and utterly unforgettable descent into evil that continues to haunt audiences a decade later.

When a mysterious stranger arrives in a remote South Korean village, a series of brutal murders and unexplained illnesses begin to spread. Tasked with investigating the increasingly bizarre events, a bumbling local policeman finds himself caught in a waking nightmare.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest horror films of the 21st century, The Wailing is occult horror at its finest and most tense. Its influence can be felt throughout contemporary genre filmmaking, and its final moments remain among the most chilling ever committed to film.