Don’t be misled by the name of this offering at the ADC Theatre. Cambridge Shorts isn’t one dish you have over two hours; it’s six sides thrown in together, that taste surprisingly good. It’s always difficult to arrange films to be shown to an audience one after the other, which are generally very different in tone and content. Cambridge Shorts, however, moves seamlessly from one piece to the next, smartly using its format to space things out for the audience.

They start off with the emotionally moving short, The Result of a Rainy Day, which touches upon leisure and creativity in a life filled with the pursuit of excellence; this is followed up by the very light and occasionally hilarious It’s Okay if it’s Catchy, which portrays a world where people use pop songs to communicate. This leaves you charged up for The Long Walk, which is again a very engaging, if slightly cliched, story with beautiful visuals and brilliant acting.

This is not to take away from the intentionally humorous 7 Steps to Becoming a Student Drug-lord, which is wonderfully edited with a slight nod to Breaking Bad in the beginning as it opens with its signature twang, and Are you Popular? which winds up being about accepting who you really are, and one completely ruined suit.

All of the shorts submit to a high standard of filmmaking. Not once do you find muffled or unclear audio, a shaky hand on a camera, a scene where actors overplay or underplay their roles, or sets which were lazily chosen because authenticity would have involved more leg work. Sure, there are limits for the people who’ve made these movies, like money, and more importantly, time. But that doesn’t show up in their work. At this point, it’s just very unfair to call them student-made films, because it implicitly implies that these aren’t as good as other movies. What we have is a set of very good short films, which happen to be made by students.

Now, if you were counting, you’ll have noticed that there are only five shorts mentioned and there’s one missing (you’ll also notice that it is a bit odd that you were counting, now that you think about it, and it might be a symptom of something far more insidious). That short is, by elimination, Not a Love Poem, and it was my favourite short of the evening. It chronicles the last day of a couple who decide to mutually end things between them. It cuts between flashbacks and loud blaring horns on a train, and shows a loving couple cope with becoming lonely. While it was not what most British romantic comedy lovers would expect, this short does tell a rather moving story.

A special commendation goes to the host, who did a wonderful job of introducing all the shorts and had a steady stream of anecdotes and behind-the-scenes information for each of the films shown.

Cambridge Shorts seems so refreshingly new, with an equal number of humorous pieces thrown in with pleasantly deep and poignant ones. You are left confused as to why it’s only been a term since they debuted, and why they only play for just the one night