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International Short Film Competition

Sections

A Metamorphosis

Lin Htet Aung | Duration 17'

In the houses, after parting, Mothers were made up of tears. Sons were transformed into empty glass cups. And the lullabies became a curse. The film examines the suffering and resilience of the Burmese people by using the distinct political elements that have floated for several years on the ocean of political opera under repetitive military dictatorships in Myanmar.

The Motherfucker’s Birthday

Saif Alsaegh | Duration 7'

Through dancing, the film shows the evil of dictators and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. Saddam dances, Bush dances, so what's left for the Iraqi people except to join in?

Loynes

Dorian Jespers | Duration 25'

A Kafkaesque courtroom drama set in 19th-century Liverpool, recounting the trial of a corpse with neither name nor past. Dozens have gathered for the absurd ceremony — and perhaps to deliver justice.

Citizen-Inmate

Hesam Eslami | Duration 15'

The electronic monitoring has transformed Tehran into a digital panopticon, turning the nightmare of constant surveillance and control into a reality. But what happens when the roles are reversed and the focus is turned on the surveillants?

Empty Rider

Lawrence Lek | Duration 15'

EMPTY RIDER is a single-channel video installation that extends Lawrence Lek’s use of cinematic language and simulated environments to explore the architecture of control. Developed using computer-generated animation, the work follows the trial of Vanguard, a sentient self-driving car accused of an attack on its human operator.

Another Other

Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson | Duration 9'

A Black police officer and a university president are interrogated by multiple white state officials after their failures to sufficiently comply with their respective institutions' plans. An experiment in image, sound, and subtitle, ANOTHER OTHER identifies these figures as collaborators with racist systems, even as those systems betray them.

happiness

Fırat Yücel | Duration 18'

An urgent desktop diary made at the intersection of a hectic digital landscape and the inner violence of modern colonization. The film chronicles the sleepless nights of a group of activists, eyes fixed on screens as they follow the news from Palestine and the Middle East. In Amsterdam, far from their home countries, police violence and the threat of deportation glue them to digital interfaces night after night.

How Are You?

Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel | Duration 31'

A group of animals live on a wild coastline and try to heal the ills caused by the contemporary world. A kind of rehab.

The Birds Choose the Cards

Basim Magdy | Duration 24'

What was intended as a film about tourism, sunsets and war, quickly turns into a puzzle with its pieces tangled between ancient philosophy and a strong desire to see the future. An emotional film where first-person narration transcends the absurdity of the journey it narrates to explore the defeat of empathy. The dissonant soundtrack highlights the warmth in the details of the narrator’s journey.

Being John Smith

John Smith | Duration 27'

After enduring many decades of embarrassment and discomfort, the artist finally admits that possessing the most common name in the English-speaking world has had a profound impact on his sense of self. Combining fragments of autobiography with interjections concerning confidence, self-doubt and the state of the world, BEING JOHN SMITH takes us on a confessional journey that addresses universal dilemmas as well as personal ones, revealing just how important a name can be.

L’Mina

Randa Maroufi | Duration 16'

Jerada is a mining town in Morocco where coal extraction, although officially halted in 2001, continues informally to this day. L’MINA recreates the current work in informal mining pits using a set design created in collaboration with the town’s residents, who perform in their own roles.

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths

Eva Giolo | Duration 24'

In the valleys surrounding the Dolomite Mountains, children reimagine ancient Ladin legends while they examine bodies of water, holes, caves and passages looking for something lost or forgotten. Through a poetic choreography, the film becomes a fictional journey creating resonances between the landscape, magical thinking and Ladin – the protected old Rhaeto-Romanic language of the valleys; a puzzle unfolds as a timeless fable.

Slet 1998

Maria Popivoda | Duration 22'

74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević moves through socialist-modernist spaces, her body echoing Yugoslavia’s last mass performance. Intertwined with a teenage girl’s diary from 1988, the film traces the shift from socialist collectivism to rising nationalism.

Portals

Elena Duque | Duration 16'

PORTALS follows the course of the Guadalete River in Cádiz, Spain, from the mountains to the sea: a catalog of landscapes that hide other landscapes, a collection of interdimensional portals (and postcards) that fuses real action and animation creating an impossible fauna and flora, inventing a new history and geography for a humble waterway.

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing

Theo Panagopoulos | Duration 17'

When a filmmaker of Palestinian descent based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wildflowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.

The Orchards

Antoine Chapon | Duration 25'

In 2015, in Damascus, the Basateen al-Razi district and its orchards were razed to the ground as punishment for the population’s uprising against the regime. Having lost everything, two former residents recall their neighborhood.

Who Was Here?

Evi Stamou | Duration 26'

To fill in the gaps and inconsistencies in her father’s biography, filmmaker Evi Stamou begins a correspondence with an artificial intelligence. From this conspiratorial and often impertinent exchange, possible and probable stories emerge, painting the portrait of a young dreamer, at a time when the Greek military junta was gaining power.

J-N-N

Ginan Seidl | Duration 19'

J-N-N is based on family conversations between the artist during a trip to Iraq and intensive research on the Jinn, the ephemeral entities that are deeply interwoven into the country's culture. Through a visual and fragmentary journey through the desert of Iraq, from Ur via Babylon to the secluded living rooms in Baghdad, the film questions a culture and society that has been torn apart by ongoing wars, civil wars, repression and terrorism.

Koki, Ciao

Quenton Miller | Duration 11'

Co-written and narrated by Koki, the 67 year old speaking cockatoo of Yugoslavia's former leader Tito, KOKI, CIAO features recordings made with the bird over four years and previously unseen images from state archives, including accounts of state visits from Nikita Khrushchev, Sukarno, the Ceaușescus and Gandhi, as well as celebrities like Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti.

Every Epoch Dreams the Next

Johannes Gierlinger | Duration 18'

Starting with an excerpt from an Albanian feature film from the communist era in which a boy dreams of the construction of a modern city, EVERY EPOCH DREAMS THE NEXT reflects on how a cityscape changes as power structures shift and how these power structures can override the common good and the general public.

World at Stake

Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein) | Duration 20'

A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays against itself and a rally co-driver faces an identity crisis. They are surrounded by an audience unable to act. Shot inside of sports video games, A WORLD AT STAKE turns the ordering principles of victory and defeat upside down and negotiates social roles between individual sovereignty and collective passivity.

What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move

Daphné Hérétakis | Duration 31'

Nothing seems to be moving in Athens and the people are as still as statues. But elsewhere in the city, a caryatid escapes the museum and a small groupuscule demands the destruction of all antiquities. Perhaps filming is the only way to avoid turning into stone.

Green Grey Black Brown

Yuyan Wang | Duration 12'

A synthetic realm unfolds, meticulously engineered by global startups. Everything is bound together by a dark slime—an oily, recurrent presence that merges Jurassic-era flora with plastic plant decorations destined for shopping malls. Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, opens up a portal to the gory logics of petro-capitalism and global extraction practices.

Their Eyes

Nicolas Gourault | Duration 23'

How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings introduce the experience of online micro-workers from the Global South: their job is to teach the AI of self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the Global North.

Common Pear

Gregor Božič | Duration 15'

In a not-too-distant future ravaged by climate crisis, a team of scientists analyse the archival footage of farmers from the past, in an attempt to understand their connection to the land.

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