International Short Film Competition

A GENERAL DISAPPOINTMENT

In three segments of everyday life filled with monotonous activities, Serge Garcia articulates a meditation on the storms hidden behind the daily silence, the routine that overwhelms us from all sides.

THE SWIMMERS

Charlie López | Duration 12 min

The Swimmers is an essay pedalling along the slippery edge of a swimming pool: in archival footage, film clips and heartbreaking testimonies, Charlie Lopez investigates, with both humour and lyricism, all that a swimming pool can mean in our lives.

NAZARBAZI

Maryam Tafakory | Duration 19 min

Drawing on hundreds of hours of Iranian films, Nazarbazi is a quest into the terrain of forbidden sentiment, where the only possible protest against the state-imposed censorship of on-screen affection is to silently splice dusty images.

HOMESICK LUNGS

Felix Klee | Duration 14 min

Homesick Lungs combines 3D animations, screen recordings and documentary footage to form an essay on reconstructed memory, marked by the death of a horse and the sale of the director's childhood farm.

HOME WHEN YOU RETURN

Carl Elsaesser | Duration 30 min

Home When You Return is an attempt to evoke the figure of a grandmother in a world where American melodramas are still alive: through a mournful letter, through an empty house, through the image of another woman from the same time and another world.

THE DEMANDS OF ORDINARY DEVOTION

Eva Giolo | Duration 12 min

A film on motherhood and creation constructed through various visual metaphors of circularity, The Demands of Ordinary Devotion speaks in a playful, yet lucid manner about the elusive link between care work and creative work.

HYSTERESIS

Robert Seidel | Duration 5 min

Hysteresis combines a queer performance with a series of video projections obtained by manipulating AI software to produce visual lags, starting from a suite of analog drawings. A visual translation of the concepts of hysteria and hysteresis as abstract as it is flamboyant.

EXALTED MARS

Jean-Sébastien Chauvin | Duration 18 min

In Exalted Mars, the body and the city are interconnected. Or, better said, outside happens inside. A man's bare body harmonises with the tension outside as the traffic loses its sound and is guided by the man's jerky breathing into the liminal space of sleep.

DIVA

Nicolas Cilins | Duration 29 min

Diva brings to the forefront a biography recounted from the non-western perspective of a trans person, whose subjectivity and manifestation of their identity is shaped in a particular way in the East. Furthermore, the film documents the everyday difficulties faced by queer people in Asia and their modes of subsistence.

BECOMING MALE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Pedro Neves Marques | Duration 22 min

Becoming Male in the Middle Ages is a story about fertility and the possibility of crossing the biological barrier related to reproduction, with the help of transhuman augmentation. The body becomes but a receptacle for the ovary or egg, which erases its biological limitations.

A BODY IS A BODY IS A BODY

Cat & Éiméar McClay | Duration 12 min

a body is a body is a body combines queerness and religion on a personal level, putting the subliminal tension between the two under the spotlight while treating it in a distant way, naturalising the interpenetrations between the two dimensions that are always understood as ricocheting off each other.

YAROKAMENA

Andrés Jurado | Duration 21 min

Yakomena's story didn't end with his death: decades after he died, a filmmaker returns to the mythical Colombian fighter to remind us of a lesson about resistance in front of colonialist oppression.

WATCH THE FIRE OF BURN INSIDE IT

Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel | Duration 18 min

To the beat of electronic music, a mysterious figure with a petrol can in her hands wanders across the Corsican plains and, like an ode to the purifying fire, burns everything in her path.

THE SPIRAL

María Silvia Esteve | Duration 19 min.

A WhatsApp audio begins, and with it, a downward spiral unfolds. The voice of a woman sinking into a health anxiety attack, quickly entangles a complex labyrinth of fears and emotions that deal with childhood, family, and the loneliness of “home”.

MANTA RAY

Anton Bialas | Duration 30 min

Three characters live out their own insurgencies in contemporary Paris, in personal rebellions through which they escape beyond the rules of an increasingly hostile city.

IT’S RAINING FROGS OUTSIDE

Maria Estela Paiso | Duration 14 min

The end of the world is about to end and frogs are raining down from the sky. Maya is back in her childhood home but it no longer feels like home. Overwhelmed by loneliness, isolation and despair, she slips into a fever dream that feels like a horror film screened on the walls of the mind.

TO PICK A FLOWER

Shireen Seno | Duration 17 min

Taking images of plants and trees as starting points, this video essay presents archival photographs from the American Colonial Era in the Philippines (1898–1946), exploring the relationship between humans, nature and their entanglements with empires.

SOUM

Alice Brygo | Duration 31 min

While occupying a former bank and waiting to be able to legally assert their domicile, three squatters build their own memories in an attempt to reconcile their non-Western heritage with a present of assimilation.

NOTES FROM THE PERIPHERY

Tulapop Saenjaroen | Duration 14 min

Shot in the peripheral areas of the Laem Chabang port, Notes from the Periphery interrogates the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby, shipping containers that become a policing tool, and barnacles.

MOUNE Ô

Maxime Jean-Baptiste | Duration 16 min

Presenting the festive events which accompanied the screening of a film where the director’s father played a role, the images in Moune Ô reveal the remnants of the colonial inheritance within a Western collective unconscious, always marking the other through stereotypes.

GOLDEN JUBILEE

Suneil Sanzgiri | Duration 19 min

Beginning with scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual 3D rendering of their ancestral house in Goa, India, Golden Jubilee reconsiders ideas of freedom, loss and recovery in the wake of colonial and neo-colonial theft.

POLYCEPHALY IN D

Michael Robinson | Duration 23 min

Polycephaly in D is a densely collaged exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma, and psychological free-fall of the contemporary moment. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake; we lose one head so as to grow another.

LIFE, AS A DREAM

Zhao Xu | Duration 20 min

Five workers are asleep. What are they dreaming of? Their voices recount memories of their dreams, yet they seem to be talking about their own daily lives. Suggestions of precarity and deep exhaustion creep in through lyrical, illusory moments.

HARDLY WORKING

Total Refusal | Duration 21 min

We find ourselves inside a video game. The NPCs (non-playable characters) are leading their dull lives on loop, bringing mechanical bustle into the simulation. But what can their repetitive gestures say about life and labour under capitalism?

AGRILOGISTICS

Gerard Ortín Castellví | Duration 21 min

Agrilogistics looks at recent technological transformations in contemporary industrial agriculture, where everything is processed through cameras and data sets. Only at night do things come ‘alive’, when plants, animals and machines form new entanglements.

3 DIALOGUES ABOUT THE FUTURE

Alina Manolache | Duration 14 min

Three pairs of robots engage in dialogue. How does artificial intelligence see the world? How does it see itself? There is a hidden tenderness in their algorithmic musings – what seems to preoccupy the robots most is the definition of being human.

PLACES WE’LL BREATHE

Davor Sanvincenti | Duration 22 min

An audiovisual essay that summons imagination through a travelogue of constructed and anonymous landscapes. A note about the future. Narratives that intertwine in the interstices between the visual, the auditory, and the expressed, speaking about loss, responsibility, struggle and freedom.

PERVADING ANIMAL

Graeme Arnfield | Duration 31 min

Equal parts systems literacy and kaleidoscopic ecological fantasia, Pervading Animal is a film about butterflies, computer viruses and all the things they touch.

HEAT WAVES

Kent Chan | Duration 21 min

The film examines through twin montages the contexts, politics, and proliferation of different aesthetics of heat. Aesthetics that are often generalised – charged with vibrancy, vitality, and visual complexity – that are increasingly mined at a time when the earth is simultaneously warming.

CURUPIRA AND THE MACHINE OF THE DESTINY

Janaina Wagner | Duration 25 min

An encounter between the entity Curupira, a queer devil who protects the forests of Brazil, and the incarnated ghost of Iracema, a fourteen-year-old sex worker who is on a quest to avenge the past.

STAGING DEATH

Jan Soldat | Duration 8 min

Spoiler alert: Udo Kier dies a thousand deaths in Jan Soldat’s latest offering – a meditation on fictionality & cinematic conventions, and on the intrinsic links between life, death and film, spanning across all five decades of the German actor’s career.