In English, German, Albanian and Pashtun with English subtitles. Rating unavailable. Now playing.

This year’s batch of live-action shorts add up to 103 mostly grim minutes, with only two out of five films not super-dark fare—and even those are pretty melancholy.

The two harshest stories were made by Americans who found themselves in Kosovo and Afghanistan in wartime. Set during the Serbian atrocities of 1998 and today, Jamie Donoughue’s 21-minute “Shok” follows a young survivor looking back on a tragic childhood. Henry Hughes’s slightly longer “Day One” is a more conventional, almost TV-like study of an Afghan-American interpreter whose mettle is tested on her first mission. (Apparently, it’s being spun into a full-length feature.)

Patrick Volrath’s 30-minute “Everything Will Be Okay”, a German/Austrian production, is the acting centrepiece here. The whole time is spent with Austrian TV veteran Simon Schwarz as a newly divorced dad who picks up his young daughter, played by an even more astonishing Julia Pointner, who quickly realizes that this won’t be a typical weekend visit.

The program’s shortest offerings, at under 15 minutes each, leaven their tricky situations with much-needed humour. Basil Khalil’s “Ave Maria” finds a family from a dubious Israeli settlement having an automotive mishap outside a convent in the West Bank. Once again, religious rituals ensure that problem-solving is difficult for everyone involved.

And in the standout “Stutterer”, young Shakespearean actor Matthew Needham plays a handsome London typographer with a love of language and an eloquent inner voice that is defeated in real life. When his online squeeze threatens to show up in person, his world is disrupted, making writer-director Benjamin Cleary the filmmaker to watch in this program.