Director: Joanne Mitchell
Ten minutes is all Broken Bird needs to sketch a childhood shaped by two worlds that never quite meet, following a girl who is learning, far too early, how to hold both halves of her identity at once.
What is Broken Bird about?
Birdie grows up biracial in a New Jersey suburb, raised by her mother in a household where the outside world's assumptions about who she is rarely match how she sees herself. Director Joanne Mitchell uses the short format to compress a coming-of-age arc into a handful of charged moments rather than a full narrative sweep, letting small gestures and glances carry the weight of a much larger story about belonging. The film sketches a household under quiet strain, where a single parent and a young daughter navigate identity, expectation, and the gap between them with more restraint than melodrama. What emerges is less a plot than a portrait, built to linger past its brief runtime.
Cast & crew
Rebecca Calder and Sacharissa Claxton anchor the short's small cast, joined by Jay Taylor, James Fleet, Jelena Moore, Steven William Moore, Jessica Yemi, and Paul Kampf, an ensemble suited to a story that depends on nuance rather than scale.
Context & significance
Broken Bird comes from the United Kingdom, released in 2024 as a short drama running roughly ten minutes, and it fits a wider tradition of short film using a tightly limited runtime to explore identity and family with an intimacy that longer features sometimes lose. The film holds a 6.4 rating on IMDb, a respectable mark for a short of its kind, and its focus on a mixed-heritage upbringing places it among a growing set of short dramas examining how children reconcile competing cultural expectations at home and in the wider world around them.
Where & how to watch
Broken Bird can be watched on K-Time with a free account login; browsing this page and reading about the film costs nothing. K-Time pairs international short films and features like this one with a Persian-language interface built for diaspora audiences, so viewers can move between global titles and Farsi-language content from the same account.