This fall, the fifth edition of Nitehawk Cinemas Shorts Festival hits the Brooklyn theater, bringing with it yet another slate of genre-defying short films. In an age when feature-length movies are finding homes in digital spaces, Nitehawk asks cinephiles to head to its physical location to experience the bite-sized stories short filmmakers are creating today. Because short films appear on a fewer platform s, neighborhood film festivals that celebrate them one are worth the trip.

And those stories pack a punch. Short films tend to be, well, shorter than those feature-length originals stuffed in your Netflix queue. They also tend to be more experimental, beholden to a smaller budget and produced in a shorter time span. That quicker pace is advantageous; it allows filmmakers to respond more swiftly to the tenor of today, whether they want to engage directly with the politics dominating our screens or reflect more subtly the chilling fallout of recent traumatic events.

For the filmmakers screening new shorts at Nitehawk this November, it amounts to both.

More than ever before, the agility of short filmmaking allows filmmakers to address the increasingly unstable world in a remarkably relatable way, Caryn Coleman, Nitehawks director of programming and special projects, told HuffPost. The short films in the Nitehawk Shorts Festival are certainly a part of this array of voices that arent simply imbued with the political climate but of the more humanizing aspects we need reminding of, such as culture, family and love.

Ahead of the festival, which HuffPost is covering as a media partner, Coleman treated us to a preview of the many shorts on deck. Check out a sampling of the films you can see in-person beginning Nov. 7, below:

1. Yes, God, Yes