This short film program explores longing and the challenge of overcoming distance, or how that distance sometimes remains. The Blue Sunshine Love begins with a familiar story: a tourist visiting Thailand, falling in love, and soon confronting complications shaped by class, sexuality, and geography. Working Class presents a fictional manifesto from Turkish construction workers, reflecting on how the market of desire fetishizes their bodies. In Jasmin That Blooms in Autumn, a quiet valley of affection unfolds between two elderly women in India, living in separate care homes yet connected through invisible, and sometimes fragrant, love letters. Casual animates one of the most debated questions in contemporary intimacy, especially among queer women: the blurred boundary between casual and romantic relationships, and how far one allows oneself to surrender to feeling. Our Joyful Endings appears as a confessional reflection on transmasculinity and sexual joy, recalling Catholic saint iconography while searching for a deeply personal sense of fulfillment. With its iconic sound effects and screens from Grindr, Cybersex19 brings us firmly into the present. Here, people across Brazil and beyond, including immigrants and men living on the down low, navigate distances shaped by borders, nation states, and their own desires. The program closes with Fresh As Daisy, leaving us with an open question. If the distances explored throughout these films could somehow be crossed, would closeness truly follow, or would we still remain just out of reach of one another?

https://xposedfilmfestival.com/2026/shorts-8-if-i-can-smell-you-from-afar/