2026 Shorts Competition - Top 26
Kinolimers, the moment is here. The Kinolime Shorts Competition 2026.
26 scripts made it through out of 2,518. Read them, vote, and help us pick the Top 10. It is in your hands now, take the reins and support your favorite scripts. Voting closes October 4th.
Logline: A young priest’s first overnight shift takes a hellish turn when a group of Satanists tries to sabotage the annual ritual keeping a portal to Hell sealed beneath his church.
Logline: On a sweltering midnight in suburban Georgia, an estranged daughter sneaks home to say a goodbye she's been dodging for two years, only to find her high school drug dealer in her backyard, cleaning the pool and refusing to leave.
Logline: On Little Diomede, an Inupiaq woman fights to survive an island vanishing beneath climate change, while two miles away a Russian soldier watches from Big Diomede—until winter freezes the border into a forbidden bridge between them.
Logline: A blue door upends Ted’s life sending him into a downward spiral.
Logline: A grieving daughter can't explain why her 
late father's TV turns on every evening at 7 pm. 
Going back to find out means finally saying everything she never said to him - and to herself.
Logline: Whilst their vacation in Colombia, the unspoken differences of a German tourist couple sharpen into a moral conflict, as they get involved in a potentially violent nightly manhunt.
Logline: A desperate new hire on a mandatory trial period in a corporate warehouse discovers human remains in a crate and realizes that the job is set to take his humanity.
Logline: A farm girl furious at her mother for putting down a sick cow takes refuge with her grandfather, unaware that he has chosen to end his own pain that same afternoon.
Logline: Across four decades on the same Chicago porch, an Italian American patriarch smokes, tans, and grouses his way through life, becoming a neighborhood legend to everyone but for the family that has to deal with him.
Logline: Climate change is even turning the daily lives of hitmen upside down.
Logline: A numb young man walks Avenida Corrientes chasing a feeling he can't find when a robbery throws a closed-off stranger into his path. That night, something finally starts to feel real.
Logline: A proactive vigilante sets the stage for himself to make a citizen's arrest.
Logline: Influenced by 1970s Brazilian Rock and MPB songs on the radio, rural workers swap Odara's hunger for urban illusions, finding a favela as a concrete purgatory. Despite a full table, they discover that their new comfort costs them their visibility.
Logline: An elderly woman continues to prepare her home for her sailor husband's return. Because, as she says, sailors leave early, but they always come home late.
Logline: When their terminally ill father decrees that a fencing duel will decide the family inheritance, two estranged professional fencer siblings – one biological, one adopted – must confront whether fighting for his approval is worth the cost of their relationship.
Logline: A guarded daughter takes one final coastal road trip with her vivacious, headstrong mother, who believes they are going on vacation, before bringing her to a memory care home and confronting the painful reversal of their roles.
Logline: A mathematical genius, working as a London realtor, comes up with an unorthodox solution to fighting gentrification in his inner-city neighbourhood: orchestrating attacks on rental properties, carried out by his teenage brother’s disaffected friends.
Logline: Two inept killers find themselves in over their heads, battling other murderers in a grotesque and chaotic competition to achieve the highest kill count.
Logline: After accidentally killing a runaway cat with his car, an immigrant worker forms an unexpected bond with the animal’s memory, forcing him to face the recent loss of his grandmother in Nepal.
Logline: The story of life, with its milestones and turning points, told through the arch of a meal, each course centering around a different group of diners at the same dinner table.
Logline: In 1930's England, a journalist conducts an affair with a famous theatre actor in the London countryside, meeting there the same time every year then returning to their families back home.
Logline: A dying Argentine-American woman returns home on her dead father’s motorcycle, hiding early symptoms of the same cancer that killed him. But a chaotic birthday party traps her with an unhinged mother bent on keeping her prodigal daughter grounded.
Logline: A man who has spent years secretly medicating away a masquerade spirit only he can see finally embraces it — and becomes it.
Logline: When a lonely man confesses his suicidal intentions to an AI chat agent, everyone around him starts acting weird, and the woman who ignored him finally opens her door.
Logline: Nate, an Indigenous boy, has big dreams of making Fernley's basketball team with friends, but when he discovers he's leaving forever, he struggles with a past he can’t leave behind.
Logline: The story of a man pursued by his addiction. Literally.
