Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

While expanding consciousness can be generative, it can also be discomforting, as the First Look 2026 avant-garde shorts program “Little Stabs” suggests. Deriving its name from Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), these twelve films encapsulate Jacobs’s “expansion of consciousness.”

Under soft lighting, amidst her drab surroundings, Hideko Takamine shines. As she and Tomioka open a bottle of shochu, Naruse keeps Yukiko centered in the foreground while Tomioka faces her in profile at the periphery of the frame.

Each of the eleven filmmakers activates celluloid’s formal potentials while also negotiating the tensions among technologies that irrevocably alter our world—and ways of seeing.

The full scale of our emotions is cinematically clarified throughout these 13 films, chronicling a continuous transmutation of feeling into thought.