OFFICIAL SELECTION FEB 2021
NARRATIVE
NEVER APPLY SALT TO ATTRACT A POTENTIAL LOVER
Directed by Jethro Massey
Francesca likes music and complex mathematical equations. She also likes Bobby.
Bobby likes salt.
A short silent comedy shot on 16mm, filmed in Italy by an Anglo-French director who doesn't speak a word of Italian.
THE DEAL
Directed by Stuart Black and George Felner
Jenny is having a bad birthday - it's freezing cold, her boyfriend is cheating on her and now a dodgy dealer is trying to rip her off. Someone will have to pay for this...
THE PACKAGE
Directed by Livio Bondi
A man’s life is at stake as he drives through the several obstacles of life to deliver a very important package.
LA DER DES DER
Directed by Patrice Guillain
«If the last surviving soldier of the first World War wanted to get rid of the terrible burden that kept him alive ... his name would be Simon Rosenberg.»
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DE RETOUR ( BACK HOME )
Directed by Pascal Marc
At just 23 years old, Lucas is back home after three years in prison.
For a day and a night, his first hours of freedom, he tries to find a place among his own.
STORMS NAMED AFTER PEOPLE
Directed by Sarah Ballard
Jess is alone in Tarpon Springs, FL on Christmas Eve.
THE BUREAU
Directed by Sengthe Vanh Bouapha
In a future dystopia, administration is left to AI. Following a recalculation of his family budget, Jules has to separate from one of his children.
To challenge this decision, he will have to go to the Bureau, the administrative management center.
THE FERRY ( A BARCA )
Directed by Nilton Resende
On Christmas Eve, two women engage in dialogue in a barge as it glides over the waters of a dark, icy pond. An unexpected event will leave its mark at the end of this crossing.
LEONIDAS AND THE FISH
Directed by Alexander Machlouzarides-Shalit
A Cypriot boy's perception of life changes when he catches a big fish.
ALL WINNERS
Directed by Antoine Langevin
"All Winners" is the journey, led by an invasive family pressure, of a young champion before an important competition.
experimental
KALEIDOSCOPE
Directed by Grace Conley
An experimental short that explores color, body image, and the lengths we go to please.
BOOBS
Directed by Mark C.Hewitt
Boobs is sixth in a sequence of eight stylistically coherent filmpoems (all less than 90 seconds) with the overarching title: 'Les Coffrets' (meaning 'little boxes', derived from the shape of the texts on the page). The vids were a collaboration between a writer/theatremaker and an artist/filmmaker. Each is voiced by a different actor.
CAN'T KILL US ALL
Directed by Boris Seva and Ben Williams
Unravelling one man’s mental unrest as he navigates the turbulence of dealing with two global pandemics.
A theatrical experience combining Hip hop theatre and film from dance experimentalist Botis Seva, CAN’T KILL US ALL reveals the deterioration of one man’s emotional sanity and physical stability as he confronts life in lockdown. From reflecting on childhood memories to reliving Black trauma, CAN’T KILL US ALL pushes through the darkness to find light, humility and peace.
DARK MYRIAD 4
Directed by Eta Dahlia
Dark Myriad 4 (Тьма Тем 4) is a videopoem that aims to create a new type of poetic language, integrating spoken word with moving image to develop a non-illustrative style. This piece ponders on the act of looking at a plain brick wall, which starts to tell its story in a rhythmic burst of colours.
The title Dark Myriad comes from an ancient Slavonic numbering system and signifies the biggest possible number, which is linguistically associated with darkness and its perceived infinity.
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XCTRY
Directed by Bill Brown
Leaving one hometown and looking for the next one.
A RETURN
Directed by James Edmonds
To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits, perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. Peering into layers, sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance.
A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience.
Structures shift and intermingle, two worlds become one.
A NEW NORMAL
Directed by Luzie Loose
A New Normal is a stereoscopic essay film that examines the question how to go on when everything has changed. A young man wanders through deserted landscapes. A narrator recounts fragments of an everyday life following catastrophe. Stories start out as banal episodes but reveal various strategies to engage with a profound crisis of identity.
RESTLESS INSTANTS
Directed by Clementine Chapron
This is a film about encounters
A film about details from these encounters
About those stories that are gone
Those stories that did not happen
This is a film about desire
DEAR FRIEND
Directed by Luca Sorgato
During the covid-19 pandemic, a man writes a letter to a dear friend.
DISAPPEARING SILENCE
Directed by Sarah Senee
The silence subtly disappeared sometime in mid-January 2019, following a traumatic event that occurred one year before. Since then, white noise, scintillating sounds, and other dysfunctional frequencies have been with me every moment of every day, like impalpable symbols of trauma, superimposed.
This self-portrait, shot in Super 8 film, illustrates the sensory chaos provoked by permanent tinnitus. I have had to tame this ‘phantom pain’, like perpetually surging sound waves, to define a new state of silence.
WAVES
Directed by Dominik Klimowski
Two people are determined to continue a relationship despite having to distance themselves in dramatic fashion. Is this happening in a time long ago, or is it in a future which has been forced to ‘re-set’?
‘Waves’ is a love story, a commentary on technology and social interaction, and a need for the human touch.
Animation
ELEVATERROR
Directed by Lee Charlish
An out-of-hours engineer is called to repair a faulty elevator, after the original repair man mysteriously left without fixing the problem. However, the issue is more desperate and other-worldly than could ever be imagined.
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SHUT THE F**K UP
Directed by Emma Tilbrook
A young woman is tired of the endless talking from her date. She fantasies about ways to shut him up, however fantasy is not reality.
FAMILY TREE
Directed by Emmet O'Brien
An animation about Seymour, a lonely sycamore tree who becomes excited when a new family moves in to the house on the grounds where he lives.
PANGAA
Directed by Markus Keim and Beate Hecher
In the field of tension between work and private retreat, the downfall of an administrative officer is sketched who is no longer up to his changing environment and who finally succumbs to it through his own disappearance. As an administrative employee of a corporate group, the protagonist experiences the same constant stations of his monotonous everyday life. Quite casually and at first unnoticed by him, his surroundings begin to change and deform until one morning he finds an empty office and is confronted with the fact that this everyday life no longer exists. What remains is a society without a human face in a deserted architecture... a city minus people in its poetic and cruel beauty.
THE BOY AND THE MOUNTAIN
Directed by Santiago Aguilera and Gabriel Monreal
Hernán is a child who likes to daydreaming, but in his studies he is not doing well at all. His father constantly urges him to improve, advising him that he must reach very high to succeed in life. Hernán dispenses with his dream, gradually forgetting it to devote himself to his studies. Over time, and already become a successful entrepreneur, Hernán achieves the dream that his father instilled in him, reach high, until one day he will realize that he has not really achieved something he always longed for. Then he will make the crucial decision to fulfill his dream, but fate will play tricks on him. Hernán will have to face a new challenge that will change the meaning of his life.
LOS
Directed by Martin del Carpio
In another time, on a different world, mankind has made progress . . . Ruled by the very AI they developed and employed to set them free, humans have become slaves to their machine. We have lost friendship, love, and sex, and we are the machine labor and means of production. In a tomorrow-land without touch or value, a future very much of our making, upon which human life is transaction and output, we have lost humanity. The AI, the machine, has put us to work, and we humans do not work without it. We labor and toil for calculations and machinations logical and unfeeling, having forgotten one another and ourselves.
documentary
IJMAGINACION
Directed by Joaquin Salgado Osuna
A short documentary that shows the lives, horrors and frustrations, of the director and his family during the COVID-19 lock down.
MAMMA
Directed by Pablo Cires
While she was struggling every day against her lung cancer, I stumbled across some of my mother's videotapes: her travels, her wedding, my birth.Her present, overshadowed by the disease, revolving only around waiting, treatments, morphine, was so different from the archives that showed her to me in a new light: radiant, carefree, loving. Feeling that her life was slipping through my fingers, before she died, I wanted one last time to make her talk and photograph her.
THE ROADS ARE NOT INNOCENT
Directed by Giulio Gobbetti
Roads, railways and bridges were, in the height of the colonial era, hailed as emblems of modernity. In reality, colonial powers used infrastructures to exert control over their colonies. Today, this history has been sanitised: although colonisation is often condemned, there is still a narrative that sees Britain and other countries as the great exporters of progress, forgetting that progress was instrumental in both propelling the colonial drive whilst maintaining control over the territory. Through the use of archive material, The Roads are not Innocent looks at the power of infrastructure in an usual and thought-provoking way.
DEVOTEE
Directed by Lucas Veuve
Thaipusam is a Hindu Festival celebrated by the Tamil community. Every year, devotees gather at Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to honour Lord Murugan, the destroyer of evil.
THE GHOST BEHIND
Directed by Caroline Rumley
Four Friends. Many bands. Expectations. Addiction. Loss.
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COAPAN ON STANDBY
Directed by Federico Cuatlacuatl
Coapan En Espera is an experimental documentary highlighting the migratory history and diaspora of a community from Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. The community of San Francisco Coapan first started migrating to the U.S in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Now almost 30 years after the first people left their hometown, the hope of returning or not returning home one day reflects in this community’s current emotional flux of being on standby. With over half of the total community’s population now living in the U.S, the tensions and uncertainty deepen.
A PLACE FOR SAILORS
Directed by Daniel Georgiev
Witness the remains of a silent and forgotten coastal town, once populated by a rich fishing culture and forgotten sailors. A portrait of Whitby; from its cliffs and piers to it’s beaches and dock. Everything stands still except the winds and ocean, only the souls of the sailors remain, forgotten to the sea.