Best Short Movies of 2018

Filmed and edited in intimate vérité style, this movie follows visionary medical practitioners who are working on the cutting edge of life and death and are dedicated to changing our thinking about both.

Four exceptional women mount grassroots campaigns against powerful incumbents in Knock Down the House, an inspiring look at the 2018 midterm elections that tipped the balance of power. When tragedy struck her family in the middle of the financial crisis, Bronx-born Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had to work double shifts as a bartender to save her home from foreclosure. After losing a loved one to a preventable medical condition, Amy Vilela didn't know what to do with the anger she felt about America's broken health care system. Cori Bush, a registered nurse and pastor, was drawn to the streets when the police shooting of an unarmed black man brought protests and tanks into her neighborhood. A coal miner's daughter, Paula Jean Swearengin was fed up with watching her friends and family suffer from the environmental effects of the coal industry.

Edith and Eddie, ages 96 and 95, are America's oldest interracial newlyweds. Their love story is disrupted by a family feud that threatens to tear the couple apart.

A group of suburban Muslims attempt to reconcile the disappearance of a close friend and must learn to live with the consequences of his actions.

Assembled from archive footage, this short documentary details a 'German-American Bund' rally held at the Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. American Nazi leader

Once a bustling industrial town, Huntington, West Virginia has become the epicenter of America's modern opioid epidemic, with an overdose rate 10 times the national average. This flood of heroin now threatens this Appalachian city with a cycle of generational addiction, lawlessness, and poverty. But within this distressed landscape, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon shows a different side of the fight against drugs; one of hope.

From documentarian Hao Wu comes a heartfelt portrait of how he created a thoroughly modern family in America, only to face the dilemma of introducing his same-sex partner and their children to his deeply traditional parents and relatives in China.

Documents the sinking of a South Korean Ferry. As a result of the ineptitude of the first response to the emerging situation, hundreds of people, mostly children lost their lives.

Paul and Millie Cao lost their youth to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Forty years later, they have become successful professionals in Southern California-and are rediscovering themselves on the dance floor.

A diverse number of migratory birds travel thousands of miles back and forth across the US-Mexico border each year. They have no regard for man-made laws and barriers. Dedicated Birders on both sides of the border and all sides of the political spectrum, share a passion for these creatures and for their perilous journey. The documentary short BIRDERS celebrates those who observe, record, monitor and fight for the rights and habitats of these species, demonstrating another way to think about the passage for survival that is migration.

In the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that took the lives of 20 first graders and their teachers, local clergymen Father Bob Weiss receives a letter from a fellow priest in Dunblane, Scotland, whose community suffered an eerily similar fate in 1996. From across the Atlantic, the two priests forge a poignant bond through the shared experience of trauma and healing.

A mind-boggling coincidence leads the filmmaker to track down his fifth grade class and fifth grade teacher to examine their memory of and complicity in a bullying incident 50 years ago.

A traveling trader provides a window into rural life in the Republic of Georgia, where potatoes are currency and ambition is crushed by poverty.

Mindy Alper is a tortured and brilliant 56 year old artist who is represented by one of Los Angeles' top galleries. Acute anxiety, mental disorder and devastating depression have caused her to be committed to mental institutions undergo electro shock therapy and survive a 10 year period without the ability to speak. Her hyper self awareness has allowed her to produce a lifelong body of work that expresses her emotional state with powerful psychological precision. Through interviews, reenactments, the building of an eight and a half foot papier-mache' bust of her beloved psychiatrist, and examining drawings made from the time she was a child, we learn how she has emerged from darkness and isolation to a life that includes love, trust and support.

Hundreds of refugee children in Sweden, who have fled with their families from extreme trauma, have become afflicted with 'uppgivenhetssyndrom,' or Resignation Syndrome. Facing deportation, they withdraw from the world into a coma-like state, as if frozen, for months, or even years.

What does it take to build a world-class French restaurant? What if the staff is almost entirely men and women just out of prison? What if most have never cooked or served before, and have barely two months to learn their trade? We follow the hectic launch of Edwins restaurant in Cleveland. In this improbable setting, with its mouth-watering dishes and its arcane French vocabulary, we discover the challenges of men and women finding their way after their release. We come to know three trainees intimately, as well as the restaurant's founder, who is himself haunted by his time in jail. These men and women all have something to prove, and all struggle to launch new lives, an endeavor as pressured and perilous as the ambitious restaurant launch of which they are a part.

After the high-profile killing of Damilola Taylor, Cornelius' mother moved their family out of London only to find themselves living on an estate rife with racism. But rather than fight back, Cornelius became more like the people who hated him. Filmed with non-actors in the same locations where the real events took place 15 years ago, what follows is an extraordinary story of fractured identity and the things we do to survive.

Lead Me Home is a short film that follows several people living on the streets in West Coast cities. Conceived to be a cinematic study of contrasts, the film will be familiar and shocking; intimate and vast. By weaving individual stories with aerial vistas, time-lapse photography, and evocative details of contemporary urban life, Lead Me Home aims to spark a national conversation about the epic scale of this alarming and ever-growing problem.