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Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival Society

The Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival Society champions Atlantic Canadian cinema by showcasing innovative short films that reflect unique voices and bold storytelling, fostering a vibrant community of filmmakers and audiences.

A HIFF 2026 Festival Pass gets you access to everything our 20th annual fest has to offer!&nbsp; Please note: While we make every effort not to turn anyone away from screenings, seating is first-come, first-served, and passes do not guarantee entry. Please arrive at least ten minutes early to each film to claim your spot!

HIFF 2026 Festival Pass

HIFF is proud to announce the North American Festival premiere of Castration Movie Anthology ii: The Best of Both Worlds! Months after last year&rsquo;s sold-out HIFF screening of Louise Weard&rsquo;s Castration Movie Anthology i., Weard headed to New York to film the next instalment, another five-hour feat of searing performances and visionary, operatic storytelling, shot on a Sony Digital8 Handycam.&nbsp; Anthology ii. follows our hero Circle as she tries to escape a trans separatist cult. A relentless horror and formidable comedy, the film feels like if Scorsese&rsquo;s After Hours were about a trans woman seeking refuge from well-wishers trying to either brainwash, abuse, or date and detransition her.&nbsp; Weard and her incredible cast of actors refuse to minimize each character&rsquo;s capacity for cruelty and harm, while never dismissing their humanity. A beautiful result of its runtime is the focus it devotes to characters who would otherwise provide only satiric one-liners or antagonism. The audience is forced to acknowledge and consider each interior world. During a more culturally literate time, the importance of honestly rendered, flawed characters as a way to connect and communicate with an audience would be more of a given. But now, the brutal grace of Castration Movie stands out as a guidepost of conviction.&nbsp;&mdash;Rebecca Falvey

Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds

Remake promises a behind-the-scenes look at the failed Hollywood attempt to remake Ross McElwee&rsquo;s 1985 documentary Sherman&rsquo;s March and instead delivers a tender and devastating meditation on parenthood and loss.&nbsp; While a reluctant McElwee awaits progress on a narrative reimagining of his most famous project, he turns his camera to his personal life, reflecting on his son Adrian&rsquo;s struggles with addiction. He flows between accounts of his professional success, his struggles with fatherhood, and his divorce, musing on their connection to each other. After Adrian&rsquo;s sudden death, McElwee reassesses his life&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; Remake is a masterclass in personal narrative. Every parent in the audience will recognize McElwee&rsquo;s struggles with guilt, the balance of personhood with the impossible job of fatherhood, and the haunting weight of hindsight. &mdash;Tori Fleming

Remake

What begins as a burglary gone wrong turns into a road movie with an unlikely duo: a petty thief focused only on what is immediately ahead of him, and an unflappable old man who is reflecting on a lifetime past. The old man&rsquo;s only wish is to be buried next to his late wife, who is currently encased in a plaster sarcophagus. As the two men negotiate their strange dynamic, questions pertaining to love arise&mdash;do we get to choose who we love, or what we do for them? The first medium-length film of editor-turned-director Nguyễn L&ecirc; Ho&agrave;ng Ph&uacute;c, Bury Us in a Lone Desert will catch you off guard in all ways. Come for the stylistic play and slapstick hijinks; stay for the surprising emotionality that will likely induce your own meditation on mortality. &mdash;Kelly Li

Bury Us in a Lone Desert

Celebrate 20 years of HIFF with filmmakers, friends, and the folks who&rsquo;ve kept independent film thriving in Halifax.

HIFF 20th Anniversary Party

HIFF&#39;s annual Atlantic Auteurs program is back with nine short films by Atlantic Canadian filmmakers. These films are connected by their dedication to a singular voice and fearless exploration of their medium and little else, a testament to the wide-reaching talent in our region.&nbsp; Marissa Sean-Cruz opens up the program with Rat + Cammie = Forever, an exploration of Rat Girl&rsquo;s relationship with a literal webcam. We later leave the internet for the club in Brandy Marien&rsquo;s hypnotic ACCISMUS, a dramatic horror film exploring men&#39;s insecurities through dance, lust, and flashing lights. Later in the program, Meg Hubley brings back the VHS aesthetic with sharp dialogue and an absolutely wild use of camcorder zoom in Jane and Jocelyn.&nbsp; Catch these and more in HIFF&rsquo;s most anticipated screening of the year.

Atlantic Auteurs

Punku&nbsp;is the third feature from Peruvian filmmaker J.D. Fern&aacute;ndez Molero, whose last film Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes) earned Rotterdam&rsquo;s Tiger Award and was Peru&rsquo;s submission to the 89th Academy Awards. His latest follows Ivan, a missing child who&rsquo;s found with an injured eye deep in the Amazon by Meshia, a Matsigenka teenager. After she joins him in the southern city of Quillabamba for his recovery, Meshia adapts to the temptations of her new city life, while Ivan faces a barrage of threatening visits from mythic creatures. Punku&mdash;a Quechua word meaning &ldquo;gateway&rdquo;&mdash;is crafted from Molero&rsquo;s childhood memories and stories from his family, and combines celluloid, digital photography, and stop-motion animation. It&rsquo;s a coming-of-age film that seeks answers in the thresholds: between child and adult, tradition and modernity, reality and the world of dreams. &mdash;Evan Bower

Punku

A reclusive young man named Julian Castronovo moves into an apartment he believes was once inhabited by an enigmatic art forger. Absorbed in a placid frenzy of uncovering clues and tenuous connections, he finds himself tangled in the cobwebs of an old murder conspiracy: the ideal subject for his newest film. Debut&mdash;the literal feature debut of filmmaker Julian Castronovo&mdash;was made with nearly no money but is utterly gripping in its rich evocation of the paranoid imagination and its aesthetic specificity. Lo-fi Zillenial technological artefacts, like Photo Booth and The Sims, exist alongside high-fidelity media, like scans of evidentiary materials and documentation of photographic and performance art (also created by Castronovo). Debut arrives from the self-cataloguing of a generation that understands itself as always being perceived, while peering over into the abyss of self and truth. &mdash;Kelly Li

Debut or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued

Every year, our Canadian Shorts program showcases a selection of bold national shorts that are pushing the boundaries of filmmaking in this country.&nbsp; This year&rsquo;s special late night edition offers a collection of films that ruminate on the people and places we&rsquo;ve lost, the ones that have persevered, and what that says about who we are right now.

Canadian Short Films for Late at Night

Maddie&#39;s Secret follows Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher at the studio of the viral online cooking channel Gourmaybe. She spends her days working alongside her best friend Deena in the shadow of the channel&#39;s cut-throat superstar Emily, and her nights perfecting vegetarian dishes to serve to her adoring husband. After one of her videos goes viral, Maddie surpasses Emily&#39;s stardom and becomes a Gourmaybe sensation. With the pressures of fame comes the return of Maddie&#39;s long-dormant struggle with an eating disorder.&nbsp; Written, directed, produced, and starring alt comedy star John Early, this ode to the &#39;Movie of the Week&#39; is full of the best of L.A.&#39;s alt comedy scene, including Early&#39;s frequent collaborator Kate Berlant. With gossamer visuals and an &lsquo;80s-inspired score, Maddie&#39;s Secret starts as a parody and ends up delivering a sharp critique of influencer culture. &mdash;Tori Fleming

Maddie's Secret

Set in the summer of 2016, Drinking and Driving follows best friends Palmer and Iris (played by Vancouver-based co-directors Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank), waitressing together in the same small town they grew up in. They kill the rest of their time looking for the next party, drug run or drive to a lake, seeking liminal pockets of connection and relief between calls from mentally unstable boyfriends and mothers. The world Fast and Frank evoke is bruising and familiar. There is an empathetic and astute understanding of every character, on and off-screen. Drinking and Driving feels like watching gauzy, melancholy footage of memories you shouldn&rsquo;t long for, but sometimes do. Fast and Frank beautifully explore the insular, co-dependent worlds of instant gratification created by low-income twenty-somethings, hiding from the world together in a procession of sweaty bedrooms. Fast has described their film as a &ldquo;period piece about how fucked [Jillian and I] would be if we never left,&rdquo; but anyone who was in their 20s in the 2010s may also experience a disarming nostalgia for a less isolating and perpetually online time, when our desperate clawing for connection and instant gratification was messy, intimate and in-person. &mdash;Rebecca Falvey

Drinking and Driving

Filmed on a 2008 Sony Ericsson phone, and passing its three-hour runtime at a blithe stroll, Dry Leaf might be the most quietly iconoclastic work of the 2020s. Alexandre Koberidze&rsquo;s latest is his much anticipated follow-up to 2021&rsquo;s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, which earned him a reputation for esoteric storytelling, disarming photography, and indulgence in soccer-obsessed tangents. Each of these signatures is magnified in Dry Leaf, which follows a father (played by Koberidze&rsquo;s real-life dad) on a search for his missing daughter, meandering through the abandoned soccer fields of the Georgian countryside with her (invisible) best friend as his guide. When projected, its lo-fi pixels crackle and compress like a Seurat in motion, offering a silent rebuttal to modern cinema&rsquo;s HD sheen and the very notion of an &ldquo;industry standard.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s a fitting milieu for a film of disappearances&mdash;disappearing technologies, bodies, ways of life&mdash;that ponders the vanishing act each of us is in the process of pulling, and reminds us whatever lingering pleasures remain in the world are worth finding. &mdash;Evan Bower

Dry Leaf

Rhayne Vermette has likened Levers, her second feature, to a curse that she&rsquo;s unleashed, and over the course of its 95 minutes one does get the sense some great new crack in the world has opened. In Ste. Anne, MB, after a monument is unveiled to show the &ldquo;love and presence of the Lord to all,&rdquo; the sun disappears for one day. Life goes on in the Red River Valley&mdash;where bears haunt doorways and tears are siphoned for holy water&mdash;and the darkness serves as an uncanny backdrop to a place that&rsquo;s more profoundly broken. Events unfold like a 16mm dream, chapter-marked by tarot cards of Vermette&rsquo;s invention and dictated by chance, fate, or something more sinister. That&rsquo;s until a civil servant begins gathering symbols and tracking a mysterious sculptor, uncertain whether the clues will uncover answers or obscure them in a new kind of shroud. Levers&nbsp;cements Vermette as one of the most singular artists working in film today, nationally or otherwise. And with the entrancing score of Bret Parenteau and lenses of analogue dream team Ryan Steel, Heidi Phillips and Kristiane Church, she may have landed on the cinematic ideal: an act of genuine collaboration true to a voice that&rsquo;s all her own. &mdash;Evan Bower

Levers

A HIFF 2025 Festival Pass provides access to everything this year&#39;s fest has to offer, including four days of incredible screenings, audience Q&amp;As, artist talks and more! PLEASE NOTE: While seats are held for passholders at every HIFF screening, a festival pass does not guarantee entry. Rush tickets will be available to fill empty seats 10 minutes before each screening, so please arrive 15 minutes before showtime to claim your spot.

HIFF 2025 Festival Pass

Castration Movie Anthology I. Traps

A Want in Her

<span fr-original-style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:#0e101a;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;" style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(14, 16, 26); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; box-sizing: inherit;">Animation nerds and Janeane Garofalo stans unite! Boys Go To Jupiter&nbsp;is the debut feature film from 3D-artist and animator Julian Glander. With its dreamy colour scheme and lo-fi music, this delightful animated film will lull you into a surreal Floridian landscape in the lawless time between Christmas and New Year. The coming of age story follows Billy 5000, a teenager determined to make $5,000 by exploiting a glitch in a food delivery app.&nbsp; <span fr-original-style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:#0e101a;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;" style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(14, 16, 26); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; box-sizing: inherit;">Boys Go To Jupiter has an all star cast featuring comedians Janeane Garofalo, Jack Corbett, Chris Fleming, Cole Escola, Sarah Sherman and Julio Torres. Made completely on Blender, this film is a must see for all animation lovers. &mdash;Tori Fleming

Boys Go to Jupiter

The Atlantic Auteurs program returns with an enthralling lineup of nine short films by filmmakers in our region. Though far-ranging in style and perspective, many of these shorts are united in their exploration of self-mythmaking as a means to orient oneself within the universe, and in turn, propose a new universal order. The sensuous cosmos of Glory&rsquo;s Hole Antiverse is birthed into existence at the whims of a celestial being, with pixels, molecules, and silver halide crystals fusing and splitting as Kay Slauenwhite experiments with analogue, digital, and transfer technologies. &nbsp;In egosurfing, Andrew Deveaux uses his own genealogical history to trace the construction of and re-write identities, narratives, and meanings within a colonial past and present. In A. Laurel Lawrence&rsquo;s&nbsp;Pan and Syrinx, a reimagined ancient Greek myth metamorphs a bucolic queer romance into something seductively dangerous and existential. Catch these and more at HIFF 2025&rsquo;s showcase of innovative voices from the Atlantic Region. &mdash;Kelly Li

Toxic is the debut feature from Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė. The film follows 13-year-olds Marija and Kristina as they attempt to escape their hometown through careers as international models. The two teens develop a complex friendship as they both try to manipulate their bodies as best they can while enrolled in the local modeling school. This unlikely story of friendship features incredibly mature and nuanced performances by first-time actors Vesta Matulyte and Ieva Rupeikaite. Toxic explores girlhood, body image, and men&rsquo;s exploitation of women and girls with care and unflinching honesty. This film deals heavily with body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Viewers are encouraged to watch with care.&nbsp; &mdash;Tori Fleming

Toxic

Canadian Shorts

Cloud

Bathed in sunlight and the warm glow of nostalgia, Lost Chapters captures moments of a family&rsquo;s life in Caracas. After years of living overseas, Ena has returned to her childhood home to search for a sense of grounding. She spends her days rifling through books alongside her father who is on a mission to archive rare Venezuelan titles, in order to protect Venezuela&rsquo;s cultural heritage from the grasp of dictatorship. The two spend time with Ena&rsquo;s lovely grandmother, who too is on her own journey of identity as she loses her memory. When Ena happens upon a forgotten Venezuelan author, her unmooredness is catalyzed into an obsessive quest of her own, which unveils an intuitive interconnectedness between these writings, her grandmother&rsquo;s memories, and her search for self-identity. The debut feature of filmmaker Lorena Alvarado, Lost Chapters is a remarkable meditation on the quiet hours of life, on what we pass on to our future selves and generations, and on what lingers even when forgotten on the surface. &mdash;Kelly Li

Lost Chapters

Over the first half of this decade, cinematographer Carson Lund and the Omnes Film collective have turned a critical eye to the rituals of small-town America, offering a refreshing, esoteric new vision for the possibilities of independent film in the process. Now, in Eephus, his directorial debut, Lund finds a microcosm of the nation&rsquo;s folksy charms and societal ills in its national pastime.&nbsp; Eephus tracks the final game of a men&rsquo;s rec league on a New England ball field set to be demolished the following day. As their day-game extends late into the night, the players go to increasingly desperate lengths to keep it going, sensing that once it ends they&rsquo;ll be incapable of finding an excuse to spend time with each other again. Far from the skilled play and high-stakes drama of the typical sports picture, Eephus is the rare work to capture the sad, complicated allure of sport for the average unremarkable player. Matching its rhythm to the game&rsquo;s crawling pace and brusque dugout banter, the film basks in the many ways baseball is at odds with modern living, examining it not so much as a contest, but a fading framework for connection. &mdash;Evan Bower

Eephus

Blue Sun Palace

There, There [+ HIFF Open Field short film (for once I dreamed of you)]

Used to pay for merch while in-person at the HIFF 2026 Box Office.

Used to pay for merch while in-person at the HIFF 2026 Box Office.

Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival Society

Past events

Past events

HIFF 2026 Festival Pass

Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds

Remake

Bury Us in a Lone Desert

HIFF 20th Anniversary Party

Atlantic Auteurs

Punku

Debut or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued

Canadian Short Films for Late at Night

Maddie's Secret

Drinking and Driving

Dry Leaf

Levers

HIFF 2025 Festival Pass

Castration Movie Anthology I. Traps

A Want in Her

Boys Go to Jupiter

Atlantic Auteurs

Toxic

Canadian Shorts

Cloud

Lost Chapters

Eephus

Blue Sun Palace

There, There [+ HIFF Open Field short film (for once I dreamed of you)]

More ways to support us

HIFF 2026 Merch Sales

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