The short film "Hide," written by Cleveland native Justin Kohlas, is part of the Cleveland International Film Festival lineup and screens on April 16 and 17. The film centers on a wealthy family's dinner party where the main course includes chunks of flesh from a participant, dragging the polished table setting straight into grotesque excess. **Who Gets to Feast** Kohlas said he drew inspiration for "Hide" from an article about a cannibalism website he read in The Guardian. "The further I researched it, I came across real-life cases where people actually acted this out," Kohlas said. "It was one of the craziest stories I'd ever heard." The premise lands like a sick joke about privilege: a wealthy family, a dinner party, and a main course made from a participant. The horror is not just in the flesh on the plate, but in the social world that makes such a scene imaginable. Kohlas, who attended Ohio University, said, "You have highly elite, uber-rich people with too much time and money on their hands." That line, delivered by the filmmaker himself, does the work of the critique without needing any editorial help. The film's wealthy dinner table becomes a stage for the excesses of people insulated by money and status, where boredom curdles into something far uglier. **What the Film Is Doing** The short is described as pushing grotesque boundaries within the horror genre, and its placement in the Cleveland International Film Festival lineup gives that provocation a public platform. The film premiered at Screamfest in Los Angeles last October, and Kohlas is already working on turning "Hide" into a feature film. The project is not just a one-off shock piece; it is being extended, packaged and moved forward through the festival circuit. Kohlas, who lives in Los Angeles, said, "I've always wanted to get into CIFF. I have friends and family in Northeast Ohio who finally get to see what I've been doing all these years." That line places the film inside a network of family, friends and festival access, with CIFF serving as the gate through which the work reaches the region where Kohlas is from. **The Festival Machine and the Grotesque** The Cleveland International Film Festival lineup is the institutional frame here, deciding what gets screened and when. "Hide" screens on April 16 and 17, giving the film two dates inside a larger curated program. The festival apparatus turns a story about elite excess into an event for public consumption, with the audience invited to watch the wealthy devour one of their own in fiction while the real-world machinery of selection and screening keeps everything neatly contained. Kohlas's own description of the premise makes the hierarchy plain: "You have highly elite, uber-rich people with too much time and money on their hands." The film's dinner party is not just a horror setup. It is a portrait of privilege gone rotten, a closed social world where wealth and leisure become the conditions for monstrosity. The result is a horror short that leans into the genre's appetite for disgust while pointing its camera at the upper crust. The flesh on the table is fictional, but the class structure around it is not hard to recognize. The festival dates are fixed, the lineup is set, and the grotesque little banquet is ready for its audience.
