tweet
shareDocumentary Shorts 2 is a celebration of resilience, creativity, and the ways people reclaim power, through art, movement, memory, and community.
In Down North, former inmates rebuild their lives by running a Philadelphia pizza shop where second chances rise with every pie. Penosar captures an aging shepherd in the Alborz Mountains who paints his memories onto stone, turning solitude into art. LIFE MODELS follows a breast cancer survivor who embraces her body’s truth and finds beauty in vulnerability. All of Us Girls invites viewers into intimate late-night conversations where women confront trauma and rediscover connection.
Fly Baby Fly offers a raw, kinetic portrait of choreographer Ryan Heffington as he transforms pain into movement in the Mojave Desert. Oceanbone is a lyrical call for justice and remembrance as Indigenous communities fight to bring stolen ancestors home. And in Old Girl in a Tutu: Susan Rennie Disrupts Art History, a witty and fearless scholar inserts herself into classical paintings, rewriting centuries of art history with a single, subversive gesture.
Together, these films form a vivid mosaic of defiance, healing, and the courage to create one’s own story.
In this program
Down North
Directed by David Dominguez
Formerly incarcerated individuals build lifechanging bonds over pizza as they reintegrate back into life in Philadelphia, finding new ways to support themselves and their families one pie at a time.
Penosar
Directed by hosein fatahi
Hemat is an old shepherd who lives with his wife in Alborz mountains in Iran. In his free time in mountain he paint on the rocks what was he remembered.
LIFE MODELS
Directed by Jean Paulo Lasmar
LIFE MODELS follows Mika, a breast cancer survivor who rejects reconstruction and chooses to live flat. When she poses nude in a figure drawing class, she confronts her vulnerability, igniting a powerful story of self-acceptance, body image, and identity.
All of Us Girls
Directed by Yifeng Wang
In a series of late-night conversations, Yifeng breaks the culture of silence surrounding sexual assault by opening up to her closest friends — through their shared vulnerability, she begins to see herself as more than her trauma.
Fly Baby Fly
Directed by Stacey Lee
In a world where movement becomes memory and dance becomes healing, join us for a rare behind-the-scenes look at how artistry can transform trauma—and vice versa. This panelFeatures an in-competition screening of FLY BABY FLY, a stylized and emotionally raw portrait of choreographer Ryan Heffington (Euphoria, Chandelier, tick, tick…BOOM!) as he develops a deeply personal Broadway-bound show in the Mojave Desert.
Oceanbone
Directed by Lani Cupchoy
Stolen ancestors lie in museum vaults, waiting to return home. Oceanbone is a poetic reckoning with history, confronting the colonial theft of Indigenous remains and the urgent fight to bring them back.
Old Girl in a Tutu: Susan Rennie Disrupts Art History
Directed by Cheri Gaulke
Feminist scholar, Susan Rennie, seizes her iPhone and sneaks her queer, octogenarian body into master works of art, disrupting the narrative of the male gaze.
Dates & Times
Washington University’s Brown Hall Auditorium
November 8, 2025
2:45 pm
