Fun in Shorts (2026 edition)
Sunday, June 21, 2026, 10:30 AM, Castro Theatre
Saturday, June 27, 2026, 12:30 PM, Roxie Theatre
- 😁 “Sleazy Tiger,” dir. James Ley, 2025, UK, 15 min.
- 😁 “Minister Chucky,” dir. Graham Kolbeins & Jonathan Andre Culliton, 2025, USA/Canada, 11 min.
- 🤩 “Sunday Lunch,” dir. Lyndon Henley Hanrahan, 2025, UK, 15 min.
- 🤩 “Sunday Sauce,” dir. Matt Campanella, 2025, USA, 15 min.
- 🙂 “The Waddles,” dir. Max Jenkins, 2026, USA, 12 min. 🌐 World premiere
- 😁 “Wife Wife,” dir. Sara Werner, 2026, USA, 6 min. 🌐 World premiere
- ❓ “Flight Risk,” dir. Mohammad Awad, 2025, Australia, 16 min. (not yet reviewed)
(The shorts may be screened in a different order from the listing here.)
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| Alan Cumming in Sleazy Tiger |
Frameline blurb: Hopeless but horny romantic Alan is determined to do things differently on his date with vegan hottie Blair who he thinks might be his future husband. But when Blair gives Alan a jar of homemade kimchi, Alan gets aroused and finds himself in Horny Hell, struggling to find the line between metaphor and reality and even reckoning with his inner Alan Cumming on his quest to get back to his date.
It’s silly and surreal, but with real heart and a sex-positive attitude. And you can’t go too far wrong with anything with Alan Cumming. Some online reviews have said things like “not for the weak stomach,” but I think that’s substantially overselling the bizarre bits. I generally don’t like blood or icky goop in a film at all, but I was fine with Sleazy Tiger. Highly recommended.
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| Minister Chucky (Chucky as a bong) |
Frameline blurb: On Election Night 2024, filmmakers Graham Kolbeins and Jonathan Andre Culliton decide to flee the impending return of Donald Trump and seek safety across the border. Kolbeins, a nonbinary Canadian, and Culliton, an American trans man, take us on a wild road trip from California’s high desert to Las Vegas.
Determined to make the most of their Sin City send-off, the couple hits a queer-coded bucket list of Vegas hotspots: Omega Mart, Drag Race Live, and the Punk Rock Museum, among others. But the true climax comes when Kolbeins and Culliton celebrate their defiant queer love by hiring Minister Chucky (yes, that Chucky) to officiate their wedding in a ceremony that’s as joyful as it is surreal.
CONTENT WARNING (from the film itself): Language, weed, explosions, killer dolls
They have to get married to have the option to move to Canada, so … trip to Las Vegas! And who should a couple of unconventional filmmakers hire to officiate the wedding? Chucky, the killer doll from the Child’s Play films, or at least someone dressed in a Chucky costume. Fortunately, they fast forward through quite a lot of the actual ceremony, filled with profanities from Chucky, and focus more on the other aspects of the trip. It’s a cute, fun travelogue of an interesting couple of horror movie fans responding in their own style to the real-life horrors following from the 2024 election. Highly recommended.
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| Sunday Lunch |
Frameline blurb: Grace, a young lesbian from a devout Catholic family, finally summons the courage to come out to her parents — on the most sacred day: Sunday lunch. But every time Grace tries to speak her truth, her mother, Susan, deploys increasingly absurd distractions to preserve the family's picture-perfect façade. What follows is a chaotic, laugh-out-loud farce that collides faith, family, and identity in a way that’s as heartwarming as it is hilariously over the top.
If your coming out to your parents had half the farcical melodrama of this family dinner — heaven help you! (but still watch this film as a catharsis) For most of us, though, it’s just a silly nightmare of what might have been in a funhouse mirror universe. Must see.
No spoilers, but I will give you one pull quote from the priest, setting the tone of the film:
“We must never give up hope. If you’d have told me in the 90s when I was selling my body for blow in the back alleys of Berlin, that I would be juggling Sunday lunch offers from my parishioners… God is good.”
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| Sunday Sauce |
Frameline blurb: A repressed Italian-American father is thrust into his worst nightmare when his online crush shows up to his family’s traditional Sunday Sauce dinner. Starring Cathy Moriarity and Matthew Risch.
Blorp, blorp, blorpblorp. Even those of us who’ve never used Grindr are by now familiar with the alert sound. Gino (Matthew Risch) is putting out his “discreet daddy” profile, and getting some promising responses, but they don’t quite seal the deal. Then, lo and behold, who shows up for Sunday dinner but the twunk himself.
Cute, well done, with just enough Italian family melodrama to keep the comedy on track without being overwhelming. Must see.
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| The Waddles |
Frameline blurb: A photo plunges Joy (Sophie von Haselberg) into despair. Max (Max Jenkins) convinces her to join him in getting a cosmetic procedure and then hiding away in Palm Springs over the holidays to convalesce. But their friendship changes. Stars Von Haselberg (who you might remember from Poreless in last year's Fun in Shorts) and Jenkins (making his directing debut here) co-wrote this quippy, clever short with Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, the Oscar-nominated screenwriters of May December.
An amusing premise, two friends decide to get a questionable cosmetic procedure to reduce their neck wattles, and then disappear to Palm Springs to recuperate. The story drags a bit for the last third, with some plot elements that serve neither the story nor the humor, in a way that doesn’t at all suggest Oscar-nominated screenwriting, but it’s still reasonably fun. Recommended.
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| Wife Wife |
Frameline blurb: In this hilarious sequel to Frameline49's Girlfriend Girlfriend... After two femme-presenting queer women get married on the beach, a group of three cishet men tell them “congratulations.” As the couple thanks the group, the men propose that they have a drink together and that the couple should “go grab their husbands.” Via this stereotypical heteronormative assumption, the wives are transported to a hyper-queer-affirming world containing queer couples dressed in their wedding best, but before they can join these empowering beautiful humans the wives must defeat their own inner colonial heteronormative insecurities.
Another cute entry from the scissor cult, with one of the more surreal answers to how to respond to heteronormativity. Highly recommended.
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| Flight Risk (Mohammad Awad) |
Frameline blurb: Muhammad’s fruity holiday plans hit a roadblock when he gets stopped by airport security and is accused of running off to join ISIS. While he desperately needs to catch his flight, he’d still like to have some fun along the way. Based on a true story.
Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, I have not yet been able to review this short. I will update this post if I get to see it before the Frameline screening.
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