Brooklyn filmmaker Anthony Koithra’s debut original animated short, Machines Learning, premieres this October at NYC Indie Shorts Awards, Newport Beach Film Festival, and the Oscar-qualifying San Jose International Short Film Festival. The darkly comic film follows a bullying factory worker whose robots observe his behavior, learn from it, and eventually turn on him. It asks a timely question: if our machines are learning, what are we teaching them?
Created almost entirely solo over two years, apart from an original score by Tyson Cazier, the eight-minute film turns anxieties about AI, labor, and power into a mechanical uprising culminating in a giant kaiju robot chase. Koithra wrote, directed, and animated the film, working primarily in Unreal Engine.
“The machines in this story don’t become violent because they are evil, they’re just reflecting the behavior modeled for them,” says Koithra.
October 2026 screenings
NYC Indie Shorts Awards: October 4 at 3 p.m., Block 5, “Dreamer,” at Cinema Village in New York. Tickets.
Newport Beach Film Festival: October 17 at 1:15 p.m., “Teens & Short Tweens.” Tickets.
San Jose International Short Film Festival: October 24 at 1:30 p.m., “The World Beyond.” Tickets.
All screening times are local. More information and the full press kit are available at Locodrome.
Locodrome is the creative home of independent animated filmmaker Anthony Koithra. Originally from India and now based in Brooklyn, Anthony makes genre films that smuggle serious questions into stories about robots, aliens and vampires, and builds tools for the real-time animation community.
Read Motionographer’s earlier story about the making of Machines Learning.
Follow: Locodrome on Instagram | YouTube | Anthony Koithra on LinkedIn.