Posted by By being named Best Short of December 2025 at Independent Shorts Awards, Malka — the haunting Holocaust musical directed by Stacey Maltin (USA) — establishes itself as the season’s most resonant and daring short film achievement.
In just sixteen minutes, the film blends memory, music, and lived history into a tightly controlled cinematic work rooted in survival, resilience, and hope.
An Unconventional Memory Piece
Malka unfolds at a present-day family seder, where a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, portrayed with poignant force, begins to experience vivid visions of her youth in the Nazi camps. As the boundaries between past and present dissolve, the film turns to theatricality, staging unimaginable trauma through cabaret-like performance. Memory becomes both spectacle and cry: a defiant assertion of survival amid the ruins of history.
Unlike traditional Holocaust narratives, Malka uses music not to soften but to amplify emotional truth, drawing the audience into fractured rhythms of recollection that are at once unsettling and deeply expressive. By compressing the emotional scope of a feature into a short form, the film achieves both formal daring and thematic depth without compromise.
Stacey Maltin: Visionary of Empathy and Nuance
Stacey Maltin brings to Malka a career defined by curiosity, risk, and empathy. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she is an award-winning filmmaker and performer whose work spans genre and form with fearless imagination. Maltin’s feature debut Triple Threat premiered at Oscar-qualifying Cinequest and found distribution on major platforms, a milestone in a career shaped by story first, medium second.
Her mini-series Mashed, a candid look at female embodiment and desire, won top honors at festivals including HollyShorts and Nashville International Film Festival. This pursuit of stories that foreground what society often neglects — from queer parenthood to bodily truth — feeds directly into Malka’s brave heart.
From Personal Shadow to Universal Light
In her director’s statement, Maltin explains the genesis of Malka as deeply personal: born in a moment of fear and disconnection following the events of October 7, 2023, when she felt the fracturing pressures of identity, community, and empathy in her own life. By committing to a film about a Holocaust survivor who finds hope in the present through memory of the past, Maltin sought not only to depict survival but to embody it, transforming trauma into a language of resilience and shared understanding.
Her cinematic choices, where flashbacks are stylized as performance, intentionally mirror the performative nature of identity and remembrance. With this, Malka becomes more than a reflection on history: it becomes a challenge to remember, to empathize, and to act with hope.
A Legacy of Craft and Community
Malka has already made its mark beyond Independent Shorts Awards, winning major prizes at Oscar-qualifying festivals, a rare and remarkable achievement for a dramatic musical short.
With a cast led by Emmy nominee Tovah Feldshuh, Malka juxtaposes theatrical gravity with the gravity of real history, a balance few films attempt, and fewer still achieve.
Why Malka Matters
In a moment when historical memory and collective empathy are under strain, Malka emerges as a work of cinema that foregrounds lived experience over abstraction. Rooted in personal remembrance and shaped through performance, the film approaches survival not as a political stance, but as a human act, one that carries trauma, resilience, and moral urgency across generations. Through its fusion of music and memory, Malka affirms the role of storytelling as a means of bearing witness, preserving dignity, and sustaining hope.
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