The Short Documentaries of Vashon Island Film Festival 2025
The short documentary block at this year’s Vashon Island Film Festival proved that powerful storytelling doesn’t require a feature-length runtime. Screening Friday morning at the Vashon Theatre, the five films in this program offered distinct perspectives and artistic approaches — from urgent calls for justice to deeply personal meditations on art, identity, and survival.
The Invisible Enemy
Directed by Douglas Brian Miller and Mark Shapiro, The Invisible Enemy is an urgent exposé revealing decades of government deception surrounding the Nevada Test and Training Range. Through the testimony of veterans like former Air Force Sergeant Dave Crete, it details how military and civilian DoD workers were unknowingly exposed to deadly radiation and chemicals — and then denied recognition, care, and compensation. I found it a powerful piece to present the need for action. The personal stories in this short documentary will open eyes and hopefully push positions towards positive change. Worth a watch.
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
In the early 1990s, Chinese Canadian gay artist Lloyd Wong began creating a deeply personal film about living with AIDS in Toronto. He died from AIDS-related illnesses before completing it, and the work was believed lost for three decades until resurfacing at The Queer ArQuives. Director Lesley Loksi Chan, who considers Wong her co-director, combines his raw, unprocessed footage with her own research notes to reflect on what it means to inherit images from queer communities and attempt to know someone through multiple takes. There’s a moment where a split screen shows Wong demonstrating how to set up an IV drip, alongside footage of him in a hospital bed receiving HIV treatment from those same kinds of bags — only now in a far more fragile state. It’s striking, not just for the contrast, but because it feels like something you’d see today on YouTube, with someone openly sharing their personal story. Wong was doing this decades before it was common. This short is a powerful capsule of a life cut short, yet still speaking through the fragments left behind.
Shanti Rides Shotgun
For three decades, Shanti Gooljar has been the driving force — literally — behind New York City’s most in-demand driving school, her unapologetic teaching style drawing everyone from A-list celebrities to the ultra-wealthy. On the chaotic streets of Manhattan, she’s a master at navigating both traffic and personalities. But the film doesn’t stop at her skill behind the wheel; it peels back layers to reveal a story of heartache and loss beneath her tough exterior. The juxtaposition of her public confidence and private vulnerability makes Shanti Rides Shotgun more than just a character portrait — it’s an intimate ride through resilience, survival, and the art of holding your lane in life.
Tiger
On the surface, Tiger is about the revival of an Indigenous family’s T-shirt business — but it’s really about art, loss, resilience, and legacy. Directed by Loren Waters, the film follows award-winning Muscogee (Creek) Nation artist Dana Tiger as she and her family reopen the Tiger Art Gallery and dust off their silkscreen to print T-shirts for the first time in 30 years. It’s a return rooted in memory: Dana’s father, celebrated artist Jerome Tiger, died when she was just five. Her mother started the gallery and shirt business to support the family, but after her brother’s murder in 1990, they closed the doors. Now, living with Parkinson’s disease and with her own career as a painter celebrating the strength of Native women, Dana — alongside her husband and children — brings the family business back to life. The film moves in an experimental, dreamlike way through grief, showing how the T-shirts, like Dana’s art, are more than merchandise; they’re a cultural symbol, a bridge between generations, and a testament to survival through creativity.
We Were the Scenery
Directed by Christopher Radcliff, this lyrical, memory-driven short follows Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che, who fled Vietnam at the end of the war in a makeshift boat to the Philippines. In an unexpected turn, the couple were recruited as extras during the filming of Apocalypse Now. What unfolds is more than a behind-the-scenes anecdote — it’s a meditation on displacement, chance encounters, and how life’s most surreal moments can be etched into personal history. The film blurs the lines between lived experience and cinematic myth, making the couple’s memories part of both Vietnamese history and Hollywood lore.
A Throughline of Resilience
Across The Invisible Enemy, Lloyd Wong, Unfinished, Shanti Rides Shotgun, Tiger, and We Were the Scenery, one theme rose to the surface: resilience. Whether fighting for recognition, preserving an artistic legacy, navigating personal loss, or reclaiming cultural identity, these shorts demonstrate the many ways people find strength in the face of adversity. As a collection, they show that even in the brief span of a short film, a story can carry the full weight of history, emotion, and hope.
– Alan Motley (@alanmotley)
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