There’s a mere matter of hours to watch what you can in the virtual festival and vote vote vote! And at the end, there will be a Chicago announcement! I am going to highlight a couple more short films that you definitely have time to check out before the final votes are in!
I feel badly it’s taken so long to get around to highlighting Alway Enough, because the creative team behind it (Regina Oliver & Keegan Jones) is so obviously passionate about their film, this festival, and mental health. It sounds like it is picking up some steam in the festival circuit so you will probably still have chances to see it, but you can see it here for FREE right now!
Always Enough is a highly dreamlike and symbolic film about mental health, generational trauma, and quiet resilience. I feel like it strikes a very good balance between being a more experimental art film with its use of bare-bone visuals to convey its message, with enough of its story being delivered in a haunting voice-over monologue to appeal to the more narrative-oriented viewer. Still, there’s enough left to interpretation in the imagery of a flickering television, a mirror, and the bandaged wounds of past trauma to carry its tone-poem about self-image and self-acceptance on a parallel track to the delivered words. With the many more surreal, experimental art films we received this year, I feel like this is one that has some of the broadest audience appeal.
You still have some time to watch Always Enough in Shorts Block No. 4 of the virtual festival: Always Enough | Shorts Block No. 2 | Mental Filmness 2025 Virtual Festival
And you can still cast your virtual vote until 10 p.m. Central tonight!
