After a painful breakup, art student Ben Willis develops insomnia and takes a night shift at a supermarket to fill the empty hours. He discovers he can freeze time, using his gift to study the beauty of the frozen world around him — and the sleeping customers — through the eyes of an artist.
Editorial Perspective
Sean Ellis’s Cashback is one of those rare shorts that generated enough buzz to be expanded into a feature film (released in 2006). The original 18-minute version remains the tighter, more focused work — a dreamy meditation on time, beauty, and the way heartbreak can sharpen perception. The supermarket-as-gallery conceit is handled with genuine visual poetry rather than the pretension it could easily have become.
Where to Watch
The feature-length version is widely available on streaming platforms. The original short can be found on Vimeo and YouTube.
Historical data reconstructed from archive.org snapshots of the Manhattan Short Film Festival website.
