Video Barn Fires Up @SXSW 2025

We spoke to director Bianca Poletti of Disco Pants Films back in 2022 for her witty short film Radical Honesty which brought the truth about the dating scene. In our digital world, where we swipe many times to land a date, it’s only fair to say that Radical Honesty was the absolute serum to relationships today. The beautiful short film premiered at SXSW where FERNTV was able to tap into the mind of Bianca Poletti for a great interview.

Fast forward to 2025, Bianca Poletti is back with another banger of a short in Video Barn. Paying homage to video stores, classic video recording and 80s horror films, Video Barn is something out of another dimension from Poletti but within her modern style. The film focuses on two outcasts, Jules (Gracie Van Dien) and Hannah (Reina Hardesty), who spend their summer nights at a video store. The two try to solve the town’s mysterious past but Jules goes missing.

You have to love Poletti paying homage to both video stores, classic video recording and 80s horror films. She also does it in such a way that this film looks like a parallel universe to her characters in Radical Honesty. It is because the style and colour of Poletti’s direction is profound and sharp. Now she has audiences paying closer attention to her as she includes her horror/genre vision in this short film. A couple of films that come to mind when you watch Video Barn are Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Creepshow. Everyone knows that these films were groundbreaking in the 80s and set the tone of many horror films afterwards.

Perhaps it’s revisiting these groundbreaking films that allows filmmakers such as Bianca Poletti to excel and sharpen up the fundamentals of filmmaking. You can tell that she is also having so much fun in putting together Video Barn which is the root reason why so many of us got into this industry in the first place. We here at FERNTV look forward to what Bianca Poletti is going to put together next.