Posted by The November 2025 edition of Independent Shorts Awards brought together an exceptionally diverse group of filmmakers, each exploring bold themes through distinctive cinematic voices.
Alongside Satomi, winner of the Best Short of the Season, the jury recognized three additional projects with Awards of Excellence—films that stood out for their craftsmanship, emotional clarity, and narrative ambition. These works span intimate family drama, socially charged psychological storytelling, and contemporary Americana reframed through a queer lens, demonstrating the remarkable range of this month’s selections.
Below, we highlight the three films that left a lasting impression on the jury and represent the strongest achievements of the season outside the top award.
The Last Supper of Girl by Jring Van (USA)
Jring Van’s The Last Supper of Girl is a stark and emotionally charged portrait of generational fracture, immigration anxiety, and the quiet desperation of a child left behind.
The film follows Yanan, the second daughter of a wealthy family, who has grown up alone in China while her father lives in America. On the day of his latest return, Yanan is permitted to open and clean the long-sealed study — a task that leads her to discover a dusty family portrait in which her nephew appears, but she does not. This understated but devastating moment sets the tone for a story about absence, longing, and the emotional invisibility of children caught between privilege and neglect.
Visually, the film situates its story inside a surreal domestic space: a lavish home styled after a Roman aristocrat’s manor, where the wealthy family’s ritualistic behaviors feel more like those of a cloistered order than a household. The atmosphere is heavy with decadence, detachment, and theatrical self-importance — a design choice that echoes the director’s intention to portray the family as a group performing their social class rather than living with emotional authenticity.
Against this backdrop, young actress Peilei Song delivers a sensitive and restrained performance as Yanan, capturing the internalized hope, confusion, and resignation of a child trying to earn affection through obedience and ritualized gestures of care.
In her director’s statement, Jring Van situates the film within a broader cultural reality affecting many wealthy Chinese families shaped by immigration and parental absence. Despite outward success, their private lives are bound by traditional hierarchies, emotional distance, and a sense of homelessness that persists across continents.
With a production budget of $49,000 USD, Van crafts a polished and unsettling family drama that merges personal narrative with social commentary. The result is a haunting depiction of a household preserved in wealth yet collapsing in spirit, anchored by a young protagonist whose search for love reflects a generation’s quiet struggle for belonging.
Unruly by David Ernesto Herrera (UK)
David Ernesto Herrera’s Unruly is a raw, atmospheric portrayal of a teenager thrust into the machinery of the “troubled teen” industry—an ecosystem that promises reform but often operates through humiliation, coercion, and emotional breaking.
The film follows a rebellious young woman battling addiction, grief, and the memory of her sister’s death, whose forced enrollment in a reform program becomes the entry point to a tightly controlled and deeply unsettling world. From its opening sequence, Unruly establishes a psychological tone shaped by disorientation, dread, and the vulnerability of a young woman pulled into an environment where authority is absolute and escape feels increasingly impossible.
Herrera builds the film as a fever dream—fragmented, sensory-driven, and intentionally non-linear. The director’s statement emphasizes that he wanted the film to be “felt first,” allowing images, sound, and pacing to shape the viewer’s emotional response rather than conventional exposition. Lighting, sonic distortion, and impressionistic editing work in tandem to recreate the blurred, often dissociative experience of being institutionalized against one’s will. This approach aligns with Herrera’s broader body of work, which frequently merges bold visual design with stories rooted in cultural memory and psychological depth.
A key factor in the film’s authenticity is the contribution of co-writer Antonia Horlick, whose own lived experience in troubled-teen programs forms the foundation of Unruly’s emotional and narrative core. Horlick has spoken openly about the trauma she endured in these institutions, describing the film as a creative release born from her journey toward healing. Her perspective grounds the film’s dreamlike structure in real-world harm, ensuring that even its most expressionistic sequences remain tethered to genuine memory and emotional truth.
The film’s impact is reinforced by compelling performances from its lead actors. Alexa Mansour—known for Unfriended: Dark Web, Civil War, and AMC’s The Walking Dead: World Beyond—delivers a grounded and emotionally precise portrayal of a young woman fighting to retain a sense of self within an oppressive system. Opposite her, the acclaimed Richard Brake—recognized for roles in Batman Begins, Hannibal Rising, Game of Thrones, Barbarian, and 31—brings a measured, unsettling presence that underscores the program’s institutional power. Combined with the film’s substantial $200,000 USD production, their performances deepen the emotional weight of Herrera’s fever-dream aesthetic, resulting in a short that is as haunting as it is visually bold.
XY by Stephan Fleet (USA)
Stephan Fleet’s XY is a tense, clear-eyed drama about two strangers whose lives collide under the weight of identity, violence, and the contradictions of modern America.
The film follows Y, a repressed convenience-store clerk, and X, a trans cam girl played by co-writer and lead JL Perkel. Their brief encounter at a desolate strip mall becomes a haunting study of fear, vulnerability, and the imbalance between who is allowed to exist freely and who must constantly negotiate their right to survive.
Fleet frames the story with the starkness of a contemporary American Western, stripping the setting down to its dust, neon, and asphalt — a landscape where identity is scrutinized but firearms remain unchecked.
Fleet’s long career as a visual effects supervisor and filmmaker shapes the film’s disciplined craft. Known for his work on Under the Dome, Timeless, and Amazon’s The Boys, Fleet brings a sharp visual confidence to XY, pairing classic genre language with intimate character focus.
His director’s statement makes the film’s intention clear: to confront the hypocrisy surrounding trans rights and gun access in the U.S., and to do so without softening or deflecting the subject. By reclaiming the iconography of the Western — a form traditionally steeped in heteronormative mythmaking — Fleet reframes Americana through a queer, contemporary lens, emphasizing resilience rather than spectacle.
Performances further deepen the film’s impact. JL Perkel delivers a grounded, emotionally precise portrayal that reflects both lived experience and narrative control, embodying the film’s themes with courage and nuance. Opposite her, Dominic Burgess — known for standout roles in Feud: Bette and Joan, The Magicians, The Good Place, Dr. Death, and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water — brings a controlled unpredictability to the screen, capturing the quiet volatility of a man shaped by repression and disconnection. Together, the two leads command the space between tension and empathy, giving XY its emotional backbone.
With a production budget of $120,000 USD, Fleet and his team craft a film that marries classical visual language with urgent social commentary. Shot in Los Angeles with an emphasis on fairness, integrity, and collaborative artistry, XY stands out as a bold and compassionate work — a film that confronts real-world inequities through character-driven storytelling rather than didacticism. It emerges as a stark, resonant portrait of a country at odds with itself, shaped by voices committed to telling this story with clarity and conviction.
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