I turned 27 this year (which is weird, because I'm pretty sure I'm still 25), and my parents presented me with a terrifying DVD entitled "Home Movies." My first reaction, "Geeuuuuaaaahhhhhhhhhhh," had to do with my first instinct, which was that they had transferred to DVD the hours and hours of old VHS tapes on which my elementary-school stretch pants and I recorded "hilarious" talk-show parodies, "hilarious" cooking-show parodies, and "hilarious" reenactments of Muppet Show sketches. Hours. And hours.

But in reality, my parents had found, somewhere among boxes of forgotten things, about 30 minutes of old Super 8 movies they shot when I was age 1. AGE 1! There's no sound—just sunny, pleasantly grainy, contextless moments: a drunken croquet party; my mom, with a perm, pointing out her armpit hair; me learning to walk (walking is hard!); people who are now dead; people who are older now, but still strikingly the same. They're not full stories, just glimpses, and their incompleteness is somehow comforting—the gaps filled with potential, not frustration.

Watching a few short films for Northwest Film Forum's Short Exposure program—they're screening one locally produced short before each feature, introducing audiences to local up-and-comers—put me in mind of those old West Family Babytime Movies. Most shorts have a built-in incompleteness: questions left unanswered, characters thin, stories simplified. But sometimes it's a strength.

Craig Downing's This True Story of Dad Club (which is no longer playing, but is available online at www.vimeo.com/962026) is a terrifically effective little documentary narrative. In the plainest language, a woman describes the last few bleak years with her alcoholic father. On the screen, an unidentifiable white substance (smoke? Pigmented water? Both? Underwater smoke? Is that a thing?) swirls and undulates in shades to gray and black and back—an amazingly restrained visual for an emotional gut punch.

Manquér, by Matt Daniels (also finished screening at NWFF, but online at www.vimeo.com/1237934), is an Amélie-lite story (precious and French) about a little boy who is best friends with his bicycle. The bicycle is named Suzette. But then the bicycle is stolen! Then the bicycle falls in love. Good luck not liking this one. It's fucking adorable.

Katherine Leggett's Gray Days (screening before Hunger) is the most ambitious of the three, and also falls the shortest. It's a miniscule documentary about elderly prison inmates that barely introduces its protagonists before it's over. Lonnie, 82, in and out of prison since 1941, smacks his gums and says, "I'm not wild anymore. Do pretty much what I should do." This is the best moment in the small movie. Gray Days has so much left unchewed-on: It should be a full-length or not exist at all.

Short Exposure continues into May.