FINAL GIRLS FILM FEST 2025: life cycles shorts block
by Vannah Taylor, Staff Writer
The 10th annual Final Girls Berlin Film Festival is stacked with over 11 different expertly curated shorts blocks. That is to say that this genre fest is a feast for horror fans of any inclination. The sixth block is centered around life cycles because if there is a truth to this universe, it is that it is relentlessly cyclical. Energy and time is in constant motion as we continuously orbit through space, as the moon waxes and wanes, the tides turn, and we experience birth and rebirth, life and death. Pairing beautifully with the themes of day two’s double feature of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Sasha Rainbow’s Grafted, these six shorts tease out the existential uneasiness we feel towards our reality.
The Final Girls Berlin Film festival runs from Wednesday, March 5 to Sunday, March 9, 2025. Tickets can be found here. Additional fest coverage from MovieJawn can be found here
The Trip
Directed and written by Arabella Anderson
With the ever-growing pressures of life, the desire to take a girls trip and spend the day sunning by the pool and reading horoscopes is undeniable. When Luna, Max, and Zoe decide to take their trip to the next level, their psychedelic vice opens up hidden anxieties. Luna, portrayed by Bella Ortiz, introduces ruminations that dip this story’s toes into a pool of existential thoughts about our environmental impact. Gorgeously captured by Kelsey Talton’s subtly trippy cinematography, Ortiz’s gaze harbors a deep intensity that is almost siren-like, drawing you deeper into the trio’s hallucinations.
In Thousand Petals (En mille pétales)
Directed by Louise Bongartz
Moving away from terrors on a cosmic scale, this animated short is isolated and intimate. Using wood carvings as an inventive medium for stopmotion, the only words spoken in In Thousand Petals are, “he loves me, he loves me not,” a familiar phrase often accompanied by the plucking of flower petals. As the woman repeats these words, petals begin to litter her dwelling. The name of this short film is not only an obvious call to this game of divination typically associated with the playful determination of affection but what I believe to be a reference to the symbol of the thousand petalled lotus flower, which represents the beauty of enlightenment or awakening from our attachments. In relation to the theme of life cycles, In Thousand Petals seems to be about breaking the cycles that slowly eat away at us and moving onto a more meaningful existence.
Fia
Directed by Luciana Martínez
This animated short opens on a strange animal in the middle of a now-desolate forest. Surrounded by nothing but charred and lifeless earth, this animal wanders around searching for something to nourish with its tears. Between the bleak and barren imagery and the upsetting cries of the animal, Fia leaves the viewer with such a deep sadness and a yearning for life to emerge from beneath the ashes.
Memento Mori
Directed by Clara Prieur
One day, Mary (portrayed by Clara Prieur herself) receives an unexpected gift–a fruit tray decorated by a ribbon inscribed with suspicious dates. For the next seven days, this sign of her imminent death causes her to fixate on her mortality. Memento Mori is a macabre edible arrangement, curating an assortment of philosophical ponderings on the inevitability of death into a fun and easy to digest little journey.
Aurora
Directed by Rita Osei
“Perimenopausal” and “vampire” are words that genre fans do not get to see placed together very often. Vampires are timeless creatures, so it would seem less than obvious to pair them with a life stage associated with aging. Director, Rita Osei is bold enough to add this creative spin to vampirism, a bodily metamorphosis that, like menopause, completely overhauls one’s previous sensory understanding of their body and results in a feeling of otherness. While Aurora (Djinda Kane) is the film’s main focus, her relationship with her daughter, Sofia (Ella Rae-Smith), is also central as she has to painfully watch this change happen in her mother as well as wonder what awaits her in the future.
A Rotten Woman (Die Verdorbene)
Directed by Niamh Sauter-Cooke
“The tulips have gone rotten” is a line that perfectly encapsulates how we are made to feel as time takes its hold over our bodily existence. A Kindergarten teacher with a quaint little life discovers a rash spreading on various parts of her body. After office visits with health care providers that wish to simply prescribe birth control pills in lieu of truly listening to her concerns, the condition only worsens until what appear to be mushrooms have fully formed (safe to say, a new nightmare has been unlocked). Itching, picking and cutting away at her new appearance is only proving to make her more miserable until she learns to embrace the way her body has changed. A fleshy existence is an uncomfortable experience only exacerbated by the ways in which we attempt to deny the body’s natural state. Once we think we have made amends with that state, our bodies decide to transform. For body horror enthusiasts, Sauter-Cooke’s A Rotten Woman scratches the itch.
The Final Girls Berlin Film festival runs from Wednesday, March 5 to Sunday, March 9, 2025. Tickets can be found here. Additional fest coverage from MovieJawn can be found here.
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