Hollywood, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/31/26 – The Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival returns to Hollywood August 13–23, 2026, presenting hundreds of short films at the TCL Chinese Theatres and venues throughout Ovation Hollywood. Among this year’s animated selections is Stephen P. Neary’s acclaimed Living with a Visionary, narrated by James Cromwell.
Based on the true story of a couple married for 50 years, Living with a Visionary explores the strange, tender and often heartbreaking reality of caring for a spouse whose illness has transformed the world she sees.
When Diana wakes, if she has slept at all, she tells her husband about giants carrying trees and bushes. Children play games in their bedroom. A man with no legs spends the night beside her, while another visitor, whom she calls the Flowery Man, is described as very nice.
One morning, she asks her husband whether he saw the opera performed the previous night. After decades together, they have attended many operas, but this one supposedly unfolded in their own backyard, complete with a stage, costumes and dramatic lighting.
Her husband cannot see what she sees. At first, he tells her he does not believe her. He eventually realizes, however, that belief is not the real issue. It is a matter of perception. Diana inhabits a reality inaccessible to him, and she considers his inability to see it a great pity.
That simple exchange is the emotional center of the film.
Rather than treating Diana’s hallucinations merely as frightening symptoms, Neary presents them as vivid, mysterious visions filled with imagination, humor and sadness. The animation allows the familiar and fantastical to overlap, placing giants, children and operatic performances inside the ordinary spaces of a long marriage.
Cromwell’s restrained narration gives the story warmth without pushing it into sentimentality. Beneath the surreal imagery is an honest portrait of caregiving: the exhaustion, confusion and devotion involved in loving someone whose perception of reality has dramatically changed.
The title itself is meaningful. Diana is not defined only by her illness. She is called a visionary, a woman who sees an extraordinary world that others cannot enter.
Winner of the animation prize at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Living with a Visionary arrives at HollyShorts as a deeply compassionate meditation on Parkinson’s disease, marriage, memory and enduring love.
The film reminds us that loving someone does not always mean seeing exactly what they see. Sometimes it simply means listening when they describe the opera taking place in the backyard.
Screening Information
Living with a Visionary is an official selection of the 22nd HollyShorts Film Festival, taking place August 13–23, 2026, at the TCL Chinese Theatres and venues throughout Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles. The individual screening date, program and showtime should be confirmed through the official HollyShorts schedule once posted.
