Ben Nicholson’s 5 Favourite Shorts of 2025

Ben Nicholson is The Film Verdict’s UK-based critic who curates our Verdict Shorts film column, reviewing new short films from festivals around the world. Here he picks out five shorts from 2025 that stuck with him.

COMMON PEAR (Gregor Bozic)

There is a whole world of amazing hybrid sci-fi documentaries out there and Gregor Bozic’s Common Pear uses the trope to make a disappearing way of life into the content of some imagined dystopia’s celluloid archive. An act of witnessing shot on luminous 16mm stock, the traditional fruit growers of Western Slovenia are charmingly captured and then cast against a threatening and uncertain future.

COYOTES (Said Zagha)

Darkness punctuated by glowing car headlights and the sounds of unseen predators give Coyotes its irresistible atmosphere. This is the life of fear lived by many Palestinians re-framed as a gripping neo-noir and I’ve returned to it several times since it premiered at Venice in August. A flat tire leads to game of cat-and-mouse as pervasive anxiety sees someone pushed to – or perhaps past – breaking point.

HAPPINESS (Firat Yucel)

Firat Yucel’s desktop documentary happiness is one of those films that perfectly encapsulates the experience of so many people in the contemporary world – permanently online and incapacitated by the emotional turmoil of what they’re seeing happen around them 24/7. It’s funny and painfully sharp in its observations, expertly conveying very specific but familiar feeling and even, maybe, proffering a little hope.

HILL STATION (Ed Lawrenson and Killian O’ Dochartaigh)

An enclave in Freetown, Sierra Leone, is the ostensible subject of Ed Lawrenson and Killian O’ Dochartaigh’s Hill Station. It explores the way this community was constructed, on a plateau overlooking the city, using specifications about malaria prevention to aid its European settler inhabitants. The film collapses time and geography – visiting the buildings now and exploring calculated colonial health inequality through this specific, enduring artefact.

INDEX (Radu Muntean)

There are few images as striking across the short film landscape in 2025 as the ghostly emergence of the person living in the woods in Index. The whole film is mired in a dusky half-light that creates an oppressive atmosphere even before night fully descends. A sort of two-hander thriller, what begins as very observational becomes somewhat more unsettling and dangerous as it continues.