Friends of Sophia (23:42)
Alden Peters; IMDb; official website; YouTube

This 2024 short film was presented by Dust in 2025.

This film is set sometime in the future, in a huge tower belonging to "the company", which produces androids for fighting a war. The short begins with a woman being arrested for being "robosexual", meaning she is sexually attracted to androids (that is, a "friend of Sophia"). She is interrogated by an official of the vice police (played by Nana Visitor), who gives her an ultimatum. The story then switches to a man named Conor, who reprograms his mother's medical android, Dosso, to be able to love him. Of course, the two of them are eventually caught by the police, but there's a twist I didn't see coming. There's a certain tragic nature to the twist, but I won't spoil what I mean by that.

That's pretty much all I want to divulge of the plot. I guess it's kind of an interesting film, and an allegory for the persecution of people deemed sexual "deviants" (as well as capitalism run amuck). One interesting thing about the film is that it seems that every character in it is gay, and that seems to be the norm for society. Maybe. Honestly, there are any number of aspects of the society presented in the short film that might be interesting to delve deeper into, such as how procreation even takes place. (It looks like all babies are kept in incubators, or something.) As it is, I think it's a decent film, but not one I could manage to get as invested in as I would have liked to. Largely that's because I didn't find the central relationship particularly believable, or I didn't really feel a lot of chemistry between Conor and Dosso. Maybe if the story took place in a longer film, there would have been a chance for the relationship to be explored more, and for the characters to be more fully developed so that we could better understand who they each are as individuals and why they love each other. But the story definitely has potential, and besides, it was just cool to see Nana Visitor in a new role.