Borders No Borders Narrative Shorts 2021

On the anniversary of her adoption, 9-year-old Esther confronts the duality of her identity when she learns that the food at the Chinese buffet might not be "real Chinese food."

After his older brother Casey returns home from a prison sentence, Caleb's relationship with his best friend Jason is put to the test.

With the ghosts of his father and brother haunting his household, Reza gets pressured into getting a tattoo, a rite of passage to the only community that allowed him to seek refuge from his home.

Tejano Night following an evening in South Texas with Mijo, a Mexican-American who is visiting his estranged family when his worst nightmare of being seen as “not Latino enough” comes to fruition. The surrounding members laugh at his lack-luster pronunciation of ‘tamale’ at the dinner table. Mijo escapes with his cousin to a local bar with the promise of getting a ride back to his hotel afterwards. While he’s stuck, Mijo’s awkward run-ins with the other patrons reinforce a similar feeling of being out of place until he begins exchanging waves with a friendly couple on the dance floor.

In a post 9/11 world, Dharmesh, an undocumented Indian American immigrant stands in front of a racial slur graffitied on the store front of his family's convenience store. Trapped within the confines of his late family’s American dream, he comes crashing through shades of grief into his subconscious, between reality, memory and imagination, until reaching the acceptance of his father’s demise from an attempted border crossing.

Blackwater follows the story of Birdie Blackwater. A washed up Native American country singer from the reservation who found stardom and fame at an early age. Now on her last leg career wise, and having burnt every bridge across America, Birdie finds herself alone and broke returning to her home land trying to cope with her life as it spirals out of control after ten years of reckless, unchecked, alcoholism.

A bus breaks down in the rural highland community of Las Cruces, Guatemala, causing an uncomfortable impasse between a tourist couple and their Kaqchikel counterparts.

Alien Abduction follows Missy, a young science prodigy, and her childhood best friend Yesenia. When Missy finds out she’s pregnant, she becomes distant and shifts her focus to the stars. Yesenia discovers an almost full term Missy secretly laying in a crop circle, for reasons that threaten to separate them forever. Together, they must confront whether their friendship can transcend space and time.

Alien Abduction, written by Candice D’Meza and directed by Nate Edwards, is part of a series of Afrofuturism micro-films entitled “30 Ways To Get Free”, which positions Abolition and Liberation within the worlds of science fiction. The films examine three of an unlimited number of ways Black people across the African Diaspora may triumphantly enter a free new world of their own imagining. Produced by The Catastrophic Theatre.

Surf the glittering channels of Xenia's mind in this highly saturated, musical spectacular in which anti-blackness is examined through the intimate lens of young love. This film is a true labor of love. Created in the isolation of the pandemic, Matthews uses fragmented form and innovative visuals to assess both the internal and external forces affecting her perception of the world and herself.