This year's festival features 30 stunning short films and one magnificent feature film that all prove you don’t need big bucks to make a sweet movie. Working in formats from digital video to 35mm, the hilo filmmakers create funny shorts, animated experimentals, hard-hitting documentaries and wondrous movies that defy description. The subjects covered in the films range from competitive table-setting to Shaquille O’Neal’s Irish ancestry with films about ninjas, crossing the street and losing your mind thrown in too.
The directorial influences run from Wes Anderson to Wim Wenders to whoever it was that thought up Degrassi Junior High.

Special feature presentation – Monster Road.
The 1st prize winner in the 2004 Slamdance Feature Documentary competition and the Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary the film is made by hilo (’01 and ’02) alum Brett Ingram and Jim Havercamp.
Monster Road illuminates the fantastical life of Bruce Bickford who for the last 50 years has been quietly making claymation movies on a lonely road in the Seattle suburbs.
This brilliantly wonderous and sweeping film is as much about one man's obsession with his work as it is about his dubiously functional relationship with most of the outside world. Aside from contact with his father (who suffers from Alzheimers), and his legions of "little guys" made out of clay, Bickford's is an intensely isolated existence. Stunning photography combines with a great soundtrack by the band Sharkquest to create a captivating movie suggesting that maybe being alone is not the same as being lonely - at least not when you've got an infinite number of supernatural worlds waiting to be molded and filmed in your basement.