“It’s Okay” at DUST by Justin Giddings and Ryan Welsh (June 3, 2021, 8:47 min)

In this Black Mirror-esque tale, a couple revisit key moments of their past, only for their memories to take an unexpected turn. … Cam and Alex are a simple couple living an un-extraordinary life, when strange things suddenly start happening to them. Will they uncover the truth before they lose one other?

Review: This is a remarkably well done short film. The directors are in control of their plot. If you don’t entirely understand what is happening at first, you will later. And that’s no easy task when the very proposition of the story involves bending time.

The human mind is structured to understand time in a certain way (one direction only). So if we are going to mess with that, we need to avoid descending into mere confusion. The truth Cam, played by Audrey Flegel, finally uncovers is, as it happens, tragic (no more spoilers) but handled in a believable way.

The ancient drama critic Aristotle (384– 322 BC, pictured) stressed the importance of the unity of a story:

That’s never more important than in a short sci-fi film. If you are a script writer anxious to jampack everything that interests you into such a film, you will make one helluva mess of your opportunity. Rather, everything you permit should contribute to a single mood, scene, or resolution.

This film achieves that goal.

Note: The featured photo is by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash.

A note re our new feature below: We sort reviewed films roughly by length so you can choose films based on how much time you have.

Five minutes or less

Fenestra, the aliens land in a domestic drama. As the alien ships loom worldwide, the cheating boyfriend thinks he can just come back… At under four minutes, Fenestra gives all the elements of a good, lean story against an alien invasion setting.

What if the future does not include smarter people? Comic scenes would dot the aerial landscape, dispelling the usual earnestness of sci-fi films. A brief sci-fi diversion like “Floaters” (4 min) reminds us that cluelessness is not a problem we can just solve or should even try to.

“This planet is not in our co-ordinates.” (3 min) A space courier crew gets a surprise when delivering a mysterious machine to a strange planet. One could almost see something like “McPherson’s Toys” happening, as an office gag, but 500 years from now.

What if an old man could see his mother again? (4:02 min) “Bygone” is a hard film to watch if you lost a loved one recently, but worthwhile. The old man is paying to use his own memories, retrieved via neuroscience imaging.

Can video games save a lone survivor? (3:51 min) “High Score” features fine animations of apocalyptic scenes of post-civilization. The “game” that turns out to be an existential struggle usually benefits from a longer treatment but the animation is well imagined.

Rescuing lost people. (5:41 min) Animated, in French, with English subtitles, but don’t let that deter you. The professional relationships in “Protocole Sandwich” sound pretty real and make it worth the watch. The animation is very good.

Ten minutes or less

In “No Guarantee,” brain uploading proves costly. In a ruined mid-21st century Britain, a couple gains tickets to a virtual world — if their brains can be uploaded. But can they? In this very short film, the theme of escape by brain uploading is handled in a refreshingly mature way with characters who face serious choices.

When “The Workplace” is anything but (9:32 min) The short film starts with a woman reassuring herself, unsettlingly, “I AM the boss.” This sci-fi short will appeal to many who have had a job at the corner of Rat and Race and sense that’s a blessing compared to the alternative.

When virtual friends are a real addiction (5:31) Animated short “Best Friends” begins with the thirtieth birthday party of a rather glum young man. As is the way with addicts, our hero cannot use his futurist fix for loneliness responsibly and ends up doing desperate things.

Watch what you wish for. There IS a tomorrow! (5:01) Carl, a lonely guy, is determined to proceed through the warning and try the Luvsik procedure, to make him fall in love at first sight. The short film features strong performances by Momo Dione and Samantha Lester, and the surprise ending avoids cliché.

We have met the aliens and they are… comb jellies. (8:15 min) The alien life form, when it appears in “Seedling,” is very well imagined. Definitely watch it for the sense of isolation when our technology bubble evaporates and for the “comb jelly” space alien.

The disabled robot vet in “A Robot Is a Robot” gets a job grooming cats. (5:49 min) Definitely worth your five minutes, in part in order to see what cartoonists can do in sci-fi with animated stills. In a research paper, Max Planck scientists recently concluded that it is not possible to hobble the danger from intelligent AI. This film offers a good illustration.

A girl with kinetic powers faces a choice. (5:06 min) Should she help relatives with activities she knows to be wrong? “Kinetic” is well executed but it breaks a fundamental rule of science fiction: There must be a clear science basis for the story premise.

A fight for the winning ticket (7:35 min) In “Here comes Frieda,” in a 2040 superstorm, engulfing the planet, a young woman gets hold of a ticket out. But does the way out really exist? Or is she just hanging on and clinging to a fragile hope?

What if there were serious wars over clouds? (9:41 min) In a world that still has technology but is desperately short of water, such wars could happen. The short sci-fi film “Oceanmaker” features pirates who steal precious water from the clouds and a pilot who challenges them.

“Kiko”: A great short but key questions unanswered A lonely retail service robot longs for a world beyond her store. (9:21 min) An agreeable short but it never addresses the question of how Charlie acquired a robot that would “want” something different from its programming.

Fifteen minutes or less

When the human race is down to its final offer … The aliens want Earth’s oceans (have they wrecked their own?) and now the fate of Earth turns on a single question: Is Henry really the world’s worst lawyer? (11:23 min) The downbeat human lawyer and the alien corporate lawyer in Final Offer achieve artful comedy by the too-little used technique of comic dialogue, not gags.

What would the ruins of “Eden” be like? — Sci-fi Saturday (11:51 min)
Scavenging for artifacts on a ruined planet, a space drifter comes across the ruins of a high-tech civilization. The derelict remains of an advanced civilization are sobering — picture our own civilization looking like that.

In a Future Market, Time To Live Is Bought, Sold (10:57 min) An employee wants to rebel against the greed and injustice but then she would run out of time … “The Bargain” raises some issues — as a thought experiment — that appear in real life in the illegal organ trade

What if insects could put humans on trial? (11:11 min) In Science+, a shrunken inventor finds himself facing Ant Justice. In a comic turnabout, the ants, seen face to face, turn out to be roughly like people, of whom — Matt discovers — he has killed nearly 3500.

Why you do NOT want to duplicate yourself. “The Unboxing Video” offers philosophy as well as dark comedy around the question of what being “oneself” means. A lonely guy, filming himself unboxing his new android replicant, discovers how hard he is to live with when there are two of him. But can he return himself?

Could stored memories bring back the dead? A nerd sees a way to bring back his friend Adam from Adam’s girlfriend’s memories (11:45 min) In Adam 2.0, the quest to bring back a dead friend from memory turns on a central question about the nature of human identity.

The artist’s android has a surprise in store for him… He makes the fateful decision to allow her to depart from her programming during a crisis. In “Muse,” the gradually humanizing android Kay raises some interesting ethical and philosophical issues about being/becoming human.

What if a new start in life were two pills away? (14:23 min) Would you feel the same about suicide? In “Cam Girl,” a woman whose life is going nowhere, largely by her own choice, learns what it means to be genuinely desperate.

In a world run by robots, a bot becomes a joker (13:12 min) The dull, dystopian atmosphere of an Australia dominated by robots, portrayed in “System Error,” is well done and worth the watch. The story prompted this viewer to consider what thoughts a robot simply couldn’t have without some kind of input from consciousness — always the Hard Problem.

Can an alternative universe save a lonely girl? (14:05 min) A girl finds fighting space aliens easier than fighting a brain haemorrhage and a sense of guilt. CARONTE ends as it must — not happily but inevitably, and with at least some sense of redemption.

A future where dreams have been privatized (14:26 min) Unfortunately, the dream Carlos wants in “I Dream” is to see his missing family again and that’s illegal … More dystopia than science fiction but the post-5G surveillance environment amid mass poverty and oppression is well imagined.

What if sweet sleep were a distant memory? (14:51 min) In a world going mad in “Don’t Forget To Remember” and dying from insomnia, a young woman may have a cure. The big challenge in writing about insomnia is not to be a cure for it. From the harrowing opening scene on, this film certainly clears that bar.

An asteroid lingers near Earth and devours time (13:23 min) Or, at any rate, it devours our perception of time, as one man discovers in “Flyby.” As the asteroid Chrono-7 hazes Earth, a man wakes up in the morning to find that he is living in his future, one he had never imagined.

In “This Time Away,” a robot helps an old fellow rediscover life (13:24 min) The robot is very well done and how he gets a name is charming. Lots of people abandon their elderly relatives, of course, so finding a helpful robot in the back yard is a pleasant fantasy.

Terrified by a Scrap Monster (11:09 min) Well, if you have never been terrified by a Scrap Monster, as in “Pinki.” you are clearly missing out. It’s fun watching a middle class South Korean business executive try to cope with the Scrap Monster. Perhaps an allegory of our big environment issues.

What if next-stage evolution children appear? (13:44 min) “Vikaari,” a sci-fi short from Sri Lanka looks at the possibilities. The story is very well done as a parable of the social risks of continuous internal warfare.

Can parents get back a dead child as an android? (14:10 min) In “Article 19-42,” they aren’t even united in their grief; they just think they must “do something” to get back a facsimile of what they remember. They have no philosophical or spiritual resources to fall back on in order to avoid this dead end.

The robot tries to learn about grief (13:37) In “Rewind,” an elderly woman buys a robot to help her when she finds herself all alone, due to tragedy. Investigating the woman’s unhappiness, the robot discovers more than it was, perhaps, intended to know.

“Speed of Time” at DUST (12:19 min): A computer nerd writing a pizza delivery program discovers that his work is way more important than he, or anyone, thought. Imagine what happens when an accomplished ground warrior busts in from another time on a quiet family at the breakfast table…

Twenty minutes or less

When terraforming Mars means “Mars”-forming people. (19:14 min) In this award-winner, the underground humans must, according to the terraforming colony’s rules, deny emotion, which pretty much guarantees a story. The “New Mars” colony embodies a contradiction: The alleged better world created by “science and logic” can’t accommodate the nature of humans.

Can a Robot Find a Better Planet Than Earth? (19:31 min) The trouble is, the robot in “Avarya” is governed by Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. After 55 habitable planets, the—by then very old—fellow is beginning to suspect something about the robot’s judgment…

“Alone” at DUST. (18:49 min) Space engineer Kaya Torres, the only survivor of a black hole, contacts an “interstellar penpal” to keep her company until she dies. She manages a desperate escape but then experiences one of the astonishing implications of time travel.

Twenty-five minutes or less

“Limbo” profiles a futurist approach to punishment (24:21). The convict must live in a vision, induced during a coma, as the victim (or bereft loved one), in an attempt to rehabilitate him by teaching empathy. For one innocent convict, it’s a nightmare of incomprehensible suffering, from which friends stage a rescue attempt.

Can we live in more than the present moment? (24:42 min) When a tech entrepreneur succeeds with time travel, he gets trapped in his own past errors. In “Container,” the time traveler is locked inside his lab and can only get out by repeated, dangerous efforts to go back in time to when the door is unlocked.

“The Beacon” (25:10 min) at DUST. Refreshingly realistic, especially the harrowing Arctic encounter where the grieving husband finds out what really happened. Not to be missed is Mark’s encounter with the bureaucrat from hell.

Forty minutes or less

“The Big Nothing” melds sci-fi and whodunit in a taut drama. (37:54) The combination of the sci-fi and detective genres takes some skill to pull off but this Australian crew succeeds. Arriving at a mining station near Saturn, Detective Lennox must interview three suspects in the captain’s murder. All have motives. Who is lying?