December 21 is the shortest day of the year, a perfect moment to celebrate the versatility and power of short films. This edition of our monthly Pavilion Shorts program once more highlights this cinematic form by brings together the directors of three unique films to discuss their distinct artistic cinematic languages.

Artist-duo Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum embrace new technologies to express personal experiences of spaces of the contemporary city and countryside. The Ride (2019) combines impersonal Google Earth imagery, sparse dialogue and the sound of a heartbeat creating an emotionally gripping experience leaving room for the imagination.

In Healing Ground (2025), interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist Tamara Shogaolu gives a new life to historical archives. In this hybrid documentary about the colonial legacy Shogaolu uses artificial intelligence to emphasise the often omitted Black perspective.

Filmmaker Albert Kuhn blends personal memory and archival research to explore silence, guilt, and transgenerational history. His short film Dreams for a better past (2025) embodies this approach, weaving a family story into a broader meditation on the ways the unspoken continues to shape us.