Anareta
2025 · 45m · UK
Directed by Daniel Boocock
Genres: action, fantasy, sci-fi
A determined woman named Enola traverses a ravaged, plague-infected post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of the final remnants of civilization, confronting both external dangers and internal psychological conflicts along the way. The film blends dystopian fantasy and brutal action with intimate character study as Enola becomes 'a little bit of light left in an immensity of dark.'
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 45-minute short that refuses to be a short — Boocock just built a wasteland and told the runtime to go to hell, and I respect the audacity.
At 45 minutes Daniel Boocock's post-apocalyptic Liverpool indie occupies the awkward no-man's-land between short and feature — admirable ambition, but the runtime mismatch with festival programming is a real obstacle, and Survivalist-adjacent material needs that exposure to land.
At 45 minutes it's deliberately unclassifiable — too long for shorts, too short for features — which is interesting structurally but also a real risk. Post-apocalyptic survival is a crowded genre and the synopsis doesn't suggest a sharp differentiator.