The 78th Cannes Film Festival wrapped up on 24 May, where Filipino filmmaker Arvin Belarmino and co-director Kyla Danelle Romero world-premiered their short Agapito in the main competition section, Palme d’Or.

You can, however, still enjoy the festival vibe from the comfort of your home through four short films straight from this year’s La Semaine de la Critique (Critics’ Week), a parallel section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Critics’ Week, where Belarmino also participated last year with Radikals (starring Elora Españo), is a launchpad for emerging filmmakers around the world. Known for its rigorous curation, it showcases bold, unique cinema.

Thanks to FestivalScope.com, you can stream the four 2025 short films online for free — fresh from this year’s Critics’ Week — only until 29 May.

Here are short reviews of each, ranked by my level of satisfaction.

GLASSES

From Korea, Joung Yumi’s 15-minute silent, surrealist black-and-white animation is a breathtaking and deeply emotional exploration of the self. Yujin accidentally steps on her eyeglasses and goes out to have them replaced. During an eye exam through an autorefractor test, she is transported into her inner self.

What comes next is a series of meetings with herself in bizarre sequences. Joung, the female director of this masterclass in metaphorical narrative, delivers not just an exquisite visual spectacle but a truly immersive, meditative psychological and emotional experience.

Rendered in textured and highly detailed pencil strokes that produce a tactile effect, the short takes the audience through self-healing. The filmmaker doesn’t care to explain the external events in her protagonist’s life but instead brings us into her interior world as she navigates her demons. The broken eyeglasses symbolize how the world can appear fractured when one feels broken inside. Healing, the film suggests, begins within.

As Yujin repairs herself through simple actions of self-care, it feels transformative. In just fifteen minutes, the film captures raw, vulnerable emotion with hypnotic effect. (5 out of 5 stars)

BLEAT!

Ananth Subramaniam’s Belgian comedy in the Tamil language is co-produced by the Philippines through Bradley Liew. In dreamy black-and-white, it follows an old Malaysian-Tamil couple who hilariously discover that their male goat, meant for ceremonial slaughter, is pregnant.

Both visually rich and structurally lean, the 15-minute film offers a metaphor on queerness. It is a comical study of the ripple effect of encountering something out of the ordinary. The goat represents a human being expected to behave and live life the way society expects. The goat stands in for a person expected to conform to societal norms but who instead behaves differently, creating dissonance in the world around them. (4 out of 5 stars)

EROGENESIS

This German short in English is another visual feast. Shot in grainy, textured film quality, it follows a group of female researchers in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are no longer able to reproduce.

While they try to reproduce outside of the female body through artificial means, they also study how to achieve sexual pleasure without physical contact. The English narration, though, is overly energetic and mismatched with the languid visual pacing.

There is little emotional resonance here. It’s more like a playful exercise in cinematic craft than a story with impact. (3 out of 5 stars)

FREE DRUM KIT

The longest among the selection, this 25-minute French short tests the patience. There’s nothing bold or emotionally resonant in this tale about a woman, Lila, who wants to get rid of her ex-boyfriend’s drum set.

Her early conversations with her new roommate and friend Agathe are engaging as they debate how to dispose of the kit. When Lila decides to offer it online for free and is flooded with responses, the film becomes a quiet study on the value we assign to objects.

Lila then has a series of encounters that lead to mildly thought-provoking moments. Director Carmen Leroi uses a handheld camera to follow Lila’s experiences. However, the short lacks impact and feels overlong and dull. The apartment setting is quite lovely, though. (2 out of 5 stars)