RIGA IFF īsfilmas: Construction Time Again

Miguel Ariza
Ice Burns Like Fire
El Hielo Quema Tanto Como El Fuego
ES
2025, 21’, es
Age 12+
Miguel Ariza

 

Three stories unfold in a single night. Javier decides to open up to his friends, sharing the story of his relationships. Sergio meets a stranger in the park and goes for a walk in which far more is revealed than he expected. Meanwhile, Eyla shares a bottle of gin with a guy she likes at a nightclub. The three variations on human nature and intimacy are like a game of hide and seek – the search runs hot and cold.

 

Portraying his peers, Madrid-born director Ariza presents a naturalistic aesthetic that continually invites the viewer to question where documentary observation ends and staging begins. This approach draws the audience closer to the film’s characters, who search for love, suffer disappointment and crave intimacy — a kind of closeness that can chill you warm and heat you cold. Perhaps there is such a thing as the right temperature when you long for someone by your side.

 

Vytautas Katkus, consultant of the RIGA IFF short film selection committee, shares: “The film made me want to keep watching and stay in that night with the characters. There was this light, carefree feeling that felt both bold and powerful.”

Csanád Baksa-Soós
Night Sky Elevator
Night Sky Elevator
HU
2025, 9’, no dialogue
Age 12+
Zsuzsanna Vincze, MOME Anim, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design 

 

The screen is a blank page, while the camera and other “weapons” in the filmmaking arsenal serve as a pencil. As night falls, the world shifts and flashes; along with a new day, people from the past arrive, and an equilibrist is about to cross the screen. Landscapes — distant and strange, intimate and endlessly reproduced — come to life, guided by the author’s intuition. But what will be the conclusion of this personal carousel of images?

 

Baksa-Soós always keeps a pencil at hand — hence the film’s epigraph. Working with paper cutouts and drawing-based animation techniques while blending different media, he explores the very texture of cinema. Born in Munich and trained in media design and animation at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Baksa-Soós works through observation of himself and his surroundings. Rather than following a clear narrative, his films unfold through associations that brim with energy, provoking and awakening both the senses and the mind of the viewer.

Aleksa Bujisic
A Whisper I Hear
Šapat koji čujem
ME
2025, 13’, sr
Age 12+
Aleksa Bujisic, Milan Radulović, University of Montenegro Faculty of Drama in Cetinje

 

The daily rituals of mother and daughter. Slavka, who suffers from insomnia, takes care of her mother, Milusa. The combing of hair, the starting of the fire, the stumbling out of bed and the breakfast with a tiny knife chiming against a ceramic plate. In the workshop where her late husband once busied himself, Slavka feels an unshakable weight – no chatter, no sudden sounds. Everything repeats itself in a melancholic rhythm, and within their togetherness, there’s an indescribable tenderness.

 

After his grandfather’s death, Bujisic sensed a change in his relationship with his grandmother, Slavka, the protagonist of this short documentary. They have never openly addressed the loss, yet its presence is reflected in the order and routine Slavka has created for herself and lives out each day. This powerful work of observational cinema, a counterpoint to the Maysles brothers’ emblematic Grey Gardens (1975), wraps its subject in a tender embrace, conveying care and intimacy. Bujisic studied film, media and directing, and this documentary short was created during his master’s studies at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the University of Montenegro in Cetinje.

Karolis Vilkas
Cemetery
Kapinės
LT
2025, 9’, bez dialoga
Age 12+
Vitalijus Gylys

 

With the full moon glowing and the black cat’s eyes gleaming, the protagonist seems unsure of what kind of film he has wound up in. Memories of a lost loved one and their time together become entangled with hallucinations and a growing fear that she might have returned. She appears to be everywhere, yet his own life seems to be slipping further away. When the presence of a prematurely lost love starts to feel more real than anything else, the man descends into the darkest labyrinths of his psyche.

It would hardly be an overstatement to say that Vilkas has managed to create a Baltic take on Stephen King and magical realism, leveraging the genre to reflect on the profound impact of loss. In a manner reminiscent of the cult series The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), he subverts expectations about the representation of tragedy and teases with daring B-movie tropes. The debut short film by the Lithuanian theatre director – now also a filmmaker – is a celebration of rich cinematic history, regional sensibilities and the gift of relationships. As he himself notes, he listens to his eight-year-old daughter’s advice.

Maria Inês Gonçalves
La Durmiente
La Durmiente
PT
2025, 20’, pt
Age 12+
Maria Inês Gonçalves, Maria Riera Peris

 

28, 29, 30… Ready or not, here I come! Children play hide-and-seek in the Monastery of Sancti Spiritus, but gradually, we witness the players transform into people who were alive seven centuries ago. One of the initiators of this historical game offers a hint: in the early 14th century, the Portuguese monarchy faced a dynastic crisis — with no male heir, the throne was set to pass to Beatrice. She was crowned head of state at the age of just ten, and today, the children swept up in their game honour a child who had to grow up too soon.

 

This short film is one of the most original recent examples of historical exploration and reconstruction, in which Portuguese director Gonçalves combines playfulness with research and the subjective with the factual. The short film was shot in the Toro Monastery, where Beatrice’s tomb is located, and a little-known chapter of the nation’s history is transformed into a laboratory of imagination, with young actors reconstructing the past. The phenomenon of the child’s gaze, so often encountered in cinema, is complemented here by performativity, which lends a childlike wisdom to Gonçalves’ work as it evokes a lost time. The film was shown as part of the Rotterdam International Film Festival’s Tiger Short Competition.

Andrea Lamedica
Fiji
Fiji
IT
2025, 11’, it
Age 12+
Gregorio Mattiocco 

 

Four flight attendants gather in a hotel room before a flight. Chatter about the handsome pilot, first-flight jitters and memories of the Mycenae trip stir anxiety in two of the young attendants. To calm their nerves, they decide to improvise a short scene, which, in just a few minutes, may reveal far more about each of them than they intended. What begins as naive play gradually turns into a mutual reflection.

 

Through the theatrical form of transformation, Lamedica has crafted a rich exploration of identity that begins as a sitcom but quickly veers onto the runway of Bergman’s Persona (1966), where the lived experiences of the flight attendants demand a mastery of performative duality. The author, a cinema student in Rome, is also a photographer working in the fashion and music industries and has created campaigns for many respected professionals in the field. “I am all that I see,” wrote philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, noting that every object… is a mirror of all the others.

 

Qiu Yang, a consultant of the short film selection committee at RIGA IFF, writes: “It’s very difficult to make a film about a ‘brief moment of life’, in one location, with a seemingly overtly done topic, but this one makes it interesting and attractive.”