Frameline50: Fun in Shorts

This laugh-out-loud shorts package has it all: dysfunctional families, Horny Hell, and Chucky (yes, that Chucky).

Short films showing in this program:

Flight Risk (Mohammad Awad, 16 mins)

Muhammad’s fruity holiday plans hit a roadblock when he gets stopped by airport security and is accused of running off to join ISIS. While he desperately needs to catch his flight, he’d still like to have some fun along the way. Based on a true story.

Minister Chucky (Graham Kolbeins & Jonathan Andre Culliton, 11 mins)

On Election Night 2024, filmmakers Graham Kolbeins and Jonathan Andre Culliton decide to flee the impending return of Donald Trump and seek safety across the border. Kolbeins, a nonbinary Canadian, and Culliton, an American trans man, take us on a wild road trip from California’s high desert to Las Vegas.

Determined to make the most of their Sin City send-off, the couple hits a queer-coded bucket list of Vegas hotspots: Omega Mart, Drag Race Live, and the Punk Rock Museum, among others. But the true climax comes when Kolbeins and Culliton celebrate their defiant queer love by hiring Minister Chucky (yes, that Chucky) to officiate their wedding in a ceremony that’s as joyful as it is surreal.

Sleazy Tiger (James Ley, 15 mins)

Hopeless but horny romantic Alan is determined to do things differently on his date with vegan hottie Blair who he thinks might be his future husband. But when Blair gives Alan a jar of homemade kimchi, Alan gets aroused and finds himself in Horny Hell, struggling to find the line between metaphor and reality and even reckoning with his inner Alan Cumming on his quest to get back to his date.

Sunday Lunch (Lyndon Henley Hanrahan, 15 mins)

Grace, a young lesbian from a devout Catholic family, finally summons the courage to come out to her parents — on the most sacred day: Sunday lunch. But every time Grace tries to speak her truth, her mother, Susan, deploys increasingly absurd distractions to preserve the family’s picture-perfect façade. What follows is a chaotic, laugh-out-loud farce that collides faith, family, and identity in a way that’s as heartwarming as it is hilariously over the top.

Sunday Sauce (Matt Campanella, 15 mins)

A repressed, Italian American father is thrust into his worst nightmare when his online crush shows up to his family’s traditional Sunday Sauce dinner. Starring Cathy Moriarity and Matthew Risch.

The Waddles (Max Jenkins, 12 mins)

A photo plunges Joy (Sophie von Haselberg) into despair. Max (Max Jenkins) convinces her to join him in getting a cosmetic procedure and then hiding away in Palm Springs over the holidays to convalesce. But their friendship changes. Stars Von Haselberg (who you might remember from Poreless in last year’s Fun in Shorts) and Jenkins (making his directing debut here) co-wrote this quippy, clever short with Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, the Oscar-nominated screenwriters of May December.

Wife Wife (Sara Werner, 6 mins)

In this hilarious sequel to Frameline49’s Girlfriend Girlfriend… After two femme presenting queer women get married on the beach, a group of three cishet men tell them “congratulations.” As the couple thanks the group, the men propose that they have a drink together and that the couple should “go grab their husbands.” Via this stereotypical heteronormative assumption, the wives are transported to a hyper queer affirming world containing queer couples dressed in their wedding best, but before they can join these empowering beautiful humans the wives must defeat their own inner colonial heteronormative insecurities.