International Short Film Competition

SOLMATALUA

Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade | Duration 15 min.

In a dreamlike Afro-Diasporic odyssey, landscapes and alleys meet at the crossroads of time. Solmatalua travels a dizzying itinerary through ancestral and contemporary territories, carrying out a mystical journey that rescues memories and searches for possible futures.

SMOKE OF THE FIRE

Daryna Mamaisur | Duration 22 min.

There is Portugal, there is the Portuguese language and there is a Ukrainian filmmaker who learns the language and approaches the role of the potential migrant. Between languages, between images from here and those from a country at war, a voice tries to put into words the state of exile.

PACIFIC CLUB

Valentin Noujaïm | Duration 16 min.

In 1979, the Pacific Club was opened in a basement of La Défense — the business district of Paris. It was the first nightclub for Arabs from the suburbs; a parallel world of dance, sweat, young loves, and one-night utopias. Azedine tells us the forgotten story of this club and of a generation who dreamed of integrating into France.

GEOMARKR

Chloé Galibert-Laîné | Duration 22 min.

After spending years travelling the world with his camera, Chris Marker embraced the online world as a new stage for his filmmaking explorations. Years later, in lockdown, thousands of gamers started playing GeoGuessr, an online game that invites its players to roam the world through their computer screens.

BLACK STRANGERS

Dan Guthrie | Duration 8 min.

After seeing him mentioned on a Bishop’s Transcript held in Gloucestershire Archives, Dan goes for a walk in the woods in search of Daniel, a man buried in Nympsfield on the 31st of December 1719 and described on the document as ‘a black stranger’. Whilst walking, Dan talks directly to Daniel, speculating about the parallels between him and his namesake.

NEWEST OLDS

Pablo Mazzolo | Duration 15 min.

The Newest Olds transforms Detroit’s iconic city-scapes, dislodging buildings from their foundations and collapsing the physical, political and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States through alchemical, in-camera, and optical printing techniques.

IT’S A DATE

Nadia Parfan | Duration 6 min.

Kyiv in 2022. A car races at breakneck speed through the city at dawn. Filmed from a subjective camera angle in a single unedited shot, this contemporary remake of Claude Lelouch’s film C’etait un rendez-vous captures the emotions in a state of emergency caused by the war.

DESERT DREAMING

Abdul Halik Azeez | Duration 12 min.

Tracing labor migration to the Middle East and the micro impacts of large shifts such as the neoliberalization of the Sri Lankan economy in the 70s, Desert Dreaming challenges monolithic narratives of personal history and middle class Muslim upbringing through popular culture and anecdotal, intimate recollections

CHASING THE SUN: EL SHATT

Ana Bilankov | Duration 19 min.

Using materials from Croatian and international archives and intertwined with present-day visuals of this desert non-place, Chasing the Sun: El Shatt attempts to reconstruct a fragmented memory and touches on historical facts about El Shatt, the largest refugee camp in the Sinai desert in Egypt during WWII.

45TH PARALLEL

Lawrence Abu Hamdan | Duration 15 min.

Inside a building where a thick border line is drawn on the floor, a monologue tells stories of permeable borders and impermeable laws, and reflecting on how free movement, free knowledge and free space are under threat.

YOU MADE ME SEE THE SKY

Luis Esguerra Cifuentes | Duration 20 min.

A group of friends decide to visit a forest on the city's outskirts, despite the warning and restrictions placed due to a strange moss that has recently invaded the area. The characters play, sing, and display their bodies freely in this place, where reality warps gradually and intertwines with their stories, fantasies, and dreams.

WHY ARE YOU IMAGE PLUS?

Diogo Baldaia | Duration 9 min.

In a small and poor village, a local Saint controls the realm of the abyss, making it impossible for dead people to talk to their loved ones who are still alive. Ima, a curious dead child, tries to meet the Saint, so he can let her talk to her beloved grandmother.

BIRDSONG

Anouk De Clercq | Duration 16 min.

Two birds in a weightless world. They summon the sun with a song until an eclipse brings out the stars. Birdsong is an attempt to see the beginning in the end, a meditation on a world without us, a postlapsarian paradise, a kind of love at last sight.

AQUERONTE

Manuel Muñoz Rivas | Duration 26 min.

On board a ferry, a series of passengers cross a river from one riverbank to the other. Cradled by the waves, their journey on the waters seems to expand, the destination shore is postponed, the magnitude of space is blurred. Motion itself is perhaps the only certainty.

ALEGRÍAS RIOJANAS

Velasco Broca | Duration 19 min.

An ophthalmologist's confession is interrupted when the priest who was attending him leaves in an emergency. After he is fatally hit by a car, his immortal soul is cast into a medieval-looking purgatory populated by grotesque creatures, blemishes and devils.

SOFT TOUCH

Paige Mazurek | Duration 11 min.

An existential bubble bath caught between past, present and daydream, Soft Touch reconsiders how we move through the tunnel of life. The film is both a celebration of and escape from the everyday—set within an unexpected American ritual.

SLIMANE

Carlos Pereira | Duration 19 min.

In a Germany in the not too distant future, queer people have become even more marginalized and under threat. On the last day of winter, Omar is released from prison and, unannounced, visits Ava.

LUCID ROOM

Chiara Caterina | Duration 20 min.

Returning home after a break-up, a man finds himself in an empty room. His gestures and actions fill the time he spends in solitude and a few objects offer him temporary comfort until a deep sleep captures him. A lucid dream will initiate a healing ritual.

GODS OF THE SUPERMARKET

Alberto Gonzales Morales | Duration 8 min.

In times of body positive movements this film pays tribute to the mainstream representation of the male body which the director has a love-hate relationship with. Through a series of gleaned images from the internet and from elsewhere (“net found footage”), our cultural obsession with unrealistic beauty standards is put into question.

FLORES DEL OTRO PATIO

Jorge Cadena | Duration 15 min.

In northern Colombia, a group of queer activists use their extravagance to denounce the disastrous exploitation of the largest coal mine in Colombia through performative actions.

DILDOTECTONICS

Tomás Paula Marques | Duration 16 min.

In this day and age, Rebeca attempts to create a collection of non-phallic ceramic dildos. During the Inquisition, Josefa finds a dildo that is used in their forbidden love relationship with Maria. Although in different timelines, the paths of Rebeca and Josefa end up crossing each other.

SENSITIVE CONTENT

Narges Kalhor | Duration 8 min.

After the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, massive women’s rights and anti-authoritarian protests erupted across Iran, which were violently suppressed by the regime in Teheran. Using social media sensitivity filters as a central metaphor, Sensitive Content explores how one witnesses and documents both historical events and dissent in the modern age.

NOCTURNE FOR A FOREST

Catarina Vasconcelos | Duration 16 min.

In the 15th century, in Portugal, a group of Catholic monks build a wall around a forest and prevent the entry of women.

MAST-DEL

Maryam Tafakory | Duration 17 min.

Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires, both inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.

JILL, UNCREDITED

Anthony Ing | Duration 18 min.

As one of the world’s most prolific background actors, Jill Goldston has remained relatively unknown up to now, despite her very impressive filmography. Anthony Ing’s found footage film poignantly reclaims her image and work, celebrating both her artistic contributions, as well as modern cinema and pop culture.

BEAR

Morgane Frund | Duration 19 min.

A seemingly innocuous project – the digitization of the archives of an amateur filmmaker who made a hobby out of filming bears – turns into a wholly different process when the images reveal more than just natural landscapes. A confrontation about the power of a gaze and its voyeuristic violence.

ALL MY SCARS VANISH IN THE WIND

Angélica Restrepo, Carlos Velandia | Duration 14 min.

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.

WILD FLOWERS

Karla Crnčević | Duration 11 min.

“My father used a camera just once in his lifetime. After 30 years he asked me to digitise the VHS material he filmed. I was wondering what he remembers.” Connecting politics with intimate spaces, Wild Flowers questions both the influence of war on private archives and the role of gardens as places of new beginnings.

THE FILM YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE

Maxime Martinot | Duration 11 min.

Please note that the film you are about to see is taken from real material of cinema history, namely the disclaimers and warnings that frame the existence of many films. However, any collusion between art and industry, any conflict of interest between freedom of creation and the law, or any hint of moralism on the life of images, would be purely incidental and unintentional.

MARIA SCHNEIDER, 1983

Elisabeth Subrin | Duration 25 min.

In 1983, French actress Maria Schneider gives an interview for the TV show Cinéma Cinémas. The conversation takes an unexpected turn when she challenges film industry practices and is asked to talk about the controversial film Last Tango in Paris (1972).

DEAR GERALD

Jasper Rigole | Duration 11 min.

Dear Gerald starts as a reflection on the medium of the home movie and the nature of the archive but slowly reveals the problematic side effects of publishing private images. What do authorship and consent mean in an online environment? The film is conceived as a response to an online review of one of the home movies from Jasper Rigole's IICADOM archive.

ARDENT OTHER

Alice Brygo | Duration 16 min.

A stunned crowd faces a fire. The threat has no name, a diffuse anguish spreads. Fear needs to be conjured, fire must be turned into a sign.

VISION OF PARADISE

Leonardo Pirondi | Duration 16 min.

Maps of the 15th century could sometimes render both the real and the imaginary. Visão do Paraíso follows the search for a mythical island in the “New World”, while exploring the capacity of human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments and to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a new kind of “New World”.

THE VEILED CITY

Natalie Cubides-Brady | Duration 13 min.

The Veiled City is a sci-fi city symphony inspired by London’s Great Smog of 1952. Created from archive footage, the film unfolds through fictional letters from a post-apocalyptic future. We are invited to understand the smog in the context of the present-day climate emergency and our global destiny.

THE SECRET GARDEN

Nour Ouayda | Duration 27 min.

The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures.

FEEL THE HEAT

Pasi Autio | Duration 9 min.

A one-man disco in a forest at night – the lights are flashing, birds are singing, dancing continues and time disappears. After the atmosphere in the forest reaches its height, it starts declining freely and uncontrollably. The night cannot go on forever and, in the morning, the surrounding reality is revealed.

CENTER, RING, MALL

Mateo Vega | Duration 17 min.

A multi-vocal triptych through peripheral sites of urban infrastructure: a data center, a ring road, and a run-down mall. All three sites were built with certain worldviews - visions of the future and US-influenced promises of progress that didn't turn out to be the utopias they presented themselves as.

BLISS.JPG

Emily Rose Apter, Elijah Stevens | Duration 9 min.

A travelogue through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of digital landscapes. Pairing 16mm footage of computer desktop backgrounds with soundscapes of sites of technological extraction – precious metal mining, smelting foundries, microprocessing plants, and data farms – Bliss.jpg excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.

WE KNEW HOW BEAUTIFUL THEY WERE, THESE ISLANDS

Younes Ben Slimane | Duration 20 min.

In the middle of Zarzis' migrant cemetery in South Tunisia, a solitary stranger performs his nocturnal ritual, delicately digging the graves and watching over the resting souls. As night falls, he unveils their objects - a collection of objects that bear witness to their scars and stories.

BEEN THERE

Corina Schwingruber Ilić | Duration 10 min.

Weekend trips, city breaks, a detour into nature or around the world. Barely a few days off, you’re already gone. Never before has the desire to travel been so widespread and visited places so overloaded. What do we get out of it, other than the picture proof that we have been there?