In 2006, as Israeli shells relentlessly rain down on Beirut, Sariah (13), her older sister Nayla and their mother take refuge in the mountains, making sure not to mention the war raging in Lebanon. Sharp tensions between the three women soon resurface, and the rivalry between the two sisters escalates when Nayla's boyfriend pays her a visit
During a hunting day in rural Spain, a father struggles to accept that his adult son is moving abroad, dealing with the feelings of being left alone.
In the violent streets of Mexico City, Joel leads a double life fixing car engines by day and getting his hands dirty by night. Now, he must repair the toughest machine of all: his own shattered existence.
It is a coming-of-age tale where youth grapple with their first profound loss. Filmmaker Yi-Shan’s best friends Chun and Yueh were trapped in a Nepal cave for 47 days. Chun died three days before Yueh's rescue, prompting Yi-Shan to take up the camera and retrace her friends’ footsteps in Nepal. When Yi-Shan reaches the cave, what awaits her there?
Two siblings distanced by age find each other through stolen objects and a literary project.
Deep in Hellfest gigantic metal festival, music gradually takes possession of metalheads.
A woman's ability to give birth to marine creatures is exploited for commercial purposes.
Under a scorching sun, Charlie is bored out of her mind and dreams of going to the seaside. But she's forced to guard a seedy motel with her cousin Jess, who's slumped in her deckchair. The two teenagers don't get along and bicker at every opportunity. On the radio, the monotone voice of a collapsology researcher predicts the imminent end of the world.
A group of adolescent victims of sex trafficking live temporarily in a shelter in Ecuador hidden in a beautiful forest. Accustomed to a night schedule, the girls spend the day sleeping. Fourteen-year-old Abigail visits a room full of babies, the result of the abuse they have suffered; hers is 5 months old and she carries it as if it were a doll. Small details reveal what they have gone through, invisible but present.
Lorea's reference points are her mother and her grandmother. Through these two generations she observes the bond that women have experienced around motherhood. Now it is up to her to decide whether or not to become a mother herself and to look for answers to pending questions.
In the theatre of the Cold War, astronauts lost in the Darien Gap are besieged by their deepest fears when surprised by an indigenous person. Did they think they were going to be decapitated, or eaten by a wild cannibal? A deconstruction of film and propaganda archives from tropical survival training challenges the colonial narrative inscribed in the conquest of space.
Álex is blocked. He tries to understand his place in the world, his masculinity, his role in caring, the origin of the noises in his grandfather's dreams. Lucia has been blind since birth. She guides Alex.He works as a film audio describer for visually impaired people. His grandfather is over a hundred years old and for months a noise has been disturbing his dreams. He can no longer tell the difference between dream and reality. Lucía helps Alex by showing him how she perceives, how she dreams, how she feels. Alex needs to feel.
Reality and imagination blend in a journey back to the director's childhood when she returns to the last place where she was with her father: the house in Campolivar.
A girl wakes up alone in the dark and surreal night, triggering fragmented memories of neglect by her caregivers.
Algorithmic typhoons turn images into zombie-like entities, human-flesh eating creatures enslaved by society. However, these images do not seek to rebel; they simply long to dream of eternal life in a disposable world. This is an essay on resurrection and impending doom.
With the help of workers and former neighbors, we dig up the layers of memory that have accumulated in the Church of San Miguel in Jaén. We explored how this ancient church has served as a parish, residential block, and workplace, looking into the past to understand the present.
The shop manager of a floating bordershop-container in the Baltic Sea, casts off the chains to shore to save the universe of love she and her employees have created inside.
Prequel to the popular story Mateo Txistu: Basque Country, late 19th century. In a small village, parish priest Mateo disappears without trace. As locals tattle, the Archbishopric sends two priests to get to the bottom of the occurrence.
An essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and the culture of the area, and with its disappearance, the memories of four characters fade away.
Non-fiction short film about the fragility of memory and the places that human beings create to safeguard it. People disappear, like the buildings they lived in, the places where they worked and were happy. Those faces and those lives were once part of the written memory, a memory that will disappear because nothing is forever. What the water brings, the water takes away.
A girl wanders through an abandoned train station. She walks the corridors of her school, disconnected from the place, while trying to write an impossible speech. A memory flies over the station frozen in time.
By focusing on the peripheral or hidden details of some paintings in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator relates several stories linked to the social, economic and psychological conditions of the artists, both past and present.
Bureaucratic systems and cultural traditions have always tried to tell me “who I am”, while today's AI industry, capable of creating “magic”, is destroying it through homogenization.
Seven-year-old Billie is driving a wounded man home in the middle of the night. By the morning he's unable to move, and she's sure something is stuck inside him that needs to come out.
An attempt to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic to a broken home.
The discovery of some unpublished recordings leads Juan Carlos Pérez, leader of the iconic band Itoiz, to ponder the dissolution of the band at the height of their success, after having adopted a more accessible pop style which he now disowns. Juan Carlos begins a cathartic journey to the essence of the band, reliving their beginnings in the 70s as a progressive rock group in Mutriku, in an attempt to reconcile with the past.
Portrait of Mexico City. Centre of chaos. Anonymous characters crosses each other self-absorbed in their daily life and existence. She, in movement; he, in paralysis. Both living in the past evading the present. They inhabit the realm of cycles trying to free themselves from attachment and suffering. Movement and paralysis intertwine in a city trapped in the cycles of earthly and recurrent existence.
Can Marguerite Duras cure us of madness? Can that woman who is soul-muted be crazy? This film, through analog casting, explores the representations of madness in silent films of the 20s and 30s.
When her estranged father dies, Nadia is forced to revisit the past and the reasons that made him abandon her as a child in pursuit of his own dreams. She leaves Cairo, a city under aggressive construction, to empty her father’s home in Helwan, an industrial wasteland. This is an exploration of grief and loss of places as we know them through the story of a daughter's inability to mourn her father's death, with nothing connecting her to the memory of him but a frail mango tree.
The only memory left to Morî from his father is the audio recording of the story he told him. Morî listens to this tale from time to time. One day, a new teacher comes to school. When Mori sees the teacher, he thinks he is his father. Morî's insistence on this issue turns into an emotional bond between him and his teacher.
Farah, an Iranian woman is forced to migrate to her private planet to be free. She buys other people's memories in form of Super 8 and 8mm films and records and archives her own, to create an alternative history of Iran.
A spatial exploration of Miami, and the endless pursuit of the American Dream in an era of immigrant mass mobilization, the absurd dominance of wealth and border securocracy. Much like the people it is about, the film is suspended in that stasis between arriving and finding belonging, moving associatively through observational vignettes in contemporary Miami, juxtaposed with a disruptive collection of video and sound archives that range as far back as the 1930’s, revealing an obsession with American individualism.
After an unprecedented social uprising, Chile chooses to write a New Constitution. A colorful assembly will be in charge of writing down the dreams of dignity and social justice of an entire people. What could go wrong?
In Russia’s most secretive region, there are many mysteries. Abandoned buildings and an empty landscape hold memories of a strange object built under Stalin’s order. Since then, odd things started happening. Locals found a weird creature called “The Alien from the Urals,” now having its own monument. But, what’s the secret of this creature? Why are people scared to talk about it? And why are villages disappearing?
A young woman is stuck in the hold queue of a telephone hotline. A surreal episodic short film about the absurdities of urban life and the frustration of a paralysing standstill.
A female worker at a closing stone factory, who had an undisclosed relationship with the supervisor and a passion for poetry, discovered a poster for a poetry sharing event in her usual old bookstore. From then on, waves of poetic inspiration surged through her heart at random moments, leading her to make an extraordinary choice to defend her poetry and spiritual freedom.
Qi, a six-year-old girl, lives with her mother's original family all year round since her father works in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in China and rarely visits home. On a hot day at noon, at the end of the 20th century, she watched as the grown-ups' figures flickered and vanished before her eyes like shadows.
Kinshasa and its inhabitants are in darkness. They wait and struggle to get access to light. Between hope, disappointment and religious faith, Tongo Saa is a subtle and fragmented portrait of a population that, despite the challenges, is sublimated by the beauty of Kinshasa's nights.
Seeking to explore his newfound power to perceive beyond the strictures of time, Cambodian migrant Jit travels to Phimai, Thailand, believed to be the site of the epic conflict between prince Prajit, his beloved Orapim and Phommathat the King. In this temple town, Jit meets Pim and Tat, a young couple drifting apart, and together, the trio find themselves reprising the love triangle of legend.
In this animated miniature on a single sheet, the drawing comes to life before our eyes telling the escape of a wild boar, but of the ways in which people occupy the places that used to belong to nature. Drawn from memories of a walk in the Belgian Ardennes. This film was drawn and animated alone on a single sheet of paper as a performance.
Devastated by heartbreak, Prem, the charismatic radio jockey of a renowned love advice program seeks solace in the rugged mountains, grappling with his own emotional turmoil. Amidst his personal quest for answers, the desperate calls from the audience seeking love advice echo through the serene wilderness.
In the early 1960s, a missionary priest disappears in a West African port city as the country prepares for independence. A young officer arrives from France, charged with finding the missing man.His investigation comes up against the sarcasm of the departing colonists, the mistrust of the African nuns and the indifference of the fishermen in the pirogues. Faced with the silence of one and all, the young officer finally leaves the blinding light of the port for the muggy darkness of the forest, where day and night merge.
A team of scientists explore the vanished island of Testerep off the Belgian coast. Traditional excavations are combined with advanced technologies, like computer simulations and sound wave analyses to trace the coastal evolution over 5,000 years. As researchers decode the mysteries, they contemplate the symbiotic relationship between humans, technology, and our temporal landscape, bridging the gaps between the past, present, and the ever-evolving role of technology in shaping our understanding of the world.
He does not remember much from that time. Things have faded, like the color of a painting after too much light. The only thing that bothers him is this music. It keeps popping up… He thinks he forget what it meant. All he knows, for sure, is that he cannot get it out of his head.
In a dystopian world, a girl breaks her ceramic pot which holds a secret within. Its breaking opens portals to a parallel universe and the girl enters a time of transformation in which the creation of a new world is finally possible.
Echoed in a memory-laden house are daily conversations between a mother and her two sons, all seemingly asleep. This autobiographical short, in a hybrid form, chronicles a personal memory from director Le Ngoc Duy's adolescence using set design and reenactment to reconstruct his childhood home and featuring his mother’s voice as part of the cast.
Ruth was a teenager when her mother passed down her medallion, etched with a golden portrait of Nefertiti. Not only was this medallion an artefact, it was an emblem of her mother’s inconceivable plight; captured in middle school by the Derg communist military regime and raised in a prison camp for years. This story follows her early memories of the Derg Genocide and how she first became in possession of the medallion upon her escape.
A family of four and their dog arrive at a seaside hotel in Kui Buri, Thailand. What appears to be an ordinary vacation turns into a series of interactions that betray an unspoken tension in their relationships. The next day, complexities unfold in a cave housing buddha statues.
A little girl finds toys under a Christmas tree. Suddenly, a toy soldier puts hand under the skirt of a doll. A series of events afterwards show the little girl the true vision of the adult world.
Anxious teenager Ūla is taken on an unexpected adventure during her swimming practise, through which she grows-up and learns to see her body anew.
An essayistic documentary about human responsibility over the gifts of nature. Filmed at the old nuclear power plant Lubmin and the dwindling fisher villages nearby.
People working backstage, during a theatre play.—Alles gut? —Alles gut? They act according to time. —Alright. They wait for the right time to act. Moin! The accident happens.
A social satire told in five acts delves into our society, its behaviors and flaws. The narrative conveyed through light and attractive visuals serves as a cautionary tale about the potential consequences if we fail to eliminate foolish behaviors, lack of empathy and a lack of responsibility.
A wise birdwoman sends three birds to guide a girl into the dark unknown landscapes of her inner world.
In gaming's online realm, sleep becomes an art. Streamers blend dreams, gamers doze mid-game, revealing life's quirky essence. ASMR experts craft a soundscape and a game designer imparts characters a tool: time-sensibility. Sleep, digital engagement and games turn sleep into poetic online tales.
Buenos Aires, 2019. A museum security guard has a premonition of a theft. When consulting with her pendulum, she foresees a sudden climb in the dollar’s value. An unexpected dismissal and the ensuing severance package leads her to connect with a currency exchange house employee.
He develops and imagines a world in a darkroom. His daughter weaves a dialogue about latent, invented images, about the ways of resisting and navigating the darkness. This film explores how the intimate and political weight of images can open spaces to reflect upon them as acts of resistance, either because they are made despite the horror of their context or because they offer an imaginary vanishing point that might just set us free.
Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, Undr constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape. (Nicholas Davies, IFFR)
Samuel's soul finds itself in a digital world he does not know. A strange voice from the sky seems to show him the way home.
This animated-documentary film recounts the memories of a childhood in Split in the 1980s. These are stories retold after Sunday lunch when everyone is in a good mood, stories filled with emotions we can easily relate to. But above all, the film is a moving tribute to the love of a grandpa and grandma who did their best to keep their granddaughter smiling.
