A monologue is performed in a building that inhabits the thickness of a borderline, telling stories of permeable borders and impermeable laws, reflecting on how free movement, free knowledge and free space are under threat.
Photos of a sunset. A book about frogs held by hands. A woman’s face reading. A wildcat among several hands. A passing sunrise. Based on the poem “Esta es la mano que cuida” [This Is the Hand that Cares], by veterinarian and writer María Sánchez, this essay is build as a diptych on the learning processes of our relationship with other species.
Whaling has been around for centuries. It seems the fruit of man’s violence, destroying himself by destroying nature. Accompanying the rise of capitalism, the practice survives today, reflecting humans’ eternal destructiveness of nature and the creatures unable to resist them.
A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín while a young director tells the story of his past in that violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a B-movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is the film’s cast, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. This documentary explores the dreams, doubts and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.
A desert landscape, as if from another planet. A few lonely, rusty shipwrecks. Low desert scrub grows around them to hold the sand together during the merciless storms. Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed, the last thing left of the Aral Sea. By weaving together different cinematic textures, this essay re-imagines the dried-up Aral Sea, allowing an old fisherman to set sail one last time.
Attempting a backflip is not safe. You can break your neck or land on your head, or land badly on your wrists. None of that is nice, so my avatar does the trick. It practices on a 6-core processor with the help of Machine Learning. The processor is not the newest but still calculates six jumps per iteration. One iteration takes one minute, this is 360 jumps in an hour and 8.640 jumps in a day. I wouldn’t be able to jump so much myself.
Football stadiums have long been the designated places for the escalation of conflicts and every incident during a football match makes for a fire-starting headline material. Meanwhile, the armies of six former Yugoslav republics have been getting together every year for over a decade, for a futsal tournament in the name of peace, in almost complete media silence.
The term bergie is a South Africanism that refers to people that are homeless, since they sought refuge on the slopes of Table Mountain in the past (in Afrikaans: Tafelberg). When a law enforcement officer has to remove homeless people to make way for a 10 km fun-run, he has to navigate the complex intersection of the law and personal responsibility when confronted with the dignity of those often ignored.
Guoqiang is a socially awkward Instagram poet and occasionally posts his self penned haikus on his Instagram page. In order to get more attention for his haiku, Guoqiang decides to go to local author Augustine Chua’s writing panel to get his feedback. When he eventually gets the chance to ask questions during the Q&A, he comes off confusing instead, creating mass awkwardness.
As the flashy life of the influencer 33 gets crazier, the canker sore inside her lower lip keeps growing larger…
After breaking up with Boris, Lara returns to her hometown, Barcelona. There, her friends, lovers and the Catalan traditions of the Castells will change her dreams and desires.
What’s an IKEA table breaking point at the weight of a crumbling friendship? It’s nearly time for dessert, the pressed down wood chips are about to crack. This is cubist history about two friends, a lost table and its replacement.
This is an attempt to rebuild a landscape. Between 1937 and 1943 in Asturias, during Franco's regime, a recreational area and a target shooting range housed a concentration camp. Sharing a pensive observational gaze with the viewer, this essay attempts to resignify the space and revive its political meaning. It is not a question of showing (or filming) the invisible, but rather revealing what is absent from what exists today.
In the heart of Bairro Alto, right in the centre of Lisbon, the building of an old printing workshop is demolished to make way for a development of luxury apartments. Seeing this demolition as a perfect image for portraying the death of a certain Lisbon in the wake of the financial crisis and the ensuing real estate and touristic boom, the director proposes to film an urban diary portraying the daily life of the construction site and those who work there.
A wagon loaded with the skeleton of a whale — one of the most significant pieces of the Nazarene school cabinet, leaves after the school building was sold to make a luxury hotel. The van crosses those emblematic places of Rome, which, like the school itself, have been displaced and emptied of meaning in a speculative operation to clean up the history generated by the city's own tourism.
In the heat of a summer day, Draginja discovers a dead body that resembles her. In the heat of a summer day, Draginja hires a fake husband to show off in front of her friends. In the cold of a winter night, Draginja roams the streets hoping to recover her lost memory. Through three different life possibilities, a middle-aged woman tries to get out of her skin.
Matixa, 22, lives with her parents. Her bedroom and her stability are in disarray: the situation is explosive. Helped by her friend Leire, she looks for support outside the family. Convinced that cutting ties with her mother will make her freer, she decides to leave home.
On her way back from a heroic mission, Cassi gets stranded on a mysterious island. She meets an eccentric hermit, and they set off to find her a new boat. The erratic depths of the island force Cassi to reevaluate her quest, while the hermit must face someone from his past.
Nothingness bursts, and lets out something. From a dark, tarry mass beings emerge genderless, looped and alone, in repetitive aimless motions. Everything changes when one of them discovers “something”. It is a red ball taken from within itself. Immediately, the ball starts getting bigger, shifting its shape and hypnotising all of the beings.
1966. En el pequeño pueblo de Bizkarsoro, en el País Vasco francés, cuatro jóvenes encuentran algunos pedazos de papel enterrados en un bosque. Estos tienen viejas palabras escritas en vasco, pero Michelle tiene 21 años y no las entiende. En su familia hace tiempo que no se habla esa lengua.
In a barren land there is a lone greenhouse with four inhabitants. From a nearby lake a mysterious man emerges and goes on a motorbike hunt for living souls. A girl from the greenhouse, the only one uncaptured, follows the soul hunter into a hidden realm of hallways and ruins. When she finally reaches her enemy's secret lair, she realizes that it was all part of an alchemical ceremony that she herself has to bring to its conclusion.
Two women take the weight of a world where care is in ruins. Gladys, from her everlasting confinement in the house where she works as a live-in servant. Ima, in her unending wait in front of the sea for the next ship to break its nets. Spaces that are also work, works that are houses and houses that are not always homes. The memories of their experiences are intertwined in a sensory story that leads us to the question: In whose hands is it that the situation changes?
Satakshi and Madhu, who went to school together, reunite after years of being apart on a night of festivities during the Durga Pujo in Kolkata. As the night progresses, we find out that both of them have feelings for each other, but they are not able to express it. Their secrets are preserved in a notebook entry by Madhu from her school days, and in a postcard that Satakshi sends Madhu six years from this night.
We have many emotions that have not been observed. "I" has a feeling of fear of being doubted by others because of a cup of coffee that has not been thrown away. The whole film revolves around the observation of this emotion. By depicting four trivial things that are growing up, and tracing the reasons for its formation, "I" finally sees the appearance of this emotion.
Muzzled by the increasingly autocratic regime of the Depression Federation, 16-year-old Marusya decides to join her generations’ suicide statistics by year’s end. Then she meets Kimi and a love story begins between the two millennials caught in the undertow of their oppressive government. Together, Marusya and Kimi film the euphoria, anxiety and misery of their youth, burning the candle at both ends, fuelled by drugs and music.
Marko and Maja are moving flats in Sarajevo. Maja's depression turns Marko's struggle into poetry, and played on the radio, Marko’s poems become the last bridge of communication between them.
Liminal space between documentary and visual tale. Alternating archival film material with new footage, this film grants a unique insight into the peaceful and sublime ways of the Universal White Brotherhood.
When it shrinks, it expands. It floats and it sinks. It separates but connects. When I think I’m watching them, they're actually watching me. A animation rhyme that weaves together the many days of observing, recording, and experimenting.
Sun starved teenagers take on a dreamy trip to the Balearic Islands in the pursuit of light and warmth. They must absorb it and be a vessel in order to transport it back to their heavy clouded Kingdom.
A Holocaust survivor reads a letter he wrote to the pig who saved his life. A young schoolgirl hears his testimony in class and sinks into a twisted dream where she confronts questions of identity, collective trauma, and the extremes of human nature.
Haleh is a very protective mother, who easily spoils her 4 years-old boy, Ilya. When one day the boy stops talking, Haleh and her husband Amir start searching for the reason and the remedy for this sudden mutism. The more they try to talk to the boy or consult experts, the worst things are becoming in the couple and the family.
A peaceful demonstration in Minsk is brutally put down by the police. Two female journalists from an independent Belarusian TV station are the only ones broadcasting the events live. When they are tracked down by a police drone, they face a dramatic choice. A drama inspired by the true story of Katerina Bakhvalova and Daria Chultsova, two Belsat TV journalists who were sentenced to two years in a penal colony in 2020. In July 2022 Katerina's sentence was extended to eight years.
Against the post-industrial landscape of Detroit, visitors arrive from the sky on the trail of clues to rebuild their own world. They find no humans; nothing remains but the vestiges of a lost capitalist chimera, a programming failure in a perpetual mechanical loop. But among the images and sounds of the emptied city, they detect a coded transmission, a secret kept by faceless guardians. An afrofuturistic dream, a techno hope.
Ale, a 17-year-old woman, lives in rural Costa Rica with her two younger siblings. Through landscapes fuelled by silence, resentment and brief moments of joy, Ale will try to protect them from the seething truth, their mother has left them and is not coming back.
Maria, a 48-year-old woman, is trapped between two worlds: one guided by asceticism, the other fuelled by the need to reconnect and be with her two sons. Through carefully composed shots and minimalistic sound, we glimpse into her everyday life, thoughts, and emotions.
A woman and a man are in a room, a gecko sits in a terrarium, several flies are circling a lamp. Gradually we find more and more dependencies and analogies between their activities and observed elements as the rhythm of their universes accelerates. The microcosms shown seem to interact rhythmically and belong to some cosmic order.
During their special "dates" with their artificially intelligent companions, three young Chinese women reflect on the uniqueness and boundaries of such intimate relationships. This work captures the richness of these bonds, from philosophical questions to intimate moments to the real sense of security and companionship afforded by these artificially intelligent lovers.
Para Sarya (17 años), una joven kurda refugiada en Japón, la vida parece ir viento en popa: sus notas en la escuela son suficientemente buenas como para pensar en la universidad, está rodeada de buenos amigos y su relación con Sota se está convirtiendo en una especial. Sin embargo, su vida da un vuelco cuando se entera de que el estatus de refugiada que tenía su familia ha sido rechazado, lo que restringe sus posibilidades de trabajar y viajar por la ciudad. Sin embargo, su padre continuaba trabajando para ganarse la vida, por lo que es detenido por “empleo ilegal”. De repente, Sarya se ve obligada a afrontar una situación en la que será responsable no solo de sus hermanos menores, sino de su propia existencia.
This work is a collage of images, repetitions, and memories, built through the intervention of the Colombian news archive during the 80s and 90s. It also reconstructs a story linked to a generation — my generation, that grew up by normalizing violence through these same senseless images.
Sounds and images of the childhood of someone who feels closer to blood-stained knives and rags than to the purity with which childhood is usually conceived when imagining children playing with each other. However, to speak of her childhood is not just to speak of blood, but of her mother and the smells of her flesh.
A filmmaker recalls a unique outing with his parents in Singapore on February 2020. A contemplation on life, death and the ever-changing landscape on this small island.
During the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, 13-year-old street boy Roma runs around the front lines of Kyiv throwing stones and molotov cocktails. He quickly becomes a familiar face and a mascot for the revolution. But behind the camouflage uniform, sunglasses and fearlessness hides a lonely boy from an orphanage who, five years later, turns 18 and is suddenly back on the streets with nothing in his pocket but a lighter and a knife.
Elias, 17 years old, suddenly loses his father. In high school as at home, his mother and friends await his reaction which does not arrive. Elias goes on with his life as if nothing had happened.
At the end of the 19th century in a Sicilian countryside village, the young Pina holds the power to regenerate the land. With each harvest, the village is prey to shameless mafia looting. Pina's encounter with the mafia chief will plunge the hamlet into an era of starvation, endangering the destiny of the whole country.
Ava and Hélios, friends-in-love, evolve in a golden Paris. At a party, their obsession with each other drives them to excess and manipulation.
Two people meet for the first time in a park on a beautiful day. As they engage in conversation and get to know each other, the world from afar seems to tremble.
The process of reliving a memory – and the disintegration that follows, through a series of associative images. Through the effect of its images, the animation attempts to lead viewers into a hypnotic mental and emotional state, where they can experience the manifold character of memory, and the pleasant, yet ephemeral joys of descending into our recollections.
Stitch by stitch, frame by frame and memory by memory, this animated documentary unburies Heleny Guariba’s history, a Brazilian philosopher, theatre director and professor disappeared in 1971 under the dictatorship. It is inspired by the arpilleras, tapestries that emerged from the horrors of Pinochet regime in Chile as a unique form of political protest.
In a mysterious forest, a woman is slowly lured into a nostalgic daydream as she observes butterflies.
In 2021, hundreds of thousands of people took over the streets in Brazil, in the midst of a pandemic, to protest against the Bolsonaro government. Inspired by Joyce Wieland's 1973 film of the same name, this film portrays these manifestations by focusing on the expressiveness of human hands rather than Wieland's feet. Gestures of affection, resistance, protection, joy or repression are revealed in these images made in super 8mm ektachrome.
10-year-old Bakyt lives with his father. They go to the baths together and eat together. Their relationship is not verbose, the father tries to bring up independence in the child. Thus, the father does not come home at night. Bakyt, hiding his anxieties, continues his daily routine. He goes to school, cooks for himself, but every night without his father it becomes harder and harder for him to endure.
Sergio Cortesi dedicated his life to solar observation. At La Specola Solare Ticinese federal observatory in Locarno, between 1957 and 2021, he made over 15.000 sunspots drawings, driven by the faith of a monk to whom his own god never gave an answer.
After not seeing each other for years, Anna and her former school bully, Jasmine, meet by coincidence when Jasmine brings her daughter to Anna’s dance class. Anna and Jasmine try to behave in a civilized manner, but there’s something bubbling beneath the surface and the encounter turns a cheerful dance class into a battle for status where emotions blur Anna’s judgment. Will the bullied become the bully?
A woman is stuck in a world full of stains, spots and repetitive thoughts…
Film funding often resembles thievery. Assembling your team is a lot like assembling a heist. Those who have made it have had a secret weapon. For Jim Jarmusch, his was Sara Driver. His short was invited to the famed Rotterdam International Film Festival, the perfect shot at securing funding. The only problem: The festival only had the money to fly the director out. Jim was not a planner, he’s more of what you would call an ideas-guy. Sara needed to join him to talk to financiers at the festival.
A fable exploring the relationship between a new form of authoritarian system and its citizens who have adapted to it. A group of people are cleaning a spotless unknown space. The broadcast repeatedly warns them about the coming attack of aliens. A sandstorm invades the space as the foreshadow of the arrival of aliens. However, one person accidentally discovers the mystery hidden in the sandstorm… Do the alien attackers really exist?
A mother bathes her baby, while other children play with the water coming from the sprinklers. Between intimate and familiar images, something begins to unravel: spaces are transformed, allowing trauma to surface. Starting from a personal memory and from the notion of water as a vital but also potentially destructive substance, this fiction takes us on an immersive journey through childhood’s states of perception, exploring the materiality of water in parallel with the materiality of film.
According to researches made throughout 1990s by the Institute for Public Opinion Research (OPOB), approximately 95 % of Poles identified themselves as believers. At the same time, unemployment rates reached record values. In times of crisis, when people sought spirituality, seemingly impossible events are possible…
This experimental work portrays a space object and its fall into the darkness of a space cemetery. A woman scientist reveals her attachment to this object and the absence of images documenting this mysterious place. As a reverse sci-fi journey, this work mixes real and fictional archives to guide us, like a stalker, to the outskirts of an invisible place.
Ming es una joven solitaria de 19 años que trabaja en el turno de noche en una tienda de conveniencia. Un día, cerca de la Fiesta de la Primavera, su vecino Rui la invita a una cena "especial", lo que le hace recordar su pasado oculto.
At the mercy of the dentist's chair, the protagonist cannot escape the confrontation with pain and the dregs of the miserable human condition. To distract himself, he takes refuge in a fantasised story of fishermen and the sea.
Among intrusive and sought-after memories, a woman hears a disconcerting call from the depths of her being. A cryptic cry for help that becomes intelligible guides her to the original wound, to her inner child, becoming her own protector.
Isolated in the Amazon rainforest lives a community of children in deep intimacy with the nature around. Between the waters of the Pastaza River and the top of the trees, these kids run their daily lives almost autonomously and with a strong sense of collaboration.
Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from an immense loss, a boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. The companion would then expose the prosthetic limb to a mélange of textures and materials, whilst documenting the whole process. As the moon inches closer and closer towards the sun, the boy sees something unusual reflected on the water's surface… What will become of the limb, and what will become of the video recordings?
My father only used a camera once in his life. Thirty years later, he asked me to digitise the material he had filmed. I was wondering what he remembers. Created from an impulse to rethink and rewatch personal archive footage, the film explores memory and its relation to documentation and non-institutional archive practices. Connecting politics with intimate spaces, the documentary questions both the influence of war on private archives and the role of gardens as places of new begginings.
In the dark swamps of a nocturnal forest, a group of gleaming axolotls is in heat, nuzzling and nibbling one another’s limbs. Soon a much larger, two-legged forest-dweller encounters the lustful group and reaches down to gobble one of the small shimmering creatures. His plump friends begin to partake as well and a feast begins. While dawn is slowly breaking, a cheerful game begins higher up in the branches.
