Manhattan Short Film Festival
Elm City’s Cabaret at the Shubert Theatre
New Haven
September 30, 2026
For one night in New Haven, the verdict on ten of the world’s newest Oscar-qualifying short films rested in the hands of local cinephiles. The Shubert Theatre’s second-floor “Elm City Cabaret” screened the 29th annual Manhattan Short Film Festival, where each audience member received a ballot to select the Best Film and Best Actor from its slate of intrepid finalists.
The festival’s premise, according to Manhattan Short founding director Nicholas Mason, is deceptively simple: “One world, one week, one festival.”
Between Sept. 24 and Oct. 4, over 500 international venues simultaneously are in the process of screening the festival’s programming, with audiences voting afterwards. At the intimate Elm City’s Cabaret, the newly-renovated counterpoint to the Shubert Theater’s 1,664-seat main concert hall, a crowd of over 80 locals buzzed around the theatre’s mezzanine lobby, joining an international audience that organizers estimate at more than 100,000 film lovers.
This year’s ten finalists, selected by Mason and the mighty two-person film screening committee, Jocelyn Schaffer and TJ Faddis, all came from different countries, for the first time in festival history. Having earned eligibility for the 99th Academy Awards, these ten shorts are officially in the running for the longlist ahead of the Academy’s voting rounds.
The 2026 official program featured Small Talk (dir. Eduardo Moral, USA), Mary is Missing(dir. Aisling Byrne, Ireland), Candy Bar (dir. Nash Edgerton, Australia), Vultures, (dir. Dian Weys, South Africa), Life Goes On (dir. K. Butterfield and D. Audritt, United Kingdom), Hai Davai (dir., Vlad Gradescu, Moldova), Pickup (dir. Viktorlia Lapushkina, Russia), Norheimsund (dir. Ana A. Alpizar Cuba), When the Sea Was Calm (dir. Vladimer Katcharava, Georgia), and Never Give Up (dir. Tamás Yvan Topolánszky, Mexico). The two-hour program was split halfway by an intermission break, where audience members immediately began to deliberate their nominations for the festival’s own categories of Best Film and Best Actor.
The first half of the festival’s program leaned toward feel-good fare, occasionally slipping into indie-typical sentimentality and cliché.
Unexpectedly, the second half gave way to politically charged narratives that mirror a moment saturated by international conflict. In that latter stretch, Hai Davai (Moldova), Norheimsund (Cuba), and When the Sea Was Calm (Georgia), came to the fore as the standout films of the night.
Vlad Gradescu’s Hai Davai turns to comedy and Moldovan folklore to depict the decision of young Nina (Paula Macovoz) to leave her local village, a choice shared by roughly a third of the country’s population since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Witnessing a black cat crossing the road near their village’s bus station, her grandmother (Aliona Oleinic) is convinced the cat is a foreboding omen she must not leave Moldova, yet Nina insists on leaving. The pair’s argument, entertainingly interrupted by a cast of unlikely and amusing villagers (including a crowd-favorite cow that “walks like a chicken”), posits how Nina’s pivotal departure is one that inevitably ripples through her community.
The weight of migration similarly burdens protagonist Yaímita (Yaité Ruiz) of Ana A. Alpizar’s Norheimsund, who, under the financial pressure of her mother (Paula Massó Varela), is burdened (if not groomed) to pursue a relationship with an older Norwegian man and leave Cuba to the titular town. Alpizar, in a recent interview with Impulse Magazine, states that the film was deeply influenced by her upbringing in post-Soviet Cuba, after which the country opened to tourists, who often sought out local women for sex work. In this way, Yaímita succumbs to a harsh negotiation between financial freedom and sexual exploitation, all the more impending by the possibility of leaving to Norheimsund.
Shervin Takyar, a Yale School of Medicine professor who frequents greater local movie theaters and independent cinemas, found the program’s films to be “emotionally loaded” and “resonant,” making it difficult to vote for only one film and actor. “I personally connected with Life Goes On and When the Sea Was Calm,” said Takyar.
“It’s clear that a lot has gone into these short films, and many of them could have been a full movie.”
New Haven public health researcher Beata Planeta, who attended the festival with Takyar, was moved by the range of depictions of immigration throughout the festival program. “The films were all attuned to our current political situation, and if we could, we would have picked more than one.”
Ultimately, Planeta cast her ballot for the Vladimer Katcharava’s hand-crafted animated stop-motion film When the Sea Was Calm because of its “creative production” and “relatedness to the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Arguably the most formally inventive of the night, the film transforms childhood memories of the 1993 fall of Sokhumi, Abkhazia into a solemnly poetic story of a childhood fractured by war, entirely without dialogue.
The protagonist, a perceptive and hopelessly romantic boy, falls in love with his next-door neighbor over the course of the film. Just as audience members begin to understand his coastal childhood in Sokhumi through his eyes and wide dreams—to play with his crush’s dog and to become Abkhazia’s Messi, to name two—his hometown is upended by war and family flees by boat.
For Takyar, the film stood out as among the best because of its emotional power, not in spite of, but precisely because of the absence of dialogue and live actors. “It’s amazing that short films are capable of expressing social upheaval,” Takyar said.
“For a stop-motion animated film with no actors to do that is high-level art.”
