There's a moment in the How to Shoot a Ghost trailer—maybe two minutes in—where Jessie Buckley stares into the camera with blue hair and a nose ring, and you can feel the Kaufman signature creep under your skin. Not horror in the cheap sense, but the uncanny dread that comes when you're reminded that everything you're living now is already slipping into the past. Gorgeous. Grating. Gorgeous again.
Kanopy unveiled the first trailer this week for Charlie Kaufman's new short film, premiering right now at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition). It's his first directorial work since I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), and instead of another sprawling feature, Kaufman funnels his existential obsessions into a 27-minute short set in Athens, Greece. The premise: two recently dead strangers wander the city as ghosts, colliding with the noise of history and the loneliness of the present. One was a translator, the other a photographer—outsiders in life, still outsiders in death.
What makes it Kaufman is not the conceit—ghosts in a European capital—but the textures: street photography, archival footage, family videos spliced into the living fabric of the film. It's like he's whispering: the now is already then, today's crowd is tomorrow's phantasm. In Venice, the intro leaned into that same fatalism: “those of us living today become the ghosts of tomorrow.”
Jessie Buckley (barely recognizable) leads alongside Josef Akiki, both dissolving into the landscape rather than dominating it. And that's the point. Kaufman has always wrestled with obliteration—of the self, of memory, of art's permanence. Adaptation. chewed its own tail. Synecdoche, New York collapsed theater into death. Now, How to Shoot a Ghost feels like the stripped-down sketchbook of a man still terrified and fascinated by what sticks after we're gone.
Produced by Isabelle Deluce and Emily McCann Lesser, with a screenplay by poet Eva H.D., the short isn't angling for mainstream release (no distribution dates yet, just Venice for now). But in the festival corridors, you can already hear cinephiles buzzing—it's not a footnote but an extension of Kaufman's legacy. His cinema has never offered answers. Only mirrors that fog the longer you stare.
Watch the trailer below. If you feel unsettled, you're in the right headspace.
📺 Watch the trailer on YouTube
What We Should Notice About How to Shoot a Ghost
Kaufman in Short Form
At just 27 minutes, he compresses the same existential weight of his features into a compact, bruising dose.
Jessie Buckley's Transformation
Blue hair, nose ring, almost unrecognizable—her casting alone signals Kaufman's obsession with identity mutability.
Athens as a Stage of the Dead
The film's setting isn't decorative; it's layered with centuries of ghosts, real and imagined.
Archival Collisions
Street photos, historical reels, home movies—all mashed against the narrative, blurring fiction with memory.
Venice Premiere Matters
Unveiled at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, the short lands with the prestige of a major stage, even outside competition.
