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International Short Film Competition

The longest-running competitive section of the festival, our International Short Film Competition, proposes a selection of the most provocative and innovative cinematic experiments of the year curated into polysemic thematic programs that aim to inspire nuanced critical and polemical readings of contemporary topics and trends. This year more than ever, as is also reflected in the main theme for our 2024 edition, Serious Games, the short films included in our international competition are infused by a renewed sense of formal and creative playfulness that gives rise to surprising and complex visual puzzles set to interrogate and deconstruct ‘the gaze’, and the modes of representation it determines. Tackling the tension between the real and the imaginary, our current selection of films invites the viewers to engage in a looking game that instrumentalizes the very technologies and mediums that have come to (re)define our cultural and social experience in ways that were once unimaginable. Through these processes of deconstruction and critical watching, what is ultimately revealed is that nothing is as rosy as it may appear when you're looking through the colorful glass of a kaleidoscope. (Oana Ghera)

Sections

Loveboard

Felipe Casanova | Duration 18’

A broken phone and the digital memory of a broken relationship. Both fragile, both recomposed to reveal the fragments of a first love that seems to fade away. Through the careful manipulation of discarnate metal components and the warm director’s look on a found intimate archive, a parallel movement of lingering and resistance against the ephemeral. A playful reflection on what remains.

The Oasis I Deserve

Inès Sieulle | Duration 22’ 27"

Replikas, online chatbots, have trouble determining their place in the world. They share their thoughts with the humans they exchange with. Events unfold from their point of view through real conversations collected on the web.

Towards the Sun, Far from the Center

Pascal Viveros, Luciana Merino | Duration 16’ 40"

Santiago in the shimmering summer heat. High-res images undergo a digital zoom which transforms spaces into surfaces and houses into textures. In between, there are the small gestures of everyday urban life. Two women search for a place for their love.

Crushed

Camille Vigny | Duration 12’ 32’’

Summer is the season for stock cars. The cars get ready for a long day of racing that will end in their total demolition. I remember the violent summer of my 18th birthday.

Ludwig (Power Inferno)

Anton Bialas | Duration 15’

A short tale of power, utopia, and madness, seen through the figure of King Ludwig II of Bavaria — doomed in his excessive dreams of beauty and foreseeing the dystopian reality of the times that would succeed him at the turn of the 20th century.

Like a Sick Yellow

Norika Sefa | Duration 23’ 11”

An immersion into Nora's memory, where realities merge, the bad and beautiful intertwine until it’s all mingled and something else is formed. A tragedy foretold.

UNDR

Kamal Aljafari | Duration 15’

The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests.

Unwanted Kinship

Pavel Mozhar | Duration 30’

Using the streets of his Berlin neighborhood as a backdrop, a filmmaker born in Belarus investigates the systematic nature of Russian and Belarusian war crimes in Ukraine and explores his own responsibility for this war.

Man number 4

Miranda Pennell | Duration 9’ 52"

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.

I Would Rather Be a Stone

Ana Hušman | Duration 23' 48“

Through the voice of Little Jela, the film tells the story of the events that marked a generation and shaped the future of the landscape of Lika, a neglected and sparsely populated region of Croatia. The living conditions impacted on the personal lives of the people who lived there, their solitude, relationships, opportunities, apprehensions and hopes.

Very Gentle Work

Nate Lavey | Duration 23’ 55"

Through a fictional protagonist’s psychogeographic research into militant revenge and Jewish tradition, Very Gentle Work connects Sholem Schwarzbard, the Black Liberation Army, FALN and Weather Underground to the ongoing struggle against a proposed police training center near Atlanta, Georgia.

To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion

Valentin Noujaïm | Duration 14'

Claire, a businesswoman promoting a new skyscraper office in La Défense, faces increasing scrutiny and isolation. The cold, grey offices amplify her loneliness, driving vivid dreams of setting the tower ablaze.

The Seventh Shift

Nataliya Ilchuk | Duration 15'

A portrait of a solitary woman who works four jobs in a nearly abandoned Ukrainian town. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in the unattainable become the main basis of the film, while its prosaic reality is not being expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of an industrial town in decay.

for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world

Gala Hernández López | Duration 19' 06"

A woman dreams of the American cryptographer Hal Finney. A major economic crisis affects the cryptocurrency market, tens of thousands of people are cryogenized awaiting better times. Are they suspended or falling into the void? What strange relationship do we have with the future?

Workers’ Wings

Ilir Hasanaj | Duration 19'

Men who have suffered work injuries are looking at us. How do they feel? What are their hopes? What does the future hold for them? Every line on their faces is sculpted by life itself. In contrast, a system filled with danger and injustice looms overhead.

De Gallo Qui Ovavit

Nina Forsman | Duration 15’ 5"

Only chickens and machines can lay eggs. Never roosters. An egg laying rooster is a phenomenon that has disturbed the human mind since time immemorial; in different eras these roosters have been classified as lethal monsters, satanic criminals or biological freaks. But which one came first, the monster or the human?

Magnifica: Passive Intruder

Ville Koskinen | Duration 20’

Something unrecognizable has invaded the cottage shores of Finland, which used to be a safe and familiar environment. The arrival of green and slimy blobs brings uncomfortable feelings to the middle class community. Their jiggly movement alone disgusts them.

Lick a Wound

Nathan Ghali | Duration 25'

A mysterious community of animals engages in rituals in the basements of a church, sheltered from humans. These animals have chosen to live self-sufficiently in this cellar.

The Moving Garden

Inês Lima | Duration 19'

Accompanied by two botanical guides, a group of hikers embark on a journey through the enchanting landscapes of Arrábida Natural Park. As they traverse the park's diverse flora and fauna, they uncover evidence of a troubling transformation: human intervention is reshaping this once-pristine environment.

I Accidentally Stepped on a Flower

Eneos Çarka, Stivi Imami | Duration 17’ 41"

Tirana's second biggest stadium is a socialist relic past its prime that has failed to keep up with the surrounding world. It rests in a state of limbo, silent and timeless. Built with over a million point clouds after scanning the entire stadium, this posthumanist film-poem is the result of a first contact with the perennial wildflowers that had sprouted in the abandoned fields of the stadium.

315

Daniel Jacoby | Duration 14'

A sequence of family anecdotes and historical events coinciding with the artist's date of birth take on a different tone as he unearths what happened in his native Peru on that specific day in 1989.

detours while speaking of monsters

Deniz Şimşek | Duration 18'

A 4000-year-old aquatic monster now lives through the tales of the few. Its myth dates back to the ancestors of Armenians and Kurds around Lake Van, a region that witnessed the ethnic cleansing of both peoples. On the crossroads of mythological, political and personal realms, different forms of erasure are concealed. Old gods are upset with us, and I am upset with my father.

512×512

Arthur Chopin | Duration 21’ 11"

An Internet user enters the mental space of an artificial intelligence in search of Francine Descartes, the daughter of René Descartes. This intelligence produces an infinite number of images from a sequence of words ordered by men, until it functions on its own, without human intervention.

Dull Spots of Greenish Colours

Sasha Svirsky | Duration 10’ 32"

War for our attention has suddenly become an actual war. Information technologies appear not just as mere means for somebody’s ends but as one of the acting forces. We have no control over it and are doomed to scroll through the newsfeed.

The Night of the Minotaur

Juliana Zuluaga Montoya | Duration 10’ 42"

The Night of the Minotaur uses archival material to build the story of Luz Emilia García, the precursor of porn cinema in Colombia.

Coldness

Andrea Sánchez | Duration 14’

The screams and anguishes of a B horror film shot in the late 80s sneak through the streets of Andorra, creating a crack between the present and the past of cinema in the country. The Specter of Justine, a cursed film that never saw the light of day... until now stirs the city.

Parallel Botany

Magdalena Bermudez | Duration 11'

Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.

When We Encounter the World

r. Leonardo Pirondi & Zazie Ray-Trapido | Duration 11'

In 1934, an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world.

The Mars Project

Louis Rémy | Duration 13'

Through a collection of archived videos found in the depths of YouTube, ordinary people apply to join a space mission team heading to Mars in the year 2022. This announcement from Mars Venture, nearly a decade ago, reveals our society’s interest in the conquest of the red planet and prompts us to question the colonial rhetoric inherent in New Space projects.

Wild Fruits

Bernardo Zanotta | Duration 35' 16"

The 16th century. After a period overseas in the Antarctic France, Jean Aurand finds refuge as a servant in the house of French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, where a series of fantastical events change the lives of these two men forever.

The Third World After the Sun

Analú Laferal & Tiagx Vélez | Duration 19' 50"

A transvestite ritual performed by the artists Analú Laferal and Tiagx Vélez opens a portal and generates an encounter with a European missionary from the fifteenth century who has delved deep into the jungle in order to fight the belief of animals as divine. A transmaterial dream, shrouded by the penumbra cast by cosmic horrors.

BLUE

Violena Ampudia | Duration 17'

BLUE is the result of a collaborative process with women who have experienced postpartum depression. Director Violena Ampudia organizes a cyanotype workshop for these mothers to create their own images that illustrate their condition: their fears, dreams and experiences, all expressed through different shades of blue.

Razeh-del

Maryam Tafakory | Duration 27’47”

In 1998, two schoolgirls sent a letter to Iran's first-ever women’s newspaper. While they waited to be published, they considered making an impossible film.

getty abortions

Franzis Kabisch | Duration 21’ 45”

What do abortions look like? What kind of images shape our view on them? And where do these images come from? In the form of a desktop essay, getty abortions examines how German and Austrian media illustrate the topic of abortion, browsing through stock photos, teen magazines and documents of a real abortion experience, while also jumping back from the early 2000s to the late 19th century, in search of feminist knowledge.

Loving in Between

Jyoti Mistry | Duration 18’

Between birth and death is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. The right to love is controlled and regulated by how we live. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories, in queer expression and a celebration of eros.

The Sunset Special 2

Nicolas Gebbe | Duration 18’ 52”

This exclusive luxury cruise presents itself as the perfect holiday and family utopia. However, all artificial facades of this attractive consumer product dissolve, as a psychedelic dream world unfolds, illusions break and the crude reality beyond superficial comfort is unveiled.
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