Encounters Film Festival 2022 catalogue

Much has changed since the last in-person edition of Encounters Film Festival in September 2019. A pandemic, and a cascade of national lockdowns, mantled the world over the past two years – its last remnants still rippling through our current realities, although with diminished potency. Conflicts arose abruptly and powers were abused, igniting communities and prompting them to come together, look out for each other, and initiate change. Social unrest makes us feel united in challenging the status quo; practices of care remind us that there is strength to be found in vulnerability and repose.

In my first year as Head of Programme at Encounters, I attempted to explore contemporary and socially-resonant themes, find similarities in seemingly dissonant works, and weave together unexpected narratives. Even at first glance, it becomes apparent that Encounters’ familiar division between Live Action and Animation programmes has evolved in favour of a more hybrid approach, one that is also curious, inquisitive, and eager to celebrate commonality regardless of genres, techniques, or filmic language.

With an interest in communities in mind and harking back to Encounters’ history, a section of the festival has returned: the South West Showcase. This section also forms its own competition to salute and nurture the thriving pool of local talents.

I hope you will be able to encounter stories that will make you feel seen and loved; stories that will inspire you to take action; stories that will make you laugh, shiver, cry and vibrate with joy. I hope that you will celebrate with us the power of short films. Happy watching!

Ren Scateni Head of Programme

ENCOUNTERS FESTIVAL TEAM

Delivery Team

Rich Warren, CEO

Ren Scateni, Head of Programme Lucy Barnes, Marketing & Communications Manager

Becky Megson, General Manager

Iris Došen, Festival Producer

Isabella Coombes, Industry Manager

Katie McGoran, Immersive Encounters Coordinator

Nicole O’Connor, Guest Liaison Jenna McDonald, Volunteer Coordinator

Joshua Westlake, Design Assistant

Fiona Morgan, Accounts Extras Festival Illustration by RTiiiKA Festival Trailer by Matt Harris-Freeth (Robot Dinosaur)

Festival Branding, Website & Catalogue design by Tony Stiles (Studio Stiles)

Preselection Alice Shone Alonso Aguilar Ben Flanagan

Florian Fernandez Apostolia Katsiantridou Iris Došen

Jason Tan Liwag Jonathan Bygraves Michel Rensen UK Student Programmers

Steph Read Fedor Tot

Board Members

Simon Perry (Chair)

Liz Harkman

Lisa Howe Will Massa James Mullighan

Alison Sterling Steven Coombe (Finance Advisor)

Jess Loveland Nat Collier

Freya Billington Euella Jackson

REFLECTIVE ENCOUNTERS

Reflective Encounters was borne out of a belief that you can’t have a great film culture without a great film criticism culture. The lack of cultural space to think about films is even more precious in the short film world. It is here that many filmmakers are taking their first, encouraging steps and yet there is a paucity of reflection on these films.

By inviting several critics to the festival and encouraging them to respond and engage with the films available at Encounters, the hope is that Reflective Encounters o ers a space in which a better film culture can be built. In a digital-first world where we’re always bombarded with information, the space to think and consider becomes even more important.

These short pieces are intended to start a conversation –between the filmmaker and writer, between the audience and the film, between yourself and the person sitting next to you.

- Fedor Tot, Reflective Encounters Editor

Writers Florian Fernandez

Laurence Boyce Jonathan Bygraves Matthew Chan

Ben Flanagan

Lillian Crawford Ben Mitchell Chris Childs Laura-Beth Cowley

Cathy Brennan Ren Scateni

Fedor Tot

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION JURY

Nora Molitor

Since her Studies of Intercultural Communication, Spanish and History in Saarbrücken and Paris, Nora Molitor has been working for international film-, literature- and theater festivals and institutions, including the the Berlin International Literature Festival (ilb), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, the Franco-German stage festival ‘Perspectives’, Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and Berlinale ‘Forum Expanded’.

Jury activities for the festival des cinemas di érents et expérimentaux de Paris (FCDEP) and Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF). She is co-founder of transdemo e.V., member of LaborBerlin e.V. and curates and coordinates interdisciplinary projects in the independent cultural scene of Berlin.

Meltse Van Coillie Meltse Van Coillie (1992) is a Belgian director with a background in documentary filmmaking. In 2018 she graduated from KASK, School of Arts in Ghent with the hybrid shortfilm ELEPHANTFISH This graduation film screened at numerous international filmfestivals and received a Wildcard from the Flemish Film Fund.

The awarded production budget resulted in a second short, ZONDER MEER, which had its international premiere at Berlinale in 2021. Afterwards, it travelled the international festival circuit and received many awards, including the Grand Prix at Encounters. In codirection with Harm Dens, she recently finished a third short called NOCTURNUS, which was shot during the polar night in Greenland in January 2022. Set in the same arena, she is writing a first feature film with the working title TORPOR

Inari Sirola

Inari Sirola is a London based animator & filmmaker from Finland. Her work challenges gender stereotypes, questioning identity and confronting the limitations set by society. Tones of surrealism and comedy meet in her mind bending realities, whilst her unique character design o ers personal and social truths about body image and beauty standards. Showcasing all manner of long, saggy, wrinkly, features with love and absurdity. She often poses the question, deep down can’t we all relate to a sausage? Maybe we do in more ways than we care to admit.

Graduating from Royal College of Art, Inari has vast experience within the industry from working across production studios in London as well as producing her own work. She’s been featured in “It’s Nice That” Magazine as well as her films “CRAZY” and Award winning “Eating in the Dark” are currently being in festival circulation, getting into high profile festivals. Both of the films are represented currently by Miyu Distribution.

Dan Guthrie is an artist, researcher and writer whose practice often explores representations of Black Britishness, with an interest in examining how they manifest themselves in rural areas.

In the last year, he has been a participant in East Bristol Contemporary’s Day School programme, a panel member for Stroud District Council’s review of streets, buildings, statues and monuments, and a part-time librarian.

His work has been shown at the Whitstable Biennale, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Focal Point Gallery, Obsidian Coast and the ICA, and he is an Associate Programmer for the upcoming edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, having previously worked as a submissions viewer for London Short Film Festival and Glasgow Short Film Festival.

Dan Guthrie

SOUTH

JURY

IMMERSIVE JURY

Claire Horrocks

Claire has been the Film Programmer for Exeter Phoenix for 9 years and is producer of Two Short Nights Film Festival, Big Screen in the Park and regular specialised film seasons.

With a passion for supporting emerging and regional talent Claire has commissioned and executively produced a significant number of short films as part of the commission scheme at Exeter Phoenix.

Claire has shortlisted for a range of festivals including Cork, Animated Exeter and Encounters and is a member of the Young Audiences Advisory Group for Film London a guest lecturer at University of Exeter.

Neil Ramjee

Neil Ramjee is a freelance writer, film critic and broadcaster.

Having worked behind and in front of the camera over the last twenty years for shoestring productions to Bollywood features, and managed the independent and commercial cinema sector, he has a rounded view of the industry.

He is currently part of the Film Hub South West team at Bristol’s Watershed as the Community Manager.

Olly Treasure-Smith

Olly has been Programme Manager for Curzon Community Cinema in Clevedon since 2019, he worked his way up to the role after first starting there as a volunteer in 2015. His programming brings together mainstream, independent, world cinema, live comedy and more for the oldest continually running, independent cinema in the country.

Since 2019 he has overseen the development of Curzon’s own short film festival Homegrown Shorts which focuses on featuring films from, or about the South West of England, from first time film makers to directors breaking into feature film. He is from Congresbury, North Somerset and now lives in Bristol.

Matt Lloyd

Matt Lloyd has worked in film exhibition in Scotland for over two decades. He was short film programmer of Edinburgh International Film Festival from 2004 to 2008. His critical history of EIFF, How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, was published by St Andrews Film Studies in 2011.

He has been involved in programming or producing several Scottish film festivals including two high profile Highland events with Mark Cousins and Tilda Swinton. Matt has directed GSFF since the 2010 edition.

Paola Orlić

Paola Orlić is the producer of the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest Zagreb, art historian and independent curator. In addition to acting as the festival producer and exhibition curator at Animafest Zagreb, Paola is also an independent art curator and lecturer.

For more than a decade, Paola serves as the chairman of the artistic advisory board at the Gallery Makina in Pula and collaborates with FoAM laboratory in Brussels on the long-term project called PARN (Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives). As a jury member she continually takes part at many International film festivals where she also promotes Animafest Zagreb and art of animation in general.

After graduating from Aberystwyth University in 2003 Ben left Wales to head to New York. Shortly after arriving he joined the Tribeca Film Festival. While there he discovered a passion for short form storytelling and creativity and began working with the programming team watching film submissions.

In 2010 he became the Shorts Programmer for the festival. Ben is fascinated by the influence film has on our world and culture and travels to search out new stories from around the globe. He has watched over 10,000 short films for Tribeca alone.

Ben Thompson

UK STUDENTS JURY CHILDREN’S JURY

The Children’s Jury for 2022 was made up of young people from the YMCA, Clevedon Into Film Club.

The group meet every Thursday afternoon to talk about all things film and try their hand at making their own short films.

Over the course of two sessions, the group visited the Curzon Clevedon and watched over two hours worth of shortlisted films before selecting their favourites. They enjoyed a healthy discussion of what would make a good programme for Encounters and were really pleased with the final outcome.

DEPICT! JURY

Mitra Tabrizian

Siavash Minoukadeh

Siavash Minoukadeh is a curator and programmer based in London. He has worked on festivals including Open City Documentary Festival and BFI Future Film Festival and has produced & hosted events at BFI London Film Festival, BFI Flare LGBT+ Film Festival and Watershed, Bristol.

In 2021, he was on the jury for the first edition of Berlin Film Week. He currently works on the BFI Film Academy South West programme at Watershed, producing events and screenings and marketing the project. He studied at the University of Bristol and the Royal College of Art.

Laurence Boyce

Laurence Boyce was born in Leeds, UK and began his career in 1999 as a programmer and moderator for the Leeds International Film Festival. He relocated to Tallinn, Estonia in 2010 and works for the Black Nights Film Festival. He works as both a programmer for the festival’s main competitions as well being the Head of Programme (Live Action) for PÖFF Shorts, the short film section of the festival.

He is also an award winning film journalist who writes for numerous publications amongst them Screen International, Sight and Sound, Yellow Bread Shorts, Little White Lies and Cineuropa. He is a member of FIPRESCI, the London Critics Circle, the European Film Academy and BAFTA.

He is currently the chairman of the board of the Short Film Conference, a network of short film organisations from across the globe.

Artist & Filmmaker (On behalf of The Royal Photographic Society)

Mitra Tabrizian is an Iranian-British artist and filmmaker. Her photographic work has been exhibited widely including Tate Britain (2008) and Venice Biennale.

Alice Cabañas

Head of BFI NETWORK

Alice Cabañas recently became Head of BFI NETWORK after four years as a Talent Executive in Film Hub South West. Previously, Alice worked with the British Council’s Film Team, where she has been the Film Programme Manager, managing the short film and new talent support.

Joe Churchill

Channel 4 Digital Commissioner

Joe has had a diverse career that took him from regional soap opera, Emmerdale through a variety of production wand development roles around the world. He has made everything from feature films to TV formats to commercials and branded content and worked with some of the biggest indies and broadcasters in the world, including BBC, Sony Pictures, RDF Television, Endemol and Japan’s Nippon TV. Before joining Channel 4 as digital commissioner, Joe was Creative Director at Studio Weekend, the independent production company he founded and ran for nearly five years.

David Sproxton

Aardman Animations Co-Founder and Trustee

David Sproxton is the co-founder of Aardman. Together with cofounder Peter Lord, he has overseen the development of the company from a two-man partnership to one of the pre-eminent animation houses in the industry.

Jim Read

Film Programmer at Shooting People

Jim Read is the New Shoots film programmer for the UK independent film network Shooting People and oversees community development services. They’re also currently the Community Manager for Future of Film and are a directory member of Trans On Screen; the directory for trans and non-binary film crew & creatives.

Rob Watson

Producer & National Film and Television School Visiting Lecturer

Rob produced Corinna Faith’s BAFTAlonglisted debut feature The Power in 2021 and recently completed The Strays, Nathaniel Martello-White’s debut feature with Netflix and The Bureau.

KIDS AGAINST THE MACHINE

Children and teenagers are up against the same struggles as adults but their coping mechanisms bring in playfulness as much as roughness.

JOY GARRANO

JACOB, a resident in child detention is desperate to get back to the outside world. When he meets fellow inmate JOY, a mysteriously magnetic 10-year-old girl, he finds an unexpected sense of belonging which will sooner take a weirder turn.

A Garrano horse is forced to pull a heavy load under a blazing sun; young boy Joel discovers a man who is about to set a forest on fire.

Reflective Encounters Reflective Encounters

Ostensibly Joy is the story of a boy in a juvenile detention centre who is struggling with the rules whilst also wishing to see his mother once again. All very good, all very British social realism. But Alexandra Brodski quickly takes us into much deeper and more fertile territory as our young protagonist finds himself under the thrall of one who is even younger than him.

Like our characters – who struggle with acceptance versus rejection or being part of regime that would deny them childhood – the film is constantly on a knife-edge between realism and the hallucinatory, between social drama and outright horror: as if Ken Loach had been given the go-ahead to make Lord Of The Flies But these tonal shifts are subtle, culminating in a film that is consistently unsettling yet strangely also a rming.

With two great performances – Badger Skelton is empathetic as Jacob while Olivia Booth-Ford is unnervingly spectacular in playing the titular ten-year-old – Joy has qualities aplenty, burrowing under your skin and leaving its mark on you for a long time afterwards. – Laurence Boyce

The first thing that hits you as a viewer when taking in David Doutel and Vasco Sá’s Garrano is its strikingly immersive, elaborate painterly style (achieved through a mix of analogue – oil paint – and digital approaches). Intense lighting and meticulous layout harmoniously combine to heighten the emotional states and overall performance of the characters, a father and son at loggerheads under the weight of their daily labour, an interloper, and their ostensibly tame Garrano pack horse.

With elaborate character animation that seems to draw upon either reference footage or rotoscope, significant labour has gone into cementing an advanced and evolved visual style that pulls the viewer in and makes the characters – notably the titular horse – particularly sympathetic and believable. The backgrounds, layout and compositing e ectively convey the sense of burdensome heat and the paradoxically claustrophobic openness of the forest environment they inhabit.

As the dubious decisions made by the characters lead to inevitably brutal consequences (which speak to a fanciful desire of some at the end of their rope to burn down the world they inhabit and all their obligations along with it) we’re presented with a poignantly analogous series of images through the depiction of fire in its raw untamed glory, parallel to that of the Garrano horse itself, a force of nature that cannot be held back indefinitely. – Ben Mitchell

Director : Alexandra Brodski UK / 2021 / 20 Mins

Directors : David Doutel & Vasco Sá Portugal, Lithuania / 2022 / 20 Mins

KIDS AGAINST THE MACHINE

KIDS AGAINST THE MACHINE

WE KNOW A BETTER WORD THAN HAPPY

Director : Helen McCrorie UK / 2021 / 5 Mins

Following lockdown, children from Maryhill in Glasgow express their rights to outdoor play and learning. The Children’s Wood was established through ten years of community activism. Through play we learn to cope.

Reflective Encounters

No matter our best intentions, an older generation will always end up complaining about a younger one. “They spend their time glued to their phones,” they cry. “We used to be out from morning until sunset playing football,” they lament. For all these rose-tinted glorifications of times gone by, it’s easy to forget that many children spend their time indoors simply because they don’t actually have anywhere to play.

While this examination of Glasgow’s Children’s Wood – giving young children who have little or no access to green spaces safe places to play – might initially seem little more than a PSA, on closer examination there is something much more profound going on here. In following the children on the site as they play, director Helen McCrorie exposes us to the hopes, dreams and desires of these youngsters and shows how play and fantasy help pave the way for a better understanding of the world as well as fostering togetherness.

As the noise of the children playing becomes more chaotic with film moving towards its end, what could be a cacophony turns into a hymn of joy, a paean to the necessity of play and a reminder that – if we want out children to experience the outdoors – we must help them find those spaces in the first place. – Laurence Boyce

I AM GOOD AT KARATE

Director : Jess Dadds

UK / 2021 / 11 Mins

A short film following a young teenager with mental health issues, who is passionate about karate. Shot on location, on a mixture of colour and hand processed black and white 16mm, the film sits in a space between documentary and fiction.

Reflective Encounters

Jess Dadds takes the tropes of British social realism, stu s them into a sack and gives them all a thoroughly good kicking in a film that manages to be funny, clever and profound all within twelve minutes. While many of the standard tropes of the kitchen-sink realist film are out in full force – the troubled teenage protagonist, the council estate festooned with gra ti – Dadds uses surrealism and absurdity (such as the demon made up of shredded football shirts) to shift our focus away from these standards and force us to examine the world in a di erent way.

There’s humour and silliness here, but there’s also a genuine sense of empathy and earnestness as our lead character tries to deny the stereotypes they are expected to conform to whilst also battling mental health stigma. With use of 16mm, the film feels both a throwback and an excitingly fresh and vital take on current issues. Add in a wonderful performance of insouciant nervousness from our lead Harley Archer, and I Am Good at Karate is a film that consistently surprises and astounds.

– Laurence Boyce

KIDS AGAINST THE MACHINE

AGAINST

MACHINE

OTHER NETWORKS OF EXCHANGE

TRAP

Director : Anastasia Veber Russia, Lithuania / 2021 / 20 Mins

Sasha fights for his classmate’s girlfriend. His sister Marina works as a teacher in the daytime and dances on the raves at nights. Their existence in modern Russia seems to be a trap.

Reflective Encounters

When Anastasia Veber’s Trap won the Short Film Golden Bear in Berlin of February earlier this year, it would only be a scant few days before we found out how uncomfortably prescient the film was. This is an exploration of Russia as a police state, which sees our two sibling protagonists try to find escape amongst a life of random police checks and stultifying daily lives.

At first this is a cold and stark a air, with a documentary-like feel that crackles with naturalistic tension as we explore the everyday lives of our lead characters. But – as we approach the climax – the film breaks with the previous rigid formality and morphs into something completely new. Heading into the realms of the absurd and the surreal, we’re given the sense of freedom and escape that the characters have been looking for: just maybe not in the way that we expected it.

But this tonal shift is never so jarring it throws the film o -kilter – for all the absurdity it seems in some ways the only response to the situation our protagonists find. Even without its defiant genre-breaking moves, Trap would be a fine piece of work. But Veber’s bold playfulness makes this an elegiac and sometimes breath-taking a air. – Laurence Boyce

Capitalist, heteropatriarchal structures of power are under investigation in this lucid selection of short films.

BECOMING MALE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Director : Pedro Neves Marques

Portugal / 2022 / 22 Mins

Mirene and André, and Carl and Vicente, are both couples in their mid-thirties. While Mirene and André struggle with their fertility, Vicente undergoes an experimental procedure, implanting an ovary in his body in the hopes of having a child.

Reflective Encounters

Medical knowledge and the conceptualisation of male and female sex during the Middle Ages were such that one could argue Medieval people had a more fluid concept of sex and gender than the strict binary that took hold during Victorian times and has held fast ever since. Despite what the title suggests, this film is not set in the middle ages, but rather in what might be the near future, looking at how two separate couples are trying to conceive.

As Mirene and André are trying – and failing – to conceive in the traditional way, questions of fertility start to chip away at André’s masculinity. Meanwhile, Carl and Vicente take a more experimental method – an ovary is injected into Vicente for a few days before being implanted into a surrogate mother. What follows is an enigmatic and ambiguous look at gender, parenthood and relationships elevated by technology. Mirene’s voiceover narration states that “our bodies are never entirely ours,” and the camera gazes out at the endless Atlantic, suggesting an infinite horizon of possibilities.

The future opens up fractures and fluidities within our reach: the trick, Pedro Neves Marques’ film argues, is to keep our minds psychologically open to these changes and to the potential for reworked familial nodes they o er us. Concepts of gender change throughout history – it’s up to us to change with them for the better. – Fedor Tot

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIES

Director : Rehana Zaman UK / 2021 / 28 Mins

Discusses the imperialist exploits of the Disney character Scrooge McDuck, and the apparently radical yet deeply compromised promises of cryptocurrency. Between these two strands, possibilities for an alternative network of exchange are sought.

Reflective Encounters

In and of itself, blockchain technology has the potential to radically change how we use online networks in ways that could be secure and democratic. The human race has instead decided that the best use of this tech is to create funny money for buying crap art. Alternative Economies digs a little deeper into the underlying psychological rot behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Artist Rehana Zaman collects her thoughts by pulling together Scrooge McDuck cartoons, US talk shows promoting cryptocurrency, and the critical thoughts of financial services regulator Rachel Bardiger.

Set against this is a document of Zaman’s time with herbalist Rasheeqa Ahmad, brewing a herbal remedy and discussing the benefits of mushrooms and the riches of nature’s kitchen. An ecosystem, of course, is a circular organism, continually destroying to render things anew – and in contrasting her discussions with Ahmad against the exploits of Scrooge McDuck, Zaman highlights capitalism’s consume-and-grow-at-all-costs nature. Blockchain pro ers us the hopes of a healthier digital ecosystem, and yet, the production of Bitcoin worldwide currently consumes more energy annually than all of Argentina. This Ponzi scheme masquerading as a circular economy will eventually break – but the question is who will pay the price when it does? – Fedor Tot

THE BAYVIEW

Director : Daniel Cook

UK / 2021 / 18 Mins

An intimate glimpse into the lives of a mobile fishing community, through the eyes of an extraordinary woman who has turned her home into an uno cial fishermen’s mission.

Reflective Encounters

Rhetoric and chest-thumping about immigration to the UK has led the country to one of the strictest and most arbitrary immigration systems on Earth. For international sailors and fishermen who pass by British waters, this proves needlessly tricky, with strict limits on how many days one is allowed to stay ashore. The Bayview takes a look at the lives of these sailing communities through the eyes of a family in Macdu , Scotland, who run a B’n’B catering specifically to the workers of the sea.

Much of our time is spent following the day-to-day life of the gentle Matthew, who helps his mother run the place. He’s an amicable, relaxed character; director Daniel Cook’s decision to follow events and document their unfurling naturally allows for a relaxing and empathetic embrace of a particular place at a particular time, enlivened by the souls who pass by. Left in the background are tantalisingly unanswered questions about identity, with Matthew’s adoptive mum pointing out that his being a person of colour in a predominantly white context gives him a very specific relationship with the tired and hungry folks who step ashore, many of whom are also people of colour from the Global South. Although Matthew may not have all the answers that his newfound role requires of him, The Bayview seems to suggest that the journey is what matters, not the destination. – Fedor Tot

SMALL ACTS OF RECOGNITION

Singular moments of validation are all we need to reignite our inner strength and reconnect with loved ones.

ALL THE CROWS IN THE WORLD

Director : Yi Tang

Hong Kong / 2021 / 14 Mins

18-year-old Shengnan is invited to a mysterious party by her cousin. The party is filled with greasy middle aged Chinese men. Among these people, Jianguo is so di erent.

Reflective Encounters

All the Crows in the World is a neon-soaked fever dream from the streets of Nanning in Guangxi, which rapidly becomes a rallying cry against misogyny and heteronormativity - as the leads scream running from a couple having sex in a car, “All heterosexuals must die!”. It stars Chen Xuanyu as Shengnan, an 18-year-old student who finds solidarity with a gay man called Jianguo, played by Xue Baohe, at a party filled with sleazy middleaged men.

The film is a biting critique of standards for young Chinese women. Shengnan is bid on with little red envelopes when the men around her assume her to be a virgin. When she reveals she is not, a Taoist priest declares that she has a perfect horoscope which matters more. With the support of Jianguo, they flee the party as it takes a surrealist turn, with the men barking like dogs before mating.

Directed and written by Hong Kong director Yi Tang, All the Crows in the World won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, and picked up the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Short at South by Southwest earlier this year. With a sumptuous aesthetic comparable to Wong Kar-wai, the film asserts the distinctive voice of a powerful young filmmaker. – Lillian Crawford

SIERRA

Director : Sander Joon Estonia / 2022 / 15 Mins

A father and his son are losing the folk race. In order to win, the boy turns himself into a car tire. Loosely inspired by the director’s childhood, Sierra pulls us into the surreal car racing world.

Reflective Encounters

In 1980, Heikki Joon used a 16mm camera to create a stop-motion video of a motorcar race. Four decades later his son, Sander Joon inserts the footage into Sierra, named for the first car handed down to him by his father. It’s a visual ode to his upbringing and the connection he feels with his father through film, despite being forced to follow his father’s interest in racing.

Joon crafts three zones within the film. His mother waters plants in a greenhouse, and his father works on his car in the garage, while Joon plays on a tire swing between them. He visually signals the gendered di erences and roles parents in post-socialist countries like Estonia often hold, and the distance this creates between them. The lack of communication between the couple is at the heart of the film, with Joon stuck in the middle.

Sierra beautifully incorporates the black-and-white stop-motion footage into a vibrant and colourful hand-drawn animated film. The medium allows Joon to mimic the hazy fluidity of memory through the film’s more surreal touches, such as a rogue moustache and a gang of frogs.

Sierra is about the influence our parents have on us, and the need for children to find their own path as they grow up. – Lillian Crawford

HIDEOUS

Director : Yann Gonzalez

UK / 2022 / 22 Mins

Popstar Oliver Sim is the main guest of a talk-show that soon slides into a surreal journey of love, shame and blood. A three-part musical short.

Reflective Encounters

Drag superstar Bimini Bon Boulash introduces Hideous to the audience. Dressed as a vamp and wading through the fog, she brings out the camp of old Hammer horrors and video nasties, the artifice of bright red Kensington Gore and budget prosthetics. That aesthetic blends into the matted purple hues of 1980s queer art, the music videos of Derek Jarman or the film work of James Bidgood. It’s the childhood of Oliver Sim, bassist and vocalist for indie band The xx, whose story the film tells.

The short is directed by Yann Gonzalez, known for features including You & The Night and Knife + Heart as an extended showcase of Sim’s upcoming debut solo album, Hideous Bastard. As the songs in this glam horror musical reveal, Sim has been living with HIV since the age of seventeen, and the film is about navigating acceptance of his condition within the queer community.

With a starry supporting cast of gay icons like Jimmy Somerville alongside Sim’s bandmates, Hideous is a glorious celebration of queer euphoria while also delivering a clear message about HIV/AIDS. Gonzalez crafts a stunning visual contextualisation for Sim’s music, putting the spotlight firmly on him and the story he wants to tell. – Lillian Crawford

LOVE, DAD

Czech Republic, Slovakia / 2021 / 13 Mins

The author rediscovers love letters her dad used to write her from prison. That love seems to be gone now. She decides to write back in hope to find the connection again.

Reflective Encounters

Director Diana Cam Van Nguyen lives in the Czech Republic and wants to send a message to her father. It’s been fifteen years since she last heard from him, after he abandoned his family. After miscarrying three times whilst trying for a second baby, Cam Van Nguyen’s mother gave birth to a baby girl, causing her father to leave for fear of not having a son.

It’s a vital part of Vietnamese culture that a man has a boy to carry on his family genes, for when a daughter marries she is no longer part of his family. Love, Dad wrestles with this tradition that stands in sharp contrast to her own Czech culture. The film opens with letters rushing by in stop-motion, the frequent correspondence exchanged between father and daughter while he was in prison for a year during her childhood.

Cam Van Nguyen layers photographs of her family on top of these letters through collage, resembling a scrapbook, creating a happy picture of their old relationship. These images are supplemented by live-action reconstructions rendered through animation as Cam Van Nguyen attempts to convey her perspective to her father. Love, Dad is a powerful essay on cultural and intergenerational di erence. – Lillian Crawford

Director : Diana Cam Van Nguyen

WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES, WE ARE TOGETHER

Three stories to reflect on land and labour exploitation and the animistic, communal ways to rewire our ancestral roots.

CURUPIRA AND THE MACHINE OF THE DESTINY

Director : Janaina Wagner Brazil, France / 2021 / 25 Mins

An encounter between the entity Curupira, a devil who protects the forests of Brazil, and the incarnated ghost of Iracema, a 14-year-old prostitute.

Reflective Encounters

A black screen. Sounds of the rainforest chirp. Red text exclaims ‘everything exists,’ then a thumb flicks a lighter, and we are launched into Janaina Wagner’s fantasia: a roadside excursion across the south Amazon Forest.

She raises a shard of broken mirror to her face, the light reflecting on her, as a passing motorbike hides a cut: her disappearance. With flat a ect, Vitória Pereira plays a dead teenage prostitute, Iracema, who travels through physical space from the place of her death to the depths of the Amazon, where she can meet the Brazilian folkloric figure of Curupira.

Landscape shots inhabit her perspective. From the back of a truck, the camera shakes so hard that a sausage dog appears as an illusion, a trick of the light. Otherwise, distant static shots, plump with primary colours, take in the rural locations. Later, a translucent herd of cows stop tra c, like a magical realist moment from an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film.

Sometimes facts and figures appear on screen as though an essay film. Archival photographs of 20th century scenes of deforestation – indigenous land stolen and destroyed for corporate progress – bring the speculative mystery into sharp focus. Across 25 pulsating minutes, this ambitious and rewarding film unfurls with otherworldly panache. – Ben Flanagan

WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES, WE ARE TOGETHER

DAWTA

Director : Jessica Ashman UK / 2021 / 7 Mins

Inspired by a family history of trans-racial fostering, concepts of inherited trauma and the work of Octavia Butler, Dawta is about escaping the past through the imagining of a utopian future for Black women.

Reflective Encounters

Jessica Ashman opens her sublime hybrid-animation film Dawta with a quote from Octavia Butler: ‘Stay alive, at least while there is a chance to be free.’ First, we see two eyes in a black circle, like a drawing of Musidora. But Ashman’s film is uninhibited by any past, either cinematic or historical. Leah Arscott voices ‘The Grandmother’ with a tenor which will keep you rapt, telling a suggestive tale of trans-racial adoption.

Skilfully the narration weaves in newspaper quotes giving a factual grounding to what follow. Vibrant use of colour gives the film the tactility of felt-tip pens, as depictions of people and natural objects swirl and move, liberated from the bounds of any physical rules.

Ripped from your ancestral home and from your roots, Dawta asks what comes next, by pulling the viewer through a gesture to a glorious science fiction future. A driving, raucous soundtrack puts the already accomplished animation on a new plane of impact. The future remains uncertain, but by breaking from the bounds of the past, Dawta forges a path forward for both people, and the animation form. – Ben Flanagan

URBAN SOLUTIONS

A doorman dreams in front of a surveillance monitor, when images of a 19th century artist emerge, and with them all the nightmares of a country’s past.

Reflective Encounters

With four credited directors, Urban Solutions builds its rebellious statement with supreme confidence and clarity. With a few exceptions, it takes the form of static shots that operate as a study of modern Brazil. These 16mm shots of foliage are textured and inviting, like the lush work of Nathanial Dorsky.

These shots slowly move out of the natural world and into urban/industrial situations: specifically on security guards at both residential buildings and undisclosed businesses. At first this is narrated by a cheerful German voiceover, like a travel guide, setting out on a ‘Voyage Picturesque’ - an e ort to merrily exoticise the Americas for a European audience. Soon it becomes clear this voice is from the colonial period, where artworks of the era begin to encroach on the present in humorous and unsettling ways.

Then arrives the Brazilian perspective. The German narration is cut o by that bored security guard. Labour and contemplation are both linked and opposed, particularly by the intrusion of ever-more elaborate frames. The documentary feel of the film’s early stages is deconstructed and demolished by a playful but no less serious call for arms. This questions cinema itself: The grain of 16mm, and the flatly colourful images they produce, is not mere aesthetic texture but an attempt to drag together the past and present. – Ben Flanagan

Directors : Arne Hector, Luciana Mazeto, Vinícius Lopes & Minze Tummescheit Germany / 2022 / 30 Mins

WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES, WE ARE TOGETHER

WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES, WE ARE TOGETHER

STORIES OF A PRESENT PAST

Storytelling is an ageold practice and often tales comment on the present drawing from myths, archives, and film stock.

FLYING POTATO AND OTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Director : Elina Oikari Finland / 2021 / 14 Mins

A filmmaker tells about her vision of directing a neo-western about two newcomers in Finland. When violence on the imaginary frontier escalates in the form of a flying potato, the ‘fictitious’ figures begin to speak about their real experiences.

Reflective Encounters

Flying Potatoes and Other Misunderstandings has the feel of a shaggy dog story. At first, we follow a filmmaker in a Parisienne café, detailing her plans for a ‘Western’ about two immigrants settling in Finland. Then, the story smoothly transforms into a rather more personal account of the two men’s (Hami Bahadori and Yassine Khaled) lives. In turn, they each describe their own story, taking in a farming allotment in Helsinki and a racist attack. Frustrated, one of the two throws a potato into the air, which seems to take on a life of its own in a Python-esque aside.

Director Elina Oikari seems to flit between di erent formats of film throughout. The varying density of film grain across the short is suggestive of the morphic qualities of analogue itself, moulding itself to the contours of light, photochemical reactions, and to the owner of the film itself. Therein lies the central message behind the film’s absurdist, playful tone: for all the japes and shenanigans, Flying Potatoes is about narrative agency and authorial control. Who gets to tell our story, and why should they tell it in the first place? – Fedor Tot

CHTHONIOS

Director : Maria Steinmetz Germany / 2021 / 4 Mins

A mythical deity transforms from a zoomorphic figure into an anthropomorphic one and lands in an age of scientific progress.

Reflective Encounters

A mix of photo collage and hand-drawn character animation that alternates between stylistically simplistic and elaborately detailed characterises Maria Steinmetz’s Chthonios. The filmmaker’s design sensibilities sometimes seem to draw upon Greek amphora artwork, though with an altogether more understated approach to colour theory. While the title denotes a number of characters and stories in Greek mythology, the film doesn’t appear to be a direct adaptation of any existing tale as much as its own unique parable that’s open to interpretation, combining imagery from di erent cultures alongside fleeting biblical references.

Although dryly executed for the most part, the film is occasionally playful in its depiction of the events as they unfold; a woman enchants – or is enchanted by – a snake, setting in motion a series of bestial metamorphoses that each come to harm before their next transmutation. In this deity’s final moments, it briefly seems as though perfection has been achieved before its final grim fate is unveiled. Steinmetz concludes the film in a manner that catches the audience somewhat o -guard, introducing satirical elements from the modern, technical age in stark contrast to the historical visuals that preceded them. – Ben Mitchell

MY HOME

Director : Azar Saiyar Finland / 2022 / 12 Mins

“A bee stung me on my finger. It happened yesterday in the yard of a kindergarten, even though I am not in kindergarten anymore.” Fragmented memories of childhood and adulthood blend together in a song that an unknown narrator is humming.

Reflective Encounters

A voiceover narration runs throughout Azar Saiyar’s My Home. It is fed through heavy electronic modulation and distortion making words barely audible without the subtitles. Together, the narration and the soundscape sound like a guttural nightmare from the darkest depths of your childhood, reminding you of those strange and surreal early memories that seem to warp with age to the point where we’re not sure if they’re actually memories or nightmares, so alien is the thought process behind the actions in those early days of growing up.

Elsewhere, black sand slips through a person’s hands, and a doll’s head is shown being taken apart, its eyes minutiously erased with a cotton tip. Suggestions of childhood memories? Even if they are, they feel like the memories of separate people, meshed together in a dreamlike, hazy piece of aesthetic experimentalism that marks out Saiyar’s vision. It’s rare for a narrative film to capture the unique muddiness of childhood memory – focused as narrative film is on storytelling and cause-and-e ect. Saiyar’s work embraces the chaos of these remembrances, none more evocatively than in a lingering take of a train ride through a blizzard, the snow blurring our vision until it’s just a field of white. – Fedor Tot

BORN IN DAMASCUS ON XERXES’ THRONE

After ten years apart, a Scottish filmmaker tries to reconnect with her closest cousin. Once so similar, their paths were separated by war. As they piece together memories of Syria, they begin to wonder - ‘What happened to our family?’

Every media image of Syria of the past ten years has been of explosions, rubble, murder and misery, to the point where the average non-Syrian viewer may not be able to conceive of the country in any other way. Born in Damascus collates footage from Syrian-Scottish filmmaker Laura Wadha’s childhood summers in Syria, with memories recorded on VHS, early DV cameras and smartphones. These are images of Mediterranean beaches, teenage girls messing around, and fun and carefree holidays. Nostalgia becomes an inescapable melancholy in such a context.

Wadha reconnects with her cousin Lujain, who fled Damascus to start a new life in Canada, but the two drifted apart as they went into adulthood. Shockingly, she doesn’t remember anything of her life in Syria; “we thought [our mother] was going to bring all of our memories with her when she came to Canada,” she says. Lujain is referring to photos and keepsakes, but the sentence is also a deeply moving admission of the trauma of war and displacement on a person’s psyche. Born in Damascus is a heart-breaking record of a country that has since functionally disappeared, but also a testament to the necessity of perseverance and of bearing witness to the memory of peace. – Fedor Tot

A dystopian workplace at the Perama shipyard: a ban on physical contact has turned human interaction into otherworldly simulations.

A workplace where touching is entirely forbidden: not uncommon during the height of the pandemic. But in this Greek shipyard, the workers have continued to keep to these rules as other workplaces dropped restrictions. Silent and implacable, these figures steadfastly go about their jobs, the lack of human contact apparently no barrier to them. The human form is front and centre here, with director Evi Kalogiropoulou composing images so as to highlight the physical qualities of her actors – often framing sweaty brows and bulging forceps against the angular coldness of sca olding and various industrial ephemera. All of this is watched over by the attentive eyes of the protagonist (Greek pop star Yorgos Mazonakis, whose rugged face and grizzled visage has a gravitas all of its own).

Drones surveying the workplace speak to a larger cultural shift where intimacy is constantly under the microscope of distant beings searching for productivity at all costs. But rather than taking to polemics, On Xerxes’ Throne takes a much more ambiguous, existential tone, seeking to push beyond the structural ideology that governs workplace politics. The arrival of two new employees at the shipyard unsettles the group, but also hints towards a radical new future of liberty and freedom. – Fedor Tot

Reflective Encounters Reflective Encounters

Director : Laura Wadha UK / 2021 / 15 Mins

Director : Evi Kalogiropoulou Greece / 2022 / 16 Mins

HIDING FROM THE SUN

Muted palettes, crepuscular sensibilities.

Director : Carlos Gómez Salamanca France, Columbia / 2021 / 10 Mins

The itinerary of a woman and a man forced to leave their native countryside questions the capitalist and liberal economic development of Latin America and its consequences on humans beings, through the environmental and societal changes it generates.

Reflective Encounters

Cross-cutting between di erent planes of existence and di erent styles of animation, YUGO conveys the ways in which testimony, history both national and familial, and even the minute workings of the human body are all intertwined. By letting the voices recall family experiences via narration, the animation takes on personal overtones, as opposed to being a lofty polemic on the e ects of capitalism in Colombia.

What unites the di ering styles of animation is that they each have a defined texture, grounding the story in a certain materiality that evokes a range of associations. Stopmotion for instance, with its emphasis on reanimating objects that are meant to be static, ensures that the macabre prospect of death is never far from the mind. CGI meanwhile, with its clean e cient looks, comes across as less spiritual and more industrial. This fits in with the messaging of YUGO, which heartbreakingly details how the incessant demand for production in a capitalist system frequently comes at the expense of people’s health. That’s the case whether it applies to building houses, or even something as trivial as producing hood ornaments for cars. – Cathy Brennan

YUGO

FOUR PILLS AT NIGHT

Director : Leart Rama Kosovo, Switzerland / 2021 / 25 Mins

With a film to shoot in the near future, a director develops more than a professional bond with his actor.

Reflective Encounters

Taking place over a single night out for a miserable film student, Four Pills at Night is an excellent case study for how clubbing is an intensely cinematic experience: the melodic beats, the pulsating lights, and the swaying of bodies. Characters are introduced in a glimpse and then disappear just as quickly. It’s a setting that crackles with anxiety, as the mixture of beats and drugs – which the main character Vali takes copious amounts of – heighten the senses.

As the night goes on, it becomes clear that Vali is besotted with the actor he’s going to be working with and that his friends don’t know about his sexuality. At first, he strikes an aloof figure on the dancefloor, swiftly avoiding a friendly-if-chatty woman, but the mounting e ects of drugs and drama expose his sense of vulnerability, and more specifically his desperate need to be loved.

This is a technically impressive film, accurately depicting the chaos of a club while still telling a comprehensible story. But Four Pills is more than a mere exercise in technique, as its perceptive portrayal of emotional fragility on a night out bears the mark of true artistry. – Cathy Brennan

DEEP BLUE

A hotel phone rings. A woman answers. It is the sea calling.

Reflective Encounters

The choice to go dialogue-free in a narrative film places more pressure onto the visuals and sound. This is not a problem for Deep Blue a film with a firm command of visual language. This story of two women at a run-down motel (one a guest, the other a cleaner) each finding a fish in an empty swimming pool resonates through the use of evocative symbolism and by conjuring mood through location.

A fish gasping for air next to a freeway is a potent representation for a multitude of feelings. The struggle for life in a gloomy environment is a blend of despair and resignation. The colour palette of a faded blue amplifies this mood: what should connote life-giving water instead represents su ocation.

The two women are the only people we see at this motel, and they never interact. This creates a sense of loneliness to the film that is only amplified by the complete lack of dialogue and overcast location. Just as the fishes might be starved of water, the audience is reminded of the comfort a human voice can bring due to its absence. – Cathy Brennan

Director : Franie-Éléonore Bernier Canada / 2021 / 10 Mins

MULIKA

Director : Maisha Maene Democratic Republic of Congo / 2022 / 14 Mins

An ‘afronaut’ emerges from the wreckage of his spaceship in the crater of Mount Nyiragongo. As he descends into the city below, encountering the people of present-day Goma, he begins to understand what he must do to change the future for his people.

Reflective Encounters

The Democratic Republic of Congo possesses the world’s largest stock of cobalt in the world. Cobalt is a rare metal used in consumer electronics such as the lithium-ion battery of an iPhone. Yet despite the abundance of such a precious resource, the DRC is one of the most economically deprived countries on the planet, due to neo-colonial exploitation.

It is within this context that the film Mulika is formed, and the generic conventions of science-fiction therefore take on a grounded political dimension rather than escapist fantasy. This rooting to reality is most pointedly expressed as our protagonist, an astronaut, walks the streets of the city of Goma, where the boundaries between fiction and documentary begin to collide. The eerie music, landscape shots, and the protagonist’s voice-over narration in the film’s opening brings to mind adaptations of Soviet sci-fi, such as Solaris, Stalker, and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel.

Mulika’s sci-fi trappings illustrate the tensions between the genre’s preoccupation with technology and the material realities of bringing such technologies to life in our own capitalist world. As such, Mulika is a deeply melancholy film about the people of the DRC, and their exploitation by “vultures”, as the film itself describes them. – Cathy Brennan

ZOON

Director : Jonatan Schwenk Germany / 2022 / 4 Mins

Small shimmering animals are in heat. A two-legged forest dweller encounters the lustful group. He and his companions snack on the little creatures and soon a feast begins.

Reflective Encounters

The sight of little salamanders rubbing against each other and snacking on their limbs draws a connection between sex and sustenance. At first what seems like vore for axolotls turns into something less seedy and more meditative.

This reflects a deeper theme: the dual need for earthly survival and spiritual transcendence. Such a reading necessitates a view of sex beyond its mechanical functions as a means to procreate, but as a primal expression that is present in all life. There’s a sudden shift in Zoon to potato-shaped people who feast on the axolotls. In the shadowy environs of a dense forest, the material world appears confining, yet teeming with life. However, the presence of ethereal fireflies hints that there may be something more.

As the potato people continue to gorge on the axolotls – absorbing their sensuality as well as their nutrients – they start to float one by one. It is only through this that these floating potato people are able to see beyond the earthly realm of the forest. Yet is this a beautiful tale of transcendence, or is it one of exploitation and, ultimately, self-destruction?

– Cathy Brennan

HIDING FROM

LOOK AT ME, AND LISTEN

Charismatic main characters may grab the viewer’s attention but is our gaze really unbiased?

SCIENCE AROUND US

Director : Arif Abdillah (ARIV) The Netherlands, Indonesia / 2021 / 20 Mins

After finding out that his father was admitted into hospital and refuses medical treatment in Indonesia, Budi has to convince his father to take medical treatment while trying to clean up his wild party in The Netherlands.

Reflective Encounters

Shot in a single take after a wild sex party, Science Around Us is a twenty-minute plate-spinner. As Netherlands-based Budi is forced to take a call from his ailing father back home in Indonesia he must clean up his party-shelled Airbnb before the new guests arrive in 15 minutes. Oh, and he also has to babysit a hungover straggler from the previous night’s frivolities.

Taken together and packaged in one long take, the stress constantly teeters on the edge of comic pandemonium through the film’s visuals. Yet it’s through sound that the film maintains a poignant emotional core that also serves as a lifeline for the audience. The conversation between Budi and his father powerfully captures the tensions immigrant children have with their parents back home: the dual weight of expectation and guilt on both sides hangs heavy in the film. Budi’s father nags him about starting a family, something Budi is very obviously not interested in. Both father and son are frustrated with one another’s di erences, yet there are also similarities in their circumstances. In the end, while Budi’s plates may come crashing down, the film is able to keep its narrative wheels turning, culminating in a powerful conclusion. – Cathy Brennan

THE LIGHTING

Director : Chihying Musquiqui Germany, Taiwan, Togo / 2021 / 21 Mins

The film aims to revisit and clarify the issue of discrimination rooted in technological development and image production through an interdisciplinary exploration.

Reflective Encounters

In recent years, as visual media has continued to proliferate in everyday life, conversations around the camera’s seeming inability to capture darker skin tones have achieved greater awareness. This “mechanical racism”, as termed by Chihying Musquiqui’s short doc The Lighting highlights tensions between technology, business, and art.

The camera as a technology emerged out of industrialised capitalism in the West, which itself was structured by a racist hierarchy. As camera technology moves from film to digital, these ingrained biases have only become further entrenched, posing di culties in an era of globalisation where everyone is a potential customer to be courted.

The film sees a software engineer at a Taiwanese tech company discuss facial recognition algorithms when confronted with examples of such technology failing to recognise Black subjects in low lighting, or misreading Asian subjects as having their eyes closed. This conversation is broken up by conversations with photographers from Togo who discuss how they work around the mechanical racism of cameras when lighting Black skin. What arises from these disparate discourses is a recognition of the camera’s innately expressive capabilities, coupled with a recognition that its development comes from a racist history. – Cathy Brennan

NEON PHANTOM

A delivery man dreams of having a motorcycle. He was told that all would be like a musical film.

Reflective Encounters

In the last decade, cyclists carrying bulky, brightly-coloured cuboid bags on their backs have become a common sight in cities across the world. The ubiquity of these food delivery workers could now be considered emblematic of the times we live in, similar to the sight of petrol filling station attendants in the mid-20th century. However, the lives of these workers have been seldom explored in film, and for that reason Neon Phantom stands out.

Through a fusion of musical and quasi-documentary, Neon Phantom seeks to portray the dreams and frustrations of food delivery workers in Brazil. The musical segments bring a peppy energy to the film, without minimising the serious issues raised about the exploitation of labour and harassment by police. The film also highlights a racial divide between the workers (almost all of whom are Black) and their customers. One particularly awkward scene sees a middle-class white customer complain about a missing item even though there’s nothing the delivery worker could have done. Such moments act as a counterbalance to the more whimsical sections of the film. Regardless, even the dances of the workers simmer with dissatisfaction at an unequal society. – Cathy Brennan

Director : Leonardo Martinelli Brazil / 2021 / 20 Mins

DINNER’S READY

Director : Yuan Li Elizabeth Xu US / 2021 / 4 Mins

Women belong in the kitchen! Women don’t belong in the kitchen! Well someone has to do the dishes. And who’s that someone if we’re both women?

Reflective Encounters

The animation in Elizabeth Xu Yuan Li’s three-minute film draws us into a quotidian realm by making its canvas a napkin and its brush a biro. By alternating between two perspectives, one defined by lines of red and blue, another by shading with a red pen, Dinner’s Ready implies a division marked by gender. Such a reading is bolstered by the increasing ubiquity of genital symbolism. This division based on sexual di erence is teased out of that most everyday of questions: “do you want me to pick up dinner?”

The DIY aesthetic roots us in the domestic space as we ponder the implications of such a question. For whom does the onus of cooking dinner normally fall onto, and what other expected labours come along with that? Red and blue biros connote binary divisions: male and female, hot and cold. Yet in reality such dichotomies are often subject to “ifs” “buts” and “howevers”, as shown by the startling conclusion to the film. The sedate motions of wringing towels and sliding spaghetti out of the packet make way for hurtling cars and pouncing snakes. Sometimes the reality of our own inequal standing in a relationship leaps out at us just as suddenly. – Cathy Brennan

WARSHA

Director : Dania Bdeir France, Lebanon / 2021 / 16 Mins

A crane operator in Beirut volunteers to cover a shift on one of the most dangerous cranes, where he is able to find his freedom.

Reflective Encounters

To live openly and freely can mean flirting with peril. When Syrian refugee Mohammad leaps at the chance to man a notoriously dangerous tower crane, it at first seems like he’s fulfilling a death wish. His refusal to check in with his manager as he ascends to his post adds to the tension, creating a sense of foreboding around his possible motives.

Yet when Mohammad reaches the top and lights a cigarette, the sense of calm release is palpable. High above the bustle and drudgery of everyday life, he can be himself. The sublime aerial shots reflect the character’s state of mind, especially when contrasted with the dark claustrophobic opening shots of the film depicting Mohammad’s morning routine in the dormitory with other refugees.

Up in the skies, Warsha’s established mode of social realism disintegrates into music and fantasy. There is an LGBTQ+ message to the film, as the dangers of the crane function as a metaphor for living out and proud. LGBTQ+ refugees may often flee countries where they can be persecuted for their identities and will often be more vulnerable to discrimination in the process. Mohammad’s tale is therefore a poignant reminder of the joys of freedom and the undeserved danger seeking it may bring. – Cathy Brennan

LOOK

ME,

TOUCH ME (NOT)

Invisible walls often divide us and yet we yearn for proximity and contact.

DEAR PASSENGERS

Director : Madli Lääne Estonia / 2022 / 11 Mins

A lonely traveler embarks on a journey to find relief for a hidden yearning. Her restless longing spreads around and forces fellow passengers to face their own desires and disappointments.

Reflective Encounters

By rooting itself in the reality and the daily life of a city bus, we might first think that Dear Passengers approaches a documentary dimension. However, this feeling doesn’t last long. Close-ups on the hands of the passengers follow one another. And quickly discomfort sets in. A latent tension is palpable as the sounds of the bus fade away. But the situation catches us and takes us where we do not necessarily expect. In the silence, glances follow touch, the frame slowly widens and the movements of the bodies turns into a choreography.

Beyond the work on the sound design (by Markus Andreas, with a soundtrack by Patrick McGinely), which draws Dear Passengers into a transcendental dimension closer to contemporary dance, director Madli Lääne manages to construct a real cinematographic performance through the image. Lääne’s direction gradually lets us forget the presence of the medium itself – and therefore the camera – in a closed and extremely confined environment. The fly-sized lens slips into every gap and helps to make possible the expression of a world in harmony with our desires, or more precisely the desires of the passengers. – Florian Fernandez

NAZARBAZI

Director : Maryam Tafakory

Iran, UK / 2022 / 19 Mins

Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited.

Reflective Encounters

As the crackling sounds of film roll are heard, we quickly understand that the archives will be at the heart of this cinematographic experimentation. In this dead calm atmosphere, close-up images focus on the hands, faces and bodies of Iranian actors who are always judging each other, waiting, moving slowly but never touching directly. There is no physical contact, except through interposed means, through artifice, through association of images or in the invisible.

If there is a central sense highlighted in this film, it is without a doubt the sight, with our gaze continually being occupied. The editing invites us to question this dense sequence of images that answer each other (nearly 90 di erent films, from 1982 to 2010) but also the words and ideas of its author. The title – Nazarbazi – precisely depicts this ‘game of glances’ that is enough to tie links between male and female bodies and underline the latent socio-political ambiguities of a society through the prism of cinema.

By superimposing words on the screen, like haiku expressing the personal feelings of a ghostly spectator, Maryam Tafakory raises the question of what is prohibited in society, but also in art. She manages to make the untouchable palpable, whether it is sensations and feelings, or the unbearable prohibitions that deprive the characters of physical bonds. – Florian Fernandez

WELL WISHES MY LOVE, YOUR LOVE

Director : Gabriel Gabriel Garble Sweden / 2022 / 9 Mins

A boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. As the moon inches closer and closer towards the sun, the boy sees something in the water...

Reflective Encounters

Opening with a psychedelic yellow background, Well Wishes My Love, Your Love immediately takes us down the path of the experimental. Spiced with high-pitched atmospheric music, giving pride of place to the synths, the film o ers beautiful variations on the landscape it builds. It transports us into a dreamlike universe close to a video game, inviting us into an active meditation.

Through the prism of waveforms reminding us of a visual hallucination constantly renewed, Gabriel Gabriel Garble develops a strong cinematographic style, brightly colored and unique. Although the animation plays with virtuality, the overall universe is firmly rooted in a lived reality. Each landscape is o ered to our eyes as a reproduction of the world, as a naturalistic painting saturated in colors and distorted by the ripples moving around the main character that we follow in his enigmatic quest.

The senses of the viewer – sight and hearing – are constantly monopolised. But this dialogue-free film also questions our sense of touch: the touch that links two beings, the one capable of filling an absence, of giving wings to feelings and flight to the imagination. We go through this journey as in a paradoxical sleep where reality and fiction intertwine before we emerge and return, like the protagonist’s friend, to the world that sharpens our senses in everyday life. – Florian Fernandez

FENCE STRANGERS

A fence is built between Denmark and Germany to separate wild boars from farm pigs, to avoid the spreading of a virus. Ebba wakes up next to her girlfriend, the reminiscence of her dream about separation and longing for unity takes a toll on them.

In an anonymous city, a person collapses, appearing to have lost consciousness. Some strangers pass by, others embrace her. In a solitary quest for intimacy, blinded by a world of indi erence, her gaze, her body are staggering.

Reflective Encounters Reflective Encounters

How do you stay yourself when sharing your life with another? From the very beginning, a hint of two worlds built in parallel is revealed through mirrored images of nature scrolling in the opening credits, both reflecting and opposing itself. Very quickly, human bodies – those of two women – fill the space and the dialogue. But through their words, an implicit tension remains.

Between dreams (or nightmares) and reality, a stillness – one of a quiet daily life in Scandinavian nature – intermingles with turmoil. The disturbed night visions and the unspoken words of two individuals who seem to cohabit the same space gives the scenes a claustrophobic atmosphere. What can you give and what would you like to keep for yourself? How can you deal with keeping to your own comfort zone while embracing the wish of sharing a common space – physically or mentally – with a lover?

With great care in the cinematography, director Hilke Rönnfeldt and DoP Roxana Kore Reiss play with the camera movements to capture moments on the spot, within the spontaneous split-seconds of life. With great touches of oneirism, the atmosphere stays appealing both in sound and image, as bodies and minds bind and break. – Florian Fernandez

In the dead calm of a Swiss city, a body collapses. There is nothing to disturb the local harmony of this somewhat austere urban territory, whose stoicism is palpable even in the pale colour palette, in the discreet and artificial lights, in the sounds in which we perceive emptiness. There is no need to panic for these banal characters living their daily routine while surrounding this lifeless body that repeatedly gives meaning to the film’s title by meeting with unknown beings.

In each sequence, the director tries to surprise her audience, and as viewers we remain on the alert, to experience once again an exceptional situation that we now know to be common, but still unpredictable. Soon, contact is made; the inert body becomes a medium, a way to interact with others. In an individualistic and reclusive society that has learned to be selfcentered, the urge for physical, psychic or oral contact becomes vital. Provoking it, even if it means imposing it, seems necessary.

With Strangers, Nora Longatti develops a sober and singular aesthetic that does not stay within a basic observational approach but stimulates the spectator, and manages – particularly thanks to her main character – to inject poetry into an emotionally sterile environment, lacking in desire and interaction. – Florian Fernandez

Director : Hilke Rönnfeldt Denmark, Germany / 2021 / 12 Mins

Director : Nora Longatti Switzerland / 2021 / 20 Mins

TOUCH ME (NOT)

DIGITAL ENTANGLEMENTS

Social media and digital landscapes are increasingly infiltrating our daily lives building bridges, opening portals, and cutting rifts.

ROOTLESS

Director : Gabriella A. Moses US / 2022 / 15 Mins

A recently adopted 8-year-old refugee spends a day preparing for her first red carpet appearance with her new pop star mother when she is haunted by reminders of the life she left behind and awakened to the fragility of her new one.

Reflective Encounters

Could someone really adopt a child as a PR stunt, or is there a genuine form of love buried underneath? This is one of the questions which comes to mind watching Rootless by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Gabriella A. Moses. Questions of heritage and new directions are thought-provokingly rendered here through a story of an 8-year-old refugee from El Salvador called Alma who is adopted by pop star Yahaira, and lavished with couture, breakfast cakes, and spa treatments.

Alma’s newfound privilege stands in stark contrast to the flashback voices of her past which echo through the film, presumably the voice of her birth mother. Her experience also conflicts with another little girl following her mother, a cleaner, around Alma’s new lavish LA home on the day she is preparing for her first red-carpet appearance with Yahaira. Cracks are already starting to show as Alma fails to adopt an adult function for her new mother, posting without permission on social media and running to her room to cry. It’s a huge transition for a child to make, and one which is not necessarily shown to be wholly positive for her. – Lillian Crawford

AT LITTLE WHEELIE THREE DAYS AGO

Director : Andrew Stephen Lee US / 2022 / 18 Mins

When a soul-shaking viral video shudders through town, a jobless father struggles to keep hold of his existence.

Reflective Encounters

There’s a creeping slowness to At Little Wheelie Three Days Ago The camera pans at an agonisingly glacial pace that allows us to take in the entirety of the suburban landscape, certain of some impending disturbance to the status quo. Such is the style of FilipinoAmerican writer-director Andrew Stephen Lee, showcasing a confident control of the cinematic form. The almost claustrophobic matted aesthetic is brilliantly rendered in 1:1 aspect ratio by cinematographer Andrew Cristen Crighton and woven together by editor Carlo Francisco Manatad.

The film focuses on the couple Pons (Mark Borkowski) and Lilith (Mardy Ma) who live within this tightly-held world. They receive a video of a mysterious white van which appears to be related to their daughter, Mary. The entirety of At Little Wheelie Three Days Ago feels enigmatic, with Lee and co-writer Chuko Esiri choosing to show rather than tell as the short narrative appears to sprawl out in a mode akin to slow cinema. It considers the impact of filming and communication on human lives in the subtlest manner, but still manages to capture the existential enormity of those ripples.

– Lillian Crawford

HYSTERESIS

Hysterisis explores the lag between recording analogue drawings by Robert Seidel and projecting them onto a queer performer Tsuki to create dense feedback loops, using an AI to mediate these transformative re-presentations.

Reflective Encounters

The art of abstraction requires images to be channelled through multiple media to produce something new and beautiful. The artist and filmmaker Robert Seidel focuses his work on this premise, setting up projections, installations, and cameras to find images which have never before been created, with work appearing across numerous festivals and museums, including the Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille, Art Center Nabi Seoul, ZKM Karlsruhe, and MOCA Taipei. Seidel’s use of film allows him to capture the moving pictures of his set-ups for posterity and push the boundaries of cinema in new and exciting directions.

Hysteresis is based on a simple idea – the LGBTQ+ performer Tsuki performs free-flowing choreography in front of a blank wall onto which footage is projected and blended around them. The movements combine the objective with the human, moving from natural landscapes to stunning paintings to fuse various modes of image-making together into a dynamic mass of colour and light. There’s a sense of euphoria to Seidel’s work, of breaking free from the constraints and binaries of society, conventional artistic style, and even the dimensions of reality. The result is a breath-taking work which can evoke questions and meditations, or simply be allowed to immerse and wash over the viewer.

– Lillian Crawford

Director : Robert Seidel

Germany / 2021 / 5 Mins

VIRTUAL VOICE

Director : Suzannah Mirghani Sudan, Qatar / 2021 / 7 Mins

Suzi doll is an ego-warrior. The director’s online avatar, marching to the algorithms of social media. She is lit by temporary outrage. A trending indignation. A passion that is fashion. A politics of the popular. Her activism is abstract.

Reflective Encounters

So much of modern life is spent immersed in technology that human beings can be reduced to cogs in a machine. Such is the thesis of Virtual Voice, a montage essay film by Sudanese-Russian filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani, whose previous works include AlSit Grand Prix winner at the Tampere Film Festival. The film uses a Bratz-like doll as its heroine, a figure described as an “ego-warrior” who moves to the beating pulse of her phone’s algorithms. Questions of humanity are plugged into Google with Siri-narrated results, the virtual assistants giving life advice and controlling our movements before eventually rising above us in a terrifying fashion previously confined to science-fiction.

The film makes light-hearted farce of Suzi’s good intentions – typing women’s liberty into an app store turns out fitness programmes whilst excerpts from Dylan Thomas and Maya Angelou are copied and pasted into social media posts without context. It’s a hyper-actualisation of mass production, the aura of everything fading into pure, blinding superficiality. Virtual Voice is a striking reflection on the contemporary digital landscape from Mirghani, made largely using screen captures, which ties directly into a critique of the contemporary mode of post-feminism. – Lillian Crawford

HAPPY NEW YEAR, JIM

Director : Andrea Gatopoulos Italy / 2022 / 9 Mins

It’s New Year’s Eve. Jim and Morten are playing videogames all night long, like every day. But Morten tonight is uncomfortable.

Reflective Encounters

Video games continue to grow more cinematic, more immersive, more realistic. In Happy New Year, Jim the fabric of the film itself becomes a computer game, specifically Red Dead Online, a role-playing game in which players adopt the personae of cowboys in a stark Western landscape. However, the story isn’t focused on the game’s characters so much as two players with the usernames J1M (Jim Muzungu) and M0rt3n (Morten Hakke) are heard communicating in dialogue through voice-over. They ruminate on the game and their own lives, spiralling down a rabbit hole of despair at the realisation of the damaging extent of their immersion within the virtual world.

The film is directed by Andrea Gatopoulos, born in Pescara in 1994, who until the age of 18 spent much of his time as a pro gamer. The film’s bleakness and reflection on the distinction between gaming life and real life comes directly from him, especially as someone who broke away from this world to focus on a career in filmmaking. It’s clear that, for Gatopoulos, the lines blur in both directions, that real life itself can often feel scripted into a routine like those of the non-playable characters in the online landscape. – Lillian Crawford

THE FOURTH

Director : Johnny Kirk US / 2022 / 12 Mins

Eager to celebrate the 4th of July, a group of young black and Latino friends experience a police encounter that shatters the meaning of the holiday.

Reflective Encounters

For the most part The Fourth, directed by Johnny D. Kirk, is exactly what it appears to be: a harrowing depiction of police brutality and targeted racism on a group of young men of colour as they enjoy a night out. But there’s something not quite right, almost deliberately scripted in the way things play out, which leads to a shocking and powerful revelation in the film’s final moments. It’s a film which looks at the fetishisation of racism, of white saviourism, and the limits of empathy for those who face regular discrimination and persecution.

The central event of the film is of a group of four young guys getting snacks from a local store before being approached by a police o cer. The screen blacks out and we hear a gunshot which leaves one of the men struggling to breathe on the floor. The camera moves from the men sitting with their friend to the police o cers, hurriedly covering their backs as they realise the o cer had no cause to shoot the man, with the situation growing increasingly violent. It’s a situation that happens every day, one Kirk was inspired to re-create through real-life events, but the ultimate message comes in the closing moments as reality fades into digital artifice. – Lillian Crawford

ALCHEMICAL ENCOUNTERS

In the beginning there was a train… A look at how filmmakers experiment with chemical reactions, storytelling, and montage.

TRAIN AGAIN

WHILE WE WERE HERE

Director : Sunčica Fradelić

Austria / 2021 / 20 Mins

Tscherkassky flits through the history of the filmic avant-garde, conceiving his work as a centrifuge of quotations from the pantheon of visionary cinema. He conjures heaven and hell, embarking on a collision course bound for the apocalyptic.

Reflective Encounters

“Eighteen years after Kurt Kren produced his third film 3/60 Bäume im Herbst (3/60 Trees in Autumn), he shot his masterpiece 37/78 Tree Again. Eighteen years after I created my third darkroom film L’Arrivée (a homage to the Lumière Brothers and their 1895 L’Arrivée d’un train), I embarked on Train Again. This third film in my “Rushes Series” is a homage to Kurt Kren that simultaneously taps into a classic motif in film history,” writes Peter Tscherkassky in a note accompanying his latest work, Train Again

One of the most prominent contemporary avant-garde filmmakers, Tscherkassky works predominantly with found footage. Train Again is no di erent. After obtaining a 5-minute roll of 35mm film consisting of commercial rushes of a train emerging from a tunnel, Tscherkassky spent three years manipulating, cutting, and collapsing these frames into a kinetic voyage. Images pulsate to the rhythm of the train’s chugging sound until their contour starts bleeding into the analogue film itself as the railway and the film strip collide. Train Again is truly a cerebral celebration of the moving image. – Ren Scateni Director : Peter Tscherkassky

Croatia / 2022 / 15 Mins

Briefly depicted fragments from the characters’ lives, through summer and winter, as each of them su ers a loss.

Reflective Encounters

A melancholic grace emanates from Sunčica Fradelić’s ethereal While We Were Here Opening on found footage of an old woman holding a baby, the text on-screen tells us of an unnamed “I” and the pair of shoes they were gifted with by a loved one. That person is no longer here – the text seems to imply – and the “I” hopes the shoes could lead them to wherever the loved one is.

This is the only narrative framework Fradelić o ers us, as While We Were Here flips through di erent mundane vignettes of solitude, caring gestures, and chats among friends. Death always looms over but is openly addressed only once. On a lakeside, two girls remember a near-death incident that happened to one of them, which opens up a brief conversation about what lies beyond life, fear (or the lack thereof), and that peculiar curiosity amongst youths for whom death is often just a faraway destination. All these self-contained, non-descriptive scenes are wreathed together by abstract, coruscated transitions embracing the film with poetic beauty. – Ren Scateni

CURRENTS / PERPENDICOLARE AVANTI

PLACES WE’LL BREATHE

The film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of multiple countries and temporalities through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling preexisting film materials and fragments of otherwise anonymous orphan films.

Reflective Encounters

‘Orphan film’ is an umbrella term that emerged in the 1990s among film archivists to identify moving image works abandoned by their owners or copyright holders, quite often due to a lack of commercial potential. Rootless and often unplaceable, these films lend their inherent ephemeral significance to Federica Foglia’s evocative collage film CURRENTS / Perpendicolare Avanti

Foglia chemically processes film strips by hand using a technique called emulsion lifting. Discovered by chance and then refined by moving image artist Cécile Fontaine, emulsion layers (the photographic part of the film, which consists of dispersions of light-sensitive materials in a colloidal medium, usually gelatine) are coaxed o delicately separated and then rearranged. Through this direct-onfilm animation technique and extra-diegetic sound excerpts, Foglia conjures up stories of transnational migration and displacement, pointing to the artist’s own experience as an Italian immigrant living in Canada. Water ripples through the film via archive footage of Venetian scenes and anonymous home movies of people taking a dip and enjoying seaside activities, presenting migratory movements as a fluid, unstoppable, and beneficial factor in human history. – Ren Scateni

An audiovisual essay that advocates imagination through a travelogue of constructed and anonymous landscapes. It is a note about the future that speaks about loss, exploration, presence, vigilance, responsibility, struggle and freedom.

Reflective Encounters

A few minutes into Davor Sanvincenti’s Places We’ll Breathe a long strip of film is exhumed from the ground, mere seconds before being abruptly projected against an aggressive score of repeated drone-y sounds. Soil, dirt, and organic matter are all beautifully exposed, opening pathways to crawl into the interstices of image and sound, organic and inorganic, human and animal.

Text on screen accompanies the entire film, weaving a slippery narrative comprised of recollections of past encounters, meditations on collaborative survival and class struggle, as well as literary quotes by Chris Marker, R. M. Rilke, and Confucius among others. Sanvincenti’s ecological sensibility also permeates Places We’ll Breathe. A shot of a tree surrounded by a drystone wall prompts an enthusiastic comment on how an unnamed rural community cherished and protected that single tree for generations. Elsewhere in the film, plants and humans are compared in that the condition for their survival lies in living per their respective nature.

The film’s topography remains ultimately ambiguous, as if to suggest that the colonialist power dynamics critically addressed in the written commentary are not a localised problem, but rather endemic to the world over. – Ren Scateni

Director : Federica Foglia Canada / 2021 / 18 Mins

Director : Davor Sanvincenti Croatia / 2022 / 22 Mins

APOCALYPTIC VISIONS OF TOMORROW

THE SKY OSCILLATES BETWEEN ETERNITY AND ITS IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES

Director : Nadim Choufi United Arab Emirates, Lebanon / 2021 / 18 Mins

Two protagonists in a future smart city show how the city runs on controlling time by exploiting and selecting life cycles of organisms, including humans, and environments as a whole.

Reflective Encounters

Nadim Choufi’s film is a stunning work of speculative fiction, one which moves beyond the mere demands of superficial immersion, weaving together a layered history and focusing on the complete re-orientation of human existence, the results of which appear alien. The film is comprised of anecdotes from the survivors of an implied climate catastrophe who have migrated to Mars: ranging from descriptions of the limits of socialisation within a small population to tracing out the scientific minutia of failed attempts at terraforming.

The form of this short – of CGI models and environments with layered over with disembodied voiceovers – comes to resemble the diagrams you view in a science class, eschewing explicit realism for descriptive purposes. This exhibits itself in models of animals with ragdoll physics, amusing liquid animations which illustrate a colony’s energy needs and porcelain white human figures who almost appear bleached and sterilised by their unrelenting environments. What Choufi depicts here ultimately feels less like a cautionary tale and more a prophetic vision of what’s to come. But of course, even amidst decay and destruction, life still finds a way, and the pleasures of the old world can twist themselves into new shapes, like watching a newly engineered organism have an enclosed dance party. – Matthew Chan

There’s no way tomorrow is going to be an utopia, right?

PERFECT CITY: THE MOTHER

Director : Shengwei Zhou US, China / 2022 / 12 Mins

Perfect City: The Mother is the first episode of the Perfect City series, telling a story about a wooden mother tries to carve her root baby into a plastic human doll under the seduce of Perfect Spray, a illusion constructed by the mother’s fear.

Reflective Encounters

There are many that consider the birth of their child to be the greatest moment of their lives, with the act of parenthood idealistically portrayed with redemptive qualities, an opportunity to bring into the world something bigger than yourself. Yet with the overturning of Roe vs Wade in America there is an increasing awareness of the horrors of childbirth, which requires a full loss of bodily autonomy that irreversibly changes the self, a fact acknowledged by every body-horror artist from Cronenberg to Ducournau. Shengwei Zhou’s film ponders these concepts as well, through a stunning mix of stop motion, used for the faceless woodland creatures that populate this short, and glossy, synthetic CGI.

Within the film we witness the various anxieties of motherhood: from the process of childbirth to fears of inadequacy, bad influence and trauma, captured in a push-pull between candle-lit eldritch horror and bubblegum plastic utopia. It’s easy to get lost in the imagery, rendering the natural and familiar uncomfortable, with white sap oozing out of trees, which stands in for sources of life and the multicoloured putty which threatens to envelop all. The final transformation eventually comes to suggest that motherhood involves not just the surrender of the body but the full surrender of identity. – Matthew Chan

IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES AND OTHER STORIES I

Director : Marta Pajek Poland, Canada / 2021 / 16 Mins

An ominous ticking sound triggers an explosion. Wandering deserted city streets, an elegant elderly woman recalls what was and what could have been.

Reflective Encounters

The titular Impossible Figures probably refer to the dystopian landscapes sketched out here, which are possessed by an unthinkable sadness that few can truly grasp. But it can very well refer to the technical feat on display, rendering a 2D world with the boundless depth typically a ronted to CG. What we witness is the comprehensive decay of a society through compressed time. Figures rapidly materialise within the void, starting with a big bang of filth and dust, shaping debris into human forms, giving way to empty concrete structures and hostile urban uniformity. It’s an intoxicating kaleidoscope of destruction.

What’s left are two elderly beings who exist to wander and bemoan our poor choices, reminiscing on the forgotten wonders of human touch, depicted here as a symphony of interlinked bodies being forced to compensate with lifeless mannequins. The phrase “When will we ever learn?” is repeated ad nauseam and it becomes fitting to view this through the lens of climate anxiety. After all, the anthropocene has ensured that urban developments have e ciently destroyed the natural world. As the woman becomes consumed by water, it is as if nature is taking its final revenge. We are only left to ponder our unrepentant hubris. – Matthew Chan

MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

Director : Viktor Schimpf Germany / 2022 / 25 Mins

The programmer Frances develops an artificial intelligence software which she can talk to. They become friends and the A.I. learns to sing, dream and work for her. One day the A.I. develops it’s own political consciousness and begins to help people.

Reflective Encounters

Cinematic depictions of AI have ranged from the famously homicidal to benevolent, beings above the petty squabbles of human life that operate on another plane of consciousness. But with Machines of Loving Grace Viktor Schimpf provides an alternate vision, where machine learning takes a uniquely humanistic bent, and where empathy takes as much credence as ruthless e ciency. Schimpf depicts the process of programming as almost akin to parenting, the act of coding replaced by gentle conversation and active listening on both ends.

On an emotional level this feels like a work attuned to our modern concept of self-care, espousing a clear vision of a utopic future: one in which we let machines do the work while we focus on things like mindfulness and stewardship of the earth. This is science fiction, but science fiction in direct conversation with our immediate past, particularly the recent wave of global civil unrest. What we ultimately have is a film that attempts to re-orient our expectations of genre and our current course of technical development: providing a vision of a world where we don’t merely view AI as another tool for the endless pursuit of capital but one for community organisation and social justice. – Matthew Chan

Daily grind, virtual spaces, pressing matters to attend to… are we all, really, alright?

SQUISH!

ALRIGHT?

Director : Tulapop Saenjaroen Thailand, Singapore / 2021 / 17 Mins

Squish! is a meditation; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture, and a constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate ‘movements’.

Reflective Encounters

“I am a mystery, without a mouth but who can express itself, who is unreal but who exists, who is present everywhere but invisible, unpredictable, slippery, without weight or aim, who goes round and round, who is neither realistic nor rational even though the irrational can be quite real... But above all, I am a serious threat.”

Pronounced o -screen, in the midst of distorted and psychedelic sounds by an unidentifiable character with a squeaky voice, these words are hardly intelligible at first. Fragmented and flat-packed – like the scraps of images that hands manipulate in front of our eyes – the words always seem incomplete, unfinished. Through this physical and psychological deconstruction, unintelligible and impalpable, the film lets us navigate with this enigma in mind.

Through this quest for identity, Tulapop Saenjaroen plays with the viewer’s senses by superimposing psychedelic sounds and animations on live action scenes as if to underline any feelings one might share with the voice-over. He manipulates materials, provokes discomfort in a colourful universe, plays with the limits between reality and its representations; and through this, questions the role of the cinematographic medium –and particularly of the animated film – itself.

But what is this impalpable voice that runs through the film? To find out, one must grasp it with both hands to Squish! it before it loses control. – Florian Fernandez

YOU ALRIGHT?

IN THE BIG YARD INSIDE THE TEENY-WEENY POCKET

Director : Yoko Yuki Japan / 2022 / 6 Mins

When it shrinks, it expands. It floats and it sinks. It separates but connects. When I think I’m watching them, they’re actually watching me. A charming animation rhyme that weaves together the many days of observing, recording, and experimenting.

Reflective Encounters

With a title that suggests something more akin to a picture book adaptation, Yoko Yuki’s In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket is rather a densely concentrated parade of unrelentingly colourful, faux naïf visuals sometimes reminiscent of the work of Peter Millard, at other times the hypnopompic hallucinations that torment us in moments of sleep paralysis between dreaming and waking. Paired with brutal sound design and narration that borders on the obnoxious, the film requires a moment or two for the viewer to acclimate before accepting the playful insanity for what it is.

While the synopsis suggests it is a piece thematically about contradictions, in its execution it comes across primarily as an experimental film about the very joy of experimentation. Certainly it feels very much stream-of-consciousness in the flow of its visual concepts, as characters and scenarios morph and evolve from one another between occasional lines of either poetry or pointedly disjointed prose. This isn’t a film that purports to have a lofty societal point to make or message to convey, other than perhaps the value of living in the moment, and the further value that can come from stringing those moments together.

– Ben Mitchell

ORTHODONTICS

Director : Mohammadreza Mayghani

Iran / 2021 / 14 Mins

Amitis is a teenage girl who always has an orthodontics headgear and is under the pressure of orthodontic treatment. She suddenly does a strange thing to her friend, Sarah

Reflective Encounters

This uniquely uncomfortable o ering from Iranian director Mohammadreza Mayghani admirably achieves a lot with relatively little. A disarmingly innocuous setup, focused on two young aspiring athletes and a seemingly typical friendship in which they share interests in games and music, gradually gives way to an increasingly pervasive sense of uneasiness and, eventually, dread. The production design and exterior settings, framed almost claustrophobically in 4:3, presents garish and dreamlike juxtapositions of colour, with interior scenes alternating between pastels and sickeningly oversaturated mood lighting. Although uncomfortable, it intrigues the viewer, shots lingering on and on where we examine repetitive actions or sometimes mere stillness.

By way of action we’re given brief glimpses of the life of one of these characters

– Amitis – who is in the process of corrective dental work that, though mundane, seems to be a source of some emotional distress. Though she keeps any significant concerns close to her chest, there are certain subtle tells in her mannerisms (a testament to actor Maryam Hosseini) that portend something troubling on the horizon. Without access to the character’s thoughts or motives, we as the audience are left with the task of deciphering why and to what purpose this serves when it comes to pass in the film’s final, macabre moments. – Ben Mitchell

BACKFLIP

Director : Nikita Diakur Germany, France / 2022 / 12 Mins

Attempting a backflip is not safe. You can break your neck, or land on your head, or land badly on your wrists. None of that is nice, so my avatar does the trick.

Reflective Encounters

Backflip is the latest o ering from Nikita Diakur, whose previous work includes the Encounters 2017 Grand Prize winner Ugly that similarly eschewed the generic conventions of CG storytelling in favour of a uniquely clunky spectacle of wire meshes, garish colour theory and frenetic character work. In a stylistic sense this new film follows in these footsteps, albeit paired with a simpler meta premise in which Diakur represents himself through a rudimentary character model that has been infused with automated machine learning prompts in the hope of perfecting a backflip in a series of virtual settings.

What ensues is a charmingly lo-fi parade of digital pratfalls as the director’s avatar wrestles with its own physicality and that of its surroundings. It is a protracted journey – repetitive though not tedious – of floundering and thrashing about that alternates between humorous, endearingly pathetic and unexpectedly poignant. Though ostensibly a film examining the technical processes at play and the potential ramifications of AI in general, a curious humanity begins to emerge. In some respects analogous to the creative process – or, indeed, life as a whole – we come to root for the character’s success and warm to his indefatigable spirit in eventually achieving his goal, regardless of how arbitrary it might seem.

– Ben Mitchell

IT’S RAINING FROGS OUTSIDE

Director : Maria Estela Paiso Philippines / 2021 / 14 Mins

The world is about to end. Maya is forced to go home to the province of Zambales. There, she confronts her childhood house that terrorizes her as frogs rain outside.

Reflective Encounters

The nature of isolation and how it can lead to contemplations of identity, self, purpose and wellbeing - and how we come to terms with all of the above - is compellingly presented through Maria Estela Paiso’s mixed-media o ering It’s Raining Frogs Outside

Set against a backdrop of frog rain, a real-life phenomenon that carries with it a whi of both the absurd and the biblical, the film’s featureless protagonist Maya sits in her childhood home, ruminating on a growing sense of despair that threatens to trigger a transmutation of her soul.

On top of a sense of authenticity to the writing that suggests it may stem from the lived experience of the filmmaker herself, what sets the film aside is the presentation of the character’s turmoil through a clever intertwining of live-action and animation processes, ranging from photorealistic VFX to purposefully jarring, grotesque CG, flat digital sequences and analogue collages that draw upon personal photographs, archive footage and other such miscellany, brought to life through an experimental animation approach in which the materials are scanned in and visually manipulated. Through all of these elements shines a universal relatability to the character’s plight and the dark nights of the soul we’ve all experienced at one time or another. – Ben Mitchell

AFTER WE DISAPPEAR

An exploration of what is left after life as we know it ends.

UNDER THE LAKE

Director : Thanasis Trouboukis Greece, Finland / 2022 / 16 Mins

As a mountainous village in Greece sinks under the lake, the memories of its inhabitants emerge from the water.

Reflective Encounters

While the rain lashes down on the reservoir, a woman weaves textiles before tending to her livestock in the barn. When it clears, two men seize the opportunity to venture into the woods with their dogs. This might appear to be a portrait of a serene pastoral idyll were it not for what haunts its centre: the disconcerting sight of the roofs of buildings protruding from the lake’s lowering levels.

In Thanasis Trouboukis’s film, the water acts as an uncanny conduit to a prior time: a flood can destroy but it can also selectively preserve history beneath its surface, the skeletal fragments revealed by its receding depths analogous to those certain memories which find themselves improbably salvaged from the oblivion of forgetting. Night falls, and with their daily rhythms complete the people gather for a candlelit vigil, suggesting the conscious memorialising of something which has passed. The water will rise once again in the morning, but the visions it has revealed are haunted not only by a half-forgotten past but perhaps too by the looming spectre of an ecologically uncertain future. – Jonathan Bygraves

WILL MY PARENTS COME TO SEE ME

Director : Mo Harawe Austria, Germany, Somalia / 2022 / 18 Mins

In a prison in Somalia. There, decisive hours have dawned for young Farah. Organizational machinery starts up around him. Farah is examined by a doctor, instructed by the baili , and looked after by an imam. He is waiting for his parents to visit.

Reflective Encounters

Everyone knows their role in the system, and most have come to perform it with a degree of detachment: the Imam produces a Qur’an from a plastic bag, the doctor prescribes some pills to help the prisoner sleep, the court representative insists on finishing watching a video on his phone before outlining the following day’s itinerary. Little here speaks of the enormity of the violence which is soon to befall Farah, the boy-like young man whose own impassivity throughout the process suggests a degree of self-denial about his proscribed fate.

Reality only seems to intrude in his final minutes, viewed in the distance through the policewoman’s car window as she turns up the music on the stereo and drives away. The composition echoes the opening shot of the film, in which she pauses for a moment to gather herself before heading from her car to the prison, a repetition which suggests a circularity: another day will bring another Farah, another Qur’an, some more sleeping pills. Her own insomnia, as evidenced by the film’s final shot, suggests that, on that day, she may need to pause for longer and turn the volume of the music up even further.

– Jonathan Bygraves

A HUMAN CERTAINTY

Director : Morgan Quaintance UK / 2021 / 21 Mins

Voices from the past haunt A Human Certainty, whose entangled threads link its multifarious narratives of su ering: a recent break-up; the romantic sweep of mid-century pop music; Weegee’s crime-scene photography; and images taken by the artist’s grandmother, a spirit medium, on her travels in Asia and Africa. Here, Quaintance’s montage becomes a codec for assembling these disparate threads, and for making sense of mortality and loss in all its forms.

Reflective Encounters

Before TMZ there was Weegee, the ambulance-chasing paparazzo extraordinaire who stalked the streets of Manhattan in the mid-20th century with his camera seeking out the grisly and the gruesome. His story is an early port of call in A Human Certainty’s trip through the psyche of its unseen narrator’s post-breakup ennui, a journey which later takes in the subject of his own grandmother, a peripatetic spiritualist who recorded her communions with the dead.

Both Weegee and the protagonist’s grandmother, in their own way, were making a record of mortality – the former its instantaneous reality, the latter what might possibly lie beyond it. The narrator returns to the scene of his heartbreak and records footage of it, born of a similar impulse to make a record of a kind of death. Perhaps this impulse is the root of all art? Even the ostensibly comforting doowop songs which punctuate the film’s soundtrack, the kind which repeat the lie of happily-ever-afters, were in some ways attempts to reckon with death: to capture fleeting emotions in order to somehow transcend their ephemerality in the face of life’s single, unavoidable certainty. – Jonathan Bygraves

LATE LOUNGE:

B*TCH!

Capitalism is grinding you to a pulp… until you get yourself out.

TENNIS BALL ON HIS DAY OFF

Director : Julian Glander

US / 2021 / 3 Mins

While leaving a voicemail to his grandma, a tennis ball ponders the passage of time and tries to find meaning and identity outside of his work.

Reflective Encounters

The fear of getting old, the unstoppable flow of time, the search for oneself, social success vs. mental comfort… these are just few of the topics that Tennis Ball on His Day O tackles in the space of three minutes. Through the personification of an overworked tennis ball, the film – starring international popstar Clairo on voiceover – focus on human anxiety with a cartoonish and colorful atmosphere.

Director Julian Gandler brings out the inner voices that occupy all of us when we think about work and our place in the world, even in the midst of vacant days. The anxiety of being trapped in a job that ruins your personal space, but also your personality itself, seems to be more acute than ever in a post-pandemic world and within the capitalist structures that have seen our ways of thinking evolve in response to ever-increasing burnout.

Twice, our round and yellow alter-ego is invited to come out of its reverie and stop relaxing in order to consider work as a personal accomplishment, a human value, or even a moment of sweetness for the soul… a discourse that neoliberal societies love. Yet, even when you’re a tennis ball you want to live your best life, which in this case is experiencing freedom, whether that’s being firmly connected to the ground or lifted vigorously into the air. – Florian Fernandez

PHLEGM

Director : Jan-David Bolt Switzerland / 2021 / 6 Mins

Oscar’s late. In the surrounding skyscrapers hands are shaken and contracts are signed. That’s the last thing he needs right now. Where do these damned snails come from?

Reflective Encounters

In the hustle and bustle of the modern business world, where grey o ce buildings and sharp suits abound, and where rational thinking ends and the “grindset” begins, it seems hard to slow down. In Jan-David Bolt’s Kafkaesque Phlegm the corporate middle managers of the world, by virtue of some cosmic punishment, are forced to (quite literally), dial back to a snail’s pace. It all starts when a businessman’s shoe meets a snail’s shell, reducing the creature to goo and his handkerchief to a sopping rag of snail guts.

What follows is a marvel of comedic escalation, with the man’s every step coinciding with the death of a fresh snail. Key to the e ectiveness of Bolt’s film is its immersive nature: featuring corporate-chic blue tinted colour grading, and an oppressive soundscape of shells cracking left and right. What also fascinates are the textural contrasts; between the smoothed soles of the businessman’s dress shoes, the snail’s remains that resemble a cracked egg and the rough asphalt of the ground. The existential fear Bolt eventually taps into is of a lack of productivity, as the great struggle the businessman faces is being late for work. Time is money – there’s no room to drag your feet or your entire body on the ground. – Matthew Chan

LATE LOUNGE: WORK B*TCH!

PRESS(ED)

Director : Senne Driesen Belgium / 2022 / 9 Mins

Every single day the same infinite struggles. We are trapped in our repetitive work pattern. A dead end street with no way out, what kind of valuable work do we do?

Reflective Encounters

With a visual aesthetic that takes us into an undecided temporal interstice, playing with pale colours and superimposed angular patterns on bodies and objects, Press(ed) is somewhere between the beginnings of silent Soviet cinema and German expressionism. But beyond the visuals, it is the presence of sound that is even more crucial here, bringing the film back into a more contemporary atmosphere, where repetition becomes a central and major motif, reminding us of the hypnotic performances of Philip Glass.

At first raw and primitive, the multiple layers of sound intertwine before taking on a deeper dimension thanks to the mu led electronic distortions of the synthesizers. Towards the last tier of the short, the musical atmosphere –composed by director Senne Driesen with collaborator Wouter Souvereyns – becomes increasingly bewitching and mesmerising. By tackling a very well-known topic such as labour under capitalist structures, enhanced by the repetitive rhythm mirroring the repetitive demands of this world, and by playing with appealing references and atmospheres, this short is a unique demonstration of the filmmaking voice of Senne Driesen. – Florian Fernandez

LATE LOUNGE: WORK B*TCH!

BLOCKS

Director : Adrián Ja é Germany / 2022 / 3 Mins

All blocks move to the rhythm until one steps out of line. This metaphor shows how traditional masculinity a ects personal development while growing up.

Reflective Encounters

Adrián Ja é’s Blocks is a hypnotic Rube Goldberg machine of a film. The world created by Ja é and his team is one oozing with charm, featuring richly textured CG characters seemingly composed of wood, wire, buttons and anything else you’d find in a sewing kit. The initial chain reaction starts when two figures start throwing a bead, or in this case a “ball” around; what follows is the sound of two glasses clinking, the chopping of an axe, the creaking of knees and the blowing of smoke.

The soundscape of the film is intoxicating, rendering the noise of minute action into a rhythmic, staccato symphony. At least that is until the advent of a new bulky outfit for a character causes everything to crumble. An inverse chain reaction follows, guided by Murphy’s Law (“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”): the ball can’t reach the other player, the clinking of cups becomes more like a punch, and the smoking man ends up on the chopping block for the axe. Ja é’s film ultimately seems to be governed by simplistic forces of harmony, cooperation and synchronisation. But the final scene, where a character discards his bulky armour, revealing themself to be flexible and limber, seems to suggest some virtue in the discarding of the superficial ephemera that bogs down our day-to-day. – Matthew Chan

SURUAIKA

Kipu is a luxury chau eur in a dark city, where the streets are full of cars and black cats. After he accidentally runs over the entire family of a little cat called Suruaika, Kipu adopts her. And as his love for Suruaika grows, so does her body.

Reflective Encounters

By opening on an elegant black and white shot emphasising the lights of a city plunged into darkness and mist, Suruaika immerses the viewer in the mind of a cat-like character prostrated on the bed of his flat. Over mysterious atmospheric music, the film takes us somewhere between a crime film and a video game universe.

The relentless repetition and monotony of the days and the su ocation caused by city life seems to have taken its toll on the mood of our main protagonist. He only finds comfort in his home, and more precisely in the company of a cat with luminescent eyes that grows bigger and bigger, just like the existential angst that is a ecting its owner. This angst grows to such an extent that it is impossible to hold back the pain any longer: the feelings have to emerge on their own and flow into public space.

Torn between stomach-ache and tender feelings, this animated short by directing duo Vlad Ilicevici and Radu Pop delves us into an apocalyptic moment in the life of a being who has to regain control over his emotions and inner desires – who must free himself to finally be himself. – Florian Fernandez

PRIMAL THERAPY

Director : Santtu Salminen Finland / 2021 / 20 Mins

Jussi, 48, is totally worn-out. A failed marriage, lost connection with his son and a professional downswing have driven him into a mental slump. Jussi’s young and athletic supervisor Aleksi has taken note of this and o ers to help.

Reflective Encounters

There was a time, astonishingly, where portraying corporate Wall Street guys as bloodthirsty, conscience-free murderers seemed chic. Santtu Salminen understands this sentiment and with his absurdist Primal Therapy breathes new life into a tired trope. An important distinguishing factor here is the age of his protagonist, Jussi, a man past middle age seemingly at the end of the road careerwise. Years of grinding projects as “Jussi the Jock” ‘’ has left him with a divorced wife, a rude child and plenty of processed food to eat. He’s practically staring down his obsolescence when the young, fit and certainly more productive Aleksi picks him up in his swanky Porsche for a corporate retreat of sorts.

The key to returning to Jussi’s prime, it appears, is to go primal, to let go of all sense of good taste, starting with your clothes and finally your morals. The pleasures of Salminen’s film stems not just from seeing naked men wrestle in an uber-masculine yet distinctly homoerotic manner, but in viewing the warped psyche of the modern capitalist. It’s a sort of body horror of the mind, where years of repression and frustration from a lack of financial success exhibit themselves in a fundamental rewiring of the brain, creating an animalistic urge to dominate, and of course, kill. – Matthew Chan

Directors : Vlad Ilicevici & Radu Pop Romania / 2022 / 9 Mins

BRUTALIA, DAYS OF LABOUR

Director : Manolis Mavris Greece, Belgium / 2021 / 25 Mins

Perfectly identical girls, dressed in military uniforms, work day and night. A matriarchal family. An oligarchic society. What would happen if we replace bees with humans?

Reflective Encounters

As soon as the frame opens, the buzzing of bees immediately imprints itself on a hive composed of identical-looking female beings toiling away at digging sand tirelessly. At the heart of a meticulous visual universe, where pale colours ranging from military green to shades of beige never seem dull, director Manolis Mavris o ers exquisite production values, whether it is in the finesse of the film’s technical execution or in the deep intentions behind the short.

Brutalia (Days Of Labour) showcases rich writing on the constrictions placed on human beings by society, focusing particularly on the issues experienced by women. While playing with references to the aesthetics of his fellow countryman, Yorgos Lanthimos, Mavris a rms his own capacity in pursuing his personal cinematographic journey on a darker level. Several memorable shots will remain in the mind’s eye, whether because of their magnificence or their violence, as will the score by Panagiotis Melidis (aka Larry Gus), alternating between the simple and the grandiose.

The viewer navigates the heart of a universe that’s becoming more and more distressed by its coldness, violence, and archaic practices loaded with unhealthy traditions, inevitably inviting rebellion or despair. Slowly throughout the film, both feelings smoulder inside the hive itself. Between the need to get out of the norm and the impossibility of escaping it, making a choice remains delicate. – Florian Fernandez

THE CAMDERINA DINER

Director : Luke Willis US / 2022 / 3 Mins

Lady Camden, RuPaul’s Drag Race season 14 runner up, is a struggling waitress in a greasy spoon diner. She does her best to keep up with increasing demands until a catastrophe forces her to break free from the daily grind.

Reflective Encounters

In the iconic music video for Queen’s ‘I Want to Break Free’, Freddie Mercury appears dolled up as a housewife, stifled by the number of chores she has to do as dictated by restrictive heteronormative structures, before Mercury strips o to reveal his true self. Luke Willis’ The Camderina Diner starring drag queen Lady Camden, is both a spiritual and literal remake of this video, locating a new source of existential frustration within the life of a waitress. Shot with digital cameras and bathed in neon light, the film is equal parts Douglas Sirk and Sean Baker, with its titular diner populated by an oddball cast of drag performers.

Throughout her day, Lady Camden’s waitress has to contend with indignities familiar to service workers: constant microaggressions, unreasonable requests and nonsensical queries. The allusions to ‘I Want to Break Free’ initially appear implicit, playing as the groovy muzak in the background, but the film eventually reaches the same conclusion as the music video, with Lady Camden releasing her frustrations and transforming into Mercury. The Camderina Diner e ectively cuts to the core of why Queen’s song continues to resonate. As long as we’re in the slump of late capitalism, we’ll still be marching to our minimum wage jobs chanting “I Want to Break Free”, “You Won’t Break My Soul”, or anything else to get through the day. – Matthew Chan

LATE LOUNGE: SQUISHY RANDOM BODY PARTS

Spongy, pulpy, quaggy, slippery things which can occasionally take the shape of body parts while ultimately remaining pleasingly disgusting.

THING

Director : Malte Stein Germany / 2021 / 5 Mins

Haunted by a little thing, a man gets driven to the edge

Reflective Encounters

A man walks, a thing follows. In a cold suburban landscape, filled with sharp angles and muted colours, an eerie surreal atmosphere develops, reminiscent of the paintings of Rene Magritte. A sombre world that feels tense and violent with minimal sound gives the film an almost Kafkaesque nightmarish quality. The character’s flesh is mottled in a way similar to that of Raynaud’s Syndrome, blueish and white, resembling an all-over bruise or the cold dead skin of a corpse. The design and filmmaking sensibilities feel like a continuation of Stein’s previous film Flute (2018), a coming-of-age story in which a young man struggles to find himself between the competing pull of his domineering peers and overbearing mother.

Stein has once again created an unsettling, raw, superbly violent and vicious world that is Cronenbergian in its ability to simultaneous combine both psychosis and body horror in a way that makes your skin crawl from start to finish. Thing frames humans as reactive, volatile creatures who, when threatened, act on impulse and from ingrained aggression, without compassion. A stark, surreal look into the core of the human consciousness and our primal drives that dictate our desire for not only survival but supremacy over the weak. – Laura-Beth Cowley

LATE LOUNGE: SQUISHY RANDOM BODY PARTS

SOMETHING IN THE GARDEN

Director : Marcos Sánchez Chile / 2021 / 6 Mins

It’s nighttime and the stillness of suburbia is interrupted by a strange presence. A creeping being lurks in the dark and a curious young man decides to confront it.

Reflective Encounters

A rustle in the dark, paired with an overwhelming sense of unease sets the scene for Marcos Sánchez’s unique take on animated horror. The design style is reminiscent of the graphic novels of artists such as Adam Allsuch Boardman (particularly his use of negative space), and the line weight and sensibilities of Adrian Tomine, combined with an almost hyper-realistic level of cartoon motion, creating a stunningly creepy film. Something in the Garden sits somewhere between sci-fi and sophisticated creature feature, managing to somehow be simultaneously unsettling and soothing.

Sánchez’s attention to detail, lavish use of hand-rendered transitions, wellpaced rhythmic character movement, and the heavy use of frameless black allows the cinema itself to become one with the screen – aiding with the sensation that we are being enveloped. The e ortless feeling of movement through space lingers here, hypnotically drawing the viewer into an eerie climax as everything and everyone is swallowed by the shapeshifting creature that dwells somewhere in the darkness of the garden. The certainty and inevitability of the progression of time (as represented here) perfectly demonstrates how animation’s metamorphic qualities can eloquently create an atmosphere of disquiet that is haunting and utterly captivating. – Laura-Beth Cowley

BODDYSSEY

Director : Jonas Bienz Switzerland / 2020 / 4 Mins

A journey through a surreal landscape covered with human skin. Processes of birth and growth, death and decay show the downfall of a strange ecosystem.

Reflective Encounters

A meditative eco-horror film, in which a living landscape undulates, throbs and breathes with life. The ever-evolving land grows, pupates and oozes in ways that are reminiscent of both the awesomeness of nature and the innately human stages of puberty, birthing new creatures and continuously changing before turning inevitably to the way of all flesh; ripping, rotting and decaying before becoming an arid wasteland. The computer-generated imagery never becomes so real as to become uncomfortable, creating instead an environment that stops short of grotesquery and verging on the visionary, exemplifying alternative or potential future worlds that combine organic life in new hybrid ways unthinkable to us now.

Boddysey o ers a Dali-esque use of anamorphic image creation in which rocks and mountains look like body parts, creating a biological dreamscape that draws parallels between our own human ageing process and our stripping of the planet’s natural resources, leaving it both desiccated and on the verge of destruction. The film is a vivid reimagining of the global environmental crisis and our own eventual self-destruction, as well as a possible alternative – that of merging ourselves with our landscape as the next step in the evolution of the earth. – Laura-Beth Cowley

LATE LOUNGE: SQUISHY RANDOM BODY PARTS

LATE LOUNGE: SQUISHY RANDOM BODY PARTS

TONGUE

JUICE

Director : Kaho Yoshida

Canada, Japan / 2022 / 2 Mins

Tired of being talked at by men, a woman takes a sensual trip with unusual friends.

Reflective Encounters

Tongue is an intimate exploration of the frustrations that come with the repetitiveness of modern dating, self-pleasure and taking ownership of your own sexuality. Kaho Yoshida’s work uses a mixed-media approach, combining a bold graphic 2D animation with brightly coloured claymation to create a distinctively sensual world. Pastels pump up against fluorescent colours, soft curves and delicate lace, the high gloss of a terrarium and the slick glisten of an ice popsicle working together with organic sounds to create a textural array of sensation. A look at the act of self-love, fantasy and fetishism, of both the self as well as objectophilia – or more pointedly Partialism (being sexually arousal by particular body parts that aren’t genitalia).

The piece fits alongside a growing number of films that focus on the uncovering of female pleasure, something that animation is particularly adept at doing. Through the use of colour, sound and metamorphic abstraction, the ability to visualise experiences such as the female orgasm takes on new perceivable dimensions, opening up dialogues for communication and representation. The non-literal, non-linear and non-figurative capabilities of animation also allow for a broader and more adaptable viewing experience, allowing the audience to seek a nity with characters that operate as the Self or an Undefined Other we see ourselves through. – Laura-Beth Cowley

Director : Mona Keil Germany / 2022 / 5 Mins

A bunch of round succulent and moist creatures smear each other contentedly with an oozy juice. They share their world with pesky little bugs, but one day, they squash them all. In response the creatures start to run dry.

Reflective Encounters

In a musty, damp crevice somewhere below sea level, a microcosm of fleshy creatures live in a dark, moist biome, exploring one another and continuously bathing in a seemingly nourishing viscous mucus. The film uses close-ups and bright lighting to replicate the use of microlens photography footage in nature documentaries, creating a believable world which these simple creatures inhabit. A unique modelling process using clay cores covered in thin, intricately painted silicone skin sheaths is used in tandem with stop-motion techniques in a way that feels uncanny in its truest sense, creating movement that feels alive and organic whilst remaining knowingly artificial and thus unreal.

These beings live with no sight, hearing, speech, taste or smell, instead relying purely on nature’s earliest and most pervasive sense – touch – toiling and fighting for more of it in their minimal world. As we watch their entire life cycle, their increasing desire for dominance ultimately becomes their downfall as their symbiotic existence is destroyed and they themselves perish. A powerfully tactile journey into the fundamentals of life and decay. – Laura-Beth Cowley

LATE LOUNGE: SQUISHY RANDOM BODY PARTS

LATE LOUNGE: SQUISHY RANDOM BODY PARTS

STEAKHOUSE

Director : Špela Čadež Slovenia, Germany, France / 2021 / 9 Mins

The steak has been marinating for a few days now. The pan is heated. Franc’s stomach is rumbling. But Liza’s co-workers surprise her with a birthday party. Will she be home on time?

Reflective Encounters

A dark psychological take on the breakdown of an unhealthy relationship before the catharsis of no longer biting your tongue and cutting the toxicity out of your life. Following on from her previous film Nighthawk (2016), Špela Čadež’s fascinating, mixed-media process makes use of classic multiplane techniques and hand-drawn animation. The multiplane allows for real depth of field amongst the hand-rendered processes. The soft focus used throughout creates a cinematic haze that – along with the intimacy of the process itself –brings a sense of oppressive closeness to the film, first in the busy o ce full of chatter, the hot summer city streets, the uncomfortably small kitchen and then within the relationship that’s on the verge of destruction. Steakhouse creates a claustrophobic mood that speaks to the environment and nature of the surroundings the characters work within.

As the bitter acrid smoke of burnt food engulfs the senses, the characters’ resentment and anger become palpable through their silence and barbed words. There is a mounting feeling that this is a regular occurrence, a familiarity within the unpleasantness of this unspoken non-verbal abuse and passive aggression that exists until we can break free of the bonds that threaten to su ocate us. – Laura-Beth Cowley

SUPPER

Director : Dániel Bárány Hungary / 2022 / 15 Mins

During a dysfunctional family dinner, oppressed family members battle their oppressors. The battle for domination leads to a monstrous outcome.

Reflective Encounters

When a family meal turns into a heated family brawl, emotions are laid bare. As a mother battles her mother-in-law for matriarchal supremacy, a father clashes with his youngest child over dietary di erences, whilst the eldest son eats his feelings and tries to avoid the rising tension of unspoken aggression and side-eyes laden with meaning. The animation here is used poetically to represent internal feelings: scale, exaggerated angles, and severe character design increases the sense of discomfort as family relations fray and threaten to sever entirely.

A free-form jazz score accompanies Supper, giving further weight to the harshness and vindictiveness depicted. The cut and thrust of action is meticulously choreographed to create moments of tension and threat. Director Dániel Bárány periodically returns to smaller visual tableaus to demonstrate the continuum of tit-for-tat comments and moments of hostility that can go unnoticed or, more often, un-commented upon, creating chasmic rifts and vast voids in families that then become destructive and potentially unreconcilable. These subtle moments are mirrored by imagined violence which eventually breaks through into a crescendo of real-world consequences. A powerful reminder of the duality of personal vision and internal thought, of what a momentary lack of compassion can do for those whom you should hold most dear. – Laura-Beth Cowley

AMOK

Director : Balázs Turai Hungary, Romania / 2022 / 14 Mins

After losing his fiancée and his good looks in a freak accident, Clyde must confront his inner demon.

Reflective Encounters

A beautiful view, a sparkling engagement ring, the girl of your dreams and a demonic gnome - what could go wrong? When protagonist Clyde su ers a traumatic experience, he struggles to come to terms with his new appearance and the loss of his fiancé. When the monstrous imp threatens to destroy Clyde’s newfound happiness once again, he must take drastic action to tackle his inner demons or allow them to envelop him once and for all.

At its core, Amok tells a story of lost and restored love for oneself, found through the care and acceptance of another person. It tells of how past events, including those in childhood, can have a profound e ect on our understanding of love and our ability to negotiate the complexity of adult relationships. Weaving a bold style with impactful, high-energy movement into a story laden with dark physiological drama and emotional self-reflection is no easy feat, but it is handled with real skill here and it’s clear to see why such a well-crafted film is gaining considerable traction on the festival circuit. The acidic colour pallet and pumping original soundtrack creates a distinct identity, leaving a long-lasting impression on the viewer with a story that injects introspection with pathos and humour. – Laura-Beth Cowley

LAUGHING MY SHORTS OFF

From a moon-worshiping cult to an empowering rewriting of the Genesis, these shorts prove you can really make fun of anything.

LE SABOTEUR

Director : Anssi Kasitonni Finland / 2022 / 12 Mins

An ex-saboteur gets back in the game and every trick will be exposed! A short action film about the joint adventure of indie filmmaking - with all the special e ects.

Reflective Encounters

We’re conditioned to think that all the spectacular events in your average Hollywood blockbuster are achieved through a few button pushes on a computer (albeit, a computer which probably costs the GDP of a small country).

Le Saboteur takes an altogether more old-school and analogue approach, as the truth behind the making of a thriller is laid bare. As the plot of said thriller comes together, we’re given a split screen showing us what is really happening. One scene of a muscular man firing a heavy machine gun is juxtaposed with the fact that he’s hanging upside down so bullets cascade ‘up’ within the frame of the film. An armoured vehicle driving majestically through the snow is juxtaposed with the fact that it is essentially a toy.

On the one level, the joy here is the reveal behind showcasing how it all works (or at least could have worked before computers came along): the silliness and yet cleverness of some of the solutions on o er, designed to trick an audience whilst continuing to provide thrills. But there’s also a sense of lament, a farewell to an era of cinematic physicality both in terms of e ects and projection. It makes for a wonderfully inventive and poignant piece of work. – Laurence Boyce

LILITH & EVE

This is a short comedy animation and feminist re-imagining of the Adam and Eve myth, in which Eve accidentally bumps into Lilith, Adam’s first wife and equal.

Reflective Encounters

In Judaism, Lilith was the first wife of Adam – cast out of the Garden of Eden for failing to obey her husband. In positing a meeting between Lilith and Eve – as well as Adam’s pained reaction to his ex meeting his current wife – Sam de Ceccatty’s film is a joyously colourful a air, all bold and bright primary colours and brassily beautiful female protagonists.

This is an inherently satirical piece of work, looking at the misogyny and the fear of women that has often been an integral part of many religious texts. With Lilith quite literally demonised by history and Eve responsible for getting everyone thrown out of the Garden of Eden, attitudes towards women and their supposed place in society are much more than medieval here.

Yet this isn’t an exercise in strained didacticism. The comedy on o er is punchy and clever, sometimes drifting into the arena of the silly and funny just because it wants to. Sometimes sweet, often laugh-out-loud funny and, on occasion, profound, Lilith & Eve will leave you wanting one more bite of that apple.

– Laurence Boyce

Director : Sam de Ceccatty UK / 2021 / 7 Mins

MONSIEUR LE BUTCH

Director : Jude Dry US / 2021 / 12 Mins

When Jude ends up unexpectedly living at home in their 30s, they must deal with a lovingly opinionated Jewish mother who doesn’t quite get the whole trans thing.

Reflective Encounters

As protagonist filmmaker Jude Dry tries to come to terms with their gender identity and their mother Cecilia’s acceptance of it, director Jude Dry attempts to make a film that makes sense of it all. While it’s meant to be a fictional account of the mother-child relationship, reality keeps seeping through as they negotiate their fractured relationship through the prism of a making a film.

It’s the constant breaks in the film that makes Monsieur Le Butch so funny, reality consistently intruding on the comfort of fiction. As Jude gently chastises Cecilia for writing herself a long monologue or not learning the script, the dynamic between the two becomes apparent as we begin to wonder which scenes are a set-up and which are real.

But it never feels like a deliberately tricksy or gimmicky piece of work. As fun as the constant flitting between documentary and fiction is, there also a sense of the profound here as Jude and Cecilia work through their complex issues. With a commendable intimacy and sense of adventure, the film is a touching account of trying to move forward. – Laurence Boyce

THE COOK

A young chef cooks up a mysterious dish…

Reflective Encounters

One of the best things about the medium of short film is that it can be used to do many things that feature films can’t. And one of these is jokes. You can’t spend 90 minutes trying to set up a single punchline, because even when armed with the best punchline in the world, you are going to lose your audience by the end. But a short film? It can be in and out. Set-up. Punchline. Roll credits.

While it would be unfair to label The Cook as a joke committed to the big screen, it’s still a perfect example of how you can use the short film form to get in and out whilst leaving an impression. Over a scant runtime of three minutes, the film subverts audience expectations as we quickly discover that everything is not what it seems to be. With some precise camerawork from director Vincent Bossel, The Cook is a wonderful example of setting up expectations versus the brunt of reality, and not just for the audience but also the film’s culinary protagonist. – Laurence Boyce

Director : Vincent Bossel Switzerland / 2022 / 3 Mins

RULES

Director : Jeanette Jeanenne US, Panama / 2021 / 5 Mins

Plural noun: rules; noun: Rules one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere. “The rules of the game were understood.”

Reflective Encounters

Life (especially if you’re British) is all about the rules. Of course, the written rules we all know. But it’s the unwritten rules that are the things that keep society going. Those are the things that keep us civilised. Without rules, all that’s left is anarchy.

Animator Jeanette Jeanenne provides a glimpse of situations in which the rules are broken. Allowing your dog to defecate on someone’s lawn. Daring to touch a painting in an art gallery. Of course, these aren’t hardline crimes. There’s no bank robbery or coshing someone over the head for their pension here. Yet – as Jeanenne shows – they still feel dreadfully transgressive. With a protagonist who can only look on in horror when said rules are broken, Jeannenne plays with notions of polite society and how conflict – no matter how measured or justified – is anathema to everyday living.

This is a gently satirical a air, all played out against a world swathed in blue and angular animation made up of bold lines, which gives a certain coldness to proceedings, reflecting the repressed emotions of our protagonists. While subtly amusing, the film is a quietly profound statement on so-called ‘polite’ society. – Laurence Boyce

CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH ANT-EATER

A surreal short animation about Thomas, a boy who becomes addicted to eating ants – despite the warnings of his parents. Narrated in verse, the work playfully explores themes such as childhood rebellion and addiction.

Reflective Encounters

Cheekily named after Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English OpiumEater Confessions of an English Ant Eater is an animation that pretty much does what it says on the tin.

Initially this work all seems to be very much a flight of fancy, a journey down the anthill of the absurd. With a lilting narrative that’s provided in verse and a mesmerising soundtrack, the film o ers dry and surreal laughs as our lead protagonist’s ant-eating habit gets worse and worse as things progress.

While the film’s underlying metaphor is perhaps crashingly clear (which one suspects is all part of the joke) there is also a through line of genuine pathos and introspection. Exploring ideas of rebellion – and how it can be inherently childish and absurd – and addiction, there’s genuine emotion to be found here. With the bold and stark black-and-white animation giving the film something of an air of innocence and simplicity, Confessions of An English Ant-Eater is a deceptively clever piece of work. – Laurence Boyce

Director : Alex Crumbie UK / 2021 / 5 Mins

BALD

Director : Luke Bather UK / 2021 / 10 Mins

At age 8, Je Reynolds was confirmed to be the world’s baldest man and spent a quiet, lonely childhood ashamed of that. Now an adult, Je ’s baldness has become the extraordinary catalyst for a burgeoning community in search of lunar wisdom.

Reflective Encounters

“Going bald is the most manly thing that I’m ever gonna do,” once sang the ever brilliant singer-songwriter Je rey Lewis.

Luke Bather’s silly and endearing dark comedy with a folically challenged protagonist is – ultimately – about masculinity. Rather than tread the obvious route of testosteronetinged self-loathing, the film is a gentle satire about how many men of a certain age need something to anchor themselves and find something to share with others. Sometimes it’s cars. At other times it’s sports. Here it’s the world’s baldest man talking to the moon and sharing the results of the conversation and almost starting a quasireligion. Each to their own.

Ostensibly Bald is a fun piece of whimsy. But for all its gentle absurdity there is also a vein of the profound that runs throughout the film, as our protagonists and his friends all search for meaning in the face of an unexplainable – and hairless – existence. With crisp black-and-white photography that strikes a fine line between realism and the cartoonish, Bald is a film that – even if it’s initially hair today and gone tomorrow – will still linger in the mind. – Laurence Boyce

MOTHERCLUCKER

Reflective Encounters

“Hey little hen, when, when, when will you lay me an egg for me tea?” goes the famous nursery rhyme. If the hen is one of the many that appear in Motherclucker the answer would probably be “When I’m good and f**king ready, now leave me alone you annoying pr**k.”

Emanating from the subconscious of animator Greg McLeod, Motherclucker is a riotous cachophony of noise (thanks to a banging soundtrack), chickens seductively dancing and more fowl behaviour than you can shake an egg at.

There’s little to make sense of on a narrative level here, and once you stop trying to make sense of it all, then you just sit back and enjoy the extremely strange ride into a world of chickens, roosters and hens that looks di erent from your usual David Attenbourough doc. While there are shades of the likes of surrealist animators David Shrigley and David Firth here, and a style that flits between the childish and the almost disturbingly real, the film eschews dark humour and introspection for a collage of images and sounds that attack the senses in an exhilarating way.

–Laurence Boyce

Director : Greg McLeod UK / 2022 / 5 Mins

Cockadoodledoo

SHORT SHIVERS

A crying baby, eerie stones, direct provision –these are stories to send a shiver down your spine.

YOU’RE NOT HOME

Director : Derek Ugochukwu Ireland / 2021 / 11 Mins

When an ominous mould appears in their room, two African brothers seeking asylum are faced with a dark entity lurking within their direct provision centre.

Reflective Encounters

The startling opening image - of a child strapped to a chair with a tar-like substance crawling up his arms - is tough to stomach, but tougher still is the reality which inspired You’re Not Home Derek Ugochukwu’s bleak and ominous socially conscious horror about the terrors of Direct Provision.

This degrading practice in Ireland, wherein asylum seekers are kept in overcrowded, dilapidated, and barely functional temporary accommodation, whilst being given less than bare minimum financially, often for years on end, is rarely condemned by observers here in the UK or elsewhere. You’re Not Home zeroes in on a clinical and precise depictions of this strange mid-space between imprisonment and freedom that Ikenna (Ashraf Tumuheirwe) and Chimba (Aaron Katambay) find themselves in.

Ugochukwu’s detailed direction focuses on the small touches: the sneer of a guard, the decay of a fence, the brothers’ slowly crumbling relationship, a hallucinatory use of African tribal imagery contrasting against the wet and eroding Tipperary landscape. It’s so e ective, that the more conventional elements of genre filmmaking – the interplay of shadow and light, silence and noise – barely registers as di erent within Ikenna and Chimba’s day-to-day experience. – Ben Flanagan

RED ROOM

Director : Bryan M. Ferguson UK / 2021 / 15 Mins

A haunting and atmospheric story of the fractured relationship of three unreliable narrators when they are faced with a reality-destroying moment of spectral possession. Based upon the book, “Bitterhall” by Helen McClory.

Reflective Encounters

In Glaswegian filmmaker Bryan M. Ferguson’s atmospheric Red Room, fear comes from waiting. Holding on for the apocalypse is no di erent to looking out of the window for the weather to change.

On vintage wired phones, a man and woman discuss possession fantasies. A cut to red, like a Nicolas Winding Refn film, teleports the viewer to a forest, where another man seems to come under a spell. The joy comes not from piecing together these puzzle pieces, but from the sensual chills that Ferguson o ers. From luxuriating in crystalline, liquid lighting, to an utter shower of mechanic and creepy sound design, this is an overload of cinema in its purest form: driven by sound and vision.

After all, what could be uncannier than the human voice, warped and unrecognisable, when it emerges from a shadowy figure in the back of a car? Perhaps, it’s in the utter resignation with which another character awaits their fate, or the way that lamps seem so soft as to actually drain a character’s soul from the screen. Nothing is safe, and everything is inevitable in Red Room – Ben Flanagan

BABYTHUMP

A couple, Donny and Marie, awake one morning to find a baby has appeared in their apartment. Unsure what to do, and bewildered by the intrusion, they seek guidance from the eccentric Dr.Hoofenho er. The advice they receive is … unexpected.

Reflective Encounters

Amidst arresting mid-century decor, a bored, childless couple lie in bed. Sleep’s pleasant numbness is interrupted by the sounds of an infant’s wails. The lady asks, ‘Do we have a baby?’ And the rest of writer-director Ian Killick’s film is about finding out.

BabyThump is alienating in just about every respect. Post-sync sound separates sound from image. With a ect, the film is almost defined by a lack of movement: the characters seem to teleport from one location to another, aided by decompressed film glitching out for a second or more.

This almost Straubian absence of cinema – where events happen o screen and the audience is left with little more than an abundance of faces – is dragged to new realms of the surreal through back-and-forth comedy that might remind the viewer of Inside Number 9 or the Peter Strickland film In Fabric.

Derek Elwood and Kathryn O’Reilly bring extraordinary detail to their performances. Stoic as they are, emotion pours through the slight vocal cracks and facial twitches. And with its final, dark turn, BabyThump cements itself as an experiment not only of mood, but of courage. – Ben Flanagan

Director : Ian Killck

UK / 2021 / 11 Mins

MOLAR

Director : Tiago Teixeira UK / 2021 / 5 Mins

A short folk horror tale set in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. Soundtrack by Baron Saturday and Sound Design by Sam Mason (‘Censor’, ‘Flux Gourmet’).

Reflective Encounters

A musician – we gather, because he carries a guitar - takes refuge in a seemingly abandoned house. Three minutes of screen time later, some force, maybe even the earth itself, will have rebelled against his transgression. Finding a molar tooth in the back yard, body horror commences.

Writer-director Tiago Teixeira sets the film in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. The film’s recurrent images of torture, of isolation, and of the separation of body parts, enhances an undercurrent suggestive of the brutal Brazilian military dictatorship, which was established in 1964 and existed until 1985.

Molar situates this political underpinning within the genre of folk horror, which relies on the notion that the world harbours horrors that existed long before and will continue to exist long after humankind (and is only waiting for us to find such horrors). In doing so, Teixeira suggests that the ongoing political violence in Brazil – with current President (at time of writing, with the first round of elections due October 2nd!) Jair Bolsonaro openly glorifying the dictatorship era – is linked to a colonial legacy which stretches back far beyond musician, house, or even that tooth. – Ben Flanagan

STONES

A brother and sister’s reunion picnic at a stone circle in the English countryside is disrupted by the arrival of an uninvited guest.

Reflective Encounters

The English rural landscape is the fertile setting for this stop-motion animation, which takes a day in the country into rather more chilling territory. As a brother and sister arrive at the site of a picnic, cotton wool clouds float in the distance and the sky hangs above in a neutral blue. But as the perfect scenery lilts them into something like a dream, the film veers into the realm of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

With a control of tone that veers with ease from comic to poignant to artfully mysterious, Stones draws a short but substantial line between the countryside and its history in British Horror.

Animator Joseph Brett uses unnerving, rigid front-on framing to flatten his creations, their haunting faces void of expression. Throughout, Andrew Leung and Bec Boey (who also wrote the film) bring soul to their characters with lively vocal performances. Stones presents the countryside, with its expansive meadows and brambly footpaths, as a site of extra-normal magnetism. You can go half-way around the world, and this place will still be waiting for you, as pristine as you left it. Only now you might be di erent, and all together lost. – Ben Flanagan

Director : Joseph Brett UK / 2021 / 7 Mins

LUX NOCTIS

Director : Damiana Acuña US, Mexico / 2021 / 12 Mins

In a post-apocalyptical-matriarchal community, Lina faces her trial to bring light or perish to the darkness. Mara’s compassion pushes Lina to create an unprecedented light.

Reflective Encounters

Not a silent film, but a mute one, Lux Noctis is a piece of sparse, post-apocalyptic genre fare which leaves the viewer enough space to find the light themselves. Set in an isolated community of religious women, which we can infer is somewhere in Mexico, and importantly somewhere where environmental change is going to make survival very di cult. Writer/Director Damiana Acuña moves at a refreshingly slow pace through this milieu, introducing the viewer to the location, then the hierarchy, and then the horrors. Each revelation hits with a thud.

Acuña’s use of crisp digital photography and austere editing choices will inevitably make viewers think of the folk horror trend that’s currently prevalent, particularly in the output of independent studio A24 in the United States. But Lux Noctis, far from chasing any fashionable trends, has a pleasingly dowdy approach to this matriarchal society that runs counter to any expectations for a girl-boss narrative. Indeed, this future society run by women takes on the strictly repressive air of a convent, where self-censorship and silence are the only choices on o er. Chilling, and all too resonant. – Ben Flanagan

SOUTH WEST SHOWCASE

A selection of the best works from South West talents.

CARBON COPY

Director : Jade Ayino UK / 2021 / 5 Mins

I created this film to reach out to those that are deemed as Other; to be the representation and celebration of what is deemed Other. I wanted to reach out to people that have shared the same experiences and have the confidence to say “me too”.

Reflective Encounters

“Do you start your morning with a twerking session?” The radio is switched o before we hear how Jade responds to the question, but we can guess: a nervous laugh, a swift brushing away of the blithe microaggression, the same bottling up that she will will have to perform when she is inappropriately touched by a customer in the restaurant in which she works. These are two kinds of silence: the former an internally patrolled reticence, the latter because her ‘tips and shit chips’ depend on it.

Carbon Copy elucidates the intersection of the economic, gender and race-based social expectations Jade faces, but especially this expectation of silence. Polite society may do as it pleases, but a young black woman wanting to speak out about the transgressions she faces knows she will be seen as disobedient and ungrateful: A Problem. As Sara Ahmed argued in her recent book Complaint!, to complain is not to be heard but merely to paint oneself as a complainer. #MeToo may have opened some doors for such stigmas to be lifted and for certain silences to be broken, but other truths have yet to be given permission to be spoken out loud. – Jonathan Bygraves

OLD WINDOWS

A struggling cafe owner’s seemingly mundane life takes a dramatic turn when a mysterious, elderly stranger stops by for tea and cake.

Reflective Encounters

At the junction of Barking Road and Green Street in East London, the statue still stands: Bobby Moore holds the World Cup aloft, raised on the shoulders of his surrounding West Ham teammates. Erected as a celebration of local heroes, this frozen moment now carries a sense of mournfulness for an absence, the club having departed the area several years ago. Such a mournfulness is at the heart of Old Windows, in which the sole observers of the drama are the faces in the photographs which crowd the café counter amid the vintage sporting memorabilia: a father whose absence can finally be spoken about, and a son whose absence cannot be, for the time being.

The incomprehensible enormity of grief can seem to bring time to a picture-like standstill, and it only slowly regains its regular rhythm tentatively, just as bright daylight imperceptibly creeps into the golden shades of the magic hour. Solace and meaning may eventually be located in the kindnesses of those around us, and it is in an enigmatic encounter between café owner Kerri and an apparent stranger that both might find healing from their respective pasts.

– Jonathan Bygraves

Director : Paul Holbrook UK / 2021 / 18 Mins

SALVATION HAS NO NAME

Director : Joseph Wallace UK, Czech Republic, France / 2022 / 17 Mins

A troupe of clowns gather to perform a story about a Priest and a refugee but as their misguided tale unfolds, the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to fray.

Reflective Encounters

Stories are the means by which entire peoples define themselves, conduits between the past and the present which set the directions for the future. They need not be verbose to carry potency: “Make America Great Again” trumped Hemingway’s famously concise tale – “for sale: baby shoes, never worn” – by two words, and its narrative of a return to an unspecified glorious past was enough to carry its standard-bearer to the highest o ce in the country. There is a clear echo of that departed demagogue’s rhetoric in Salvation Has No Name, depicting a priest ordering the construction of a wall between islanders and a newly-arrived refugee, though the refugee’s arrival in a small boat evokes a further allegorical layer closer to British shores.

The specifics may di er, but xenophobia is at root the same tall tale wherever it is told and whoever the teller may be. These stories may eventually ossify into orthodoxies, but brittleness is just weakness in a di erent form; the defensiveness of Empire apologists in recent years is if anything a tacit acknowledgment of the fragility of that handed-down narrative. Such stories can be retold, and Salvation Has No Name makes an eloquent plea for those hitherto silenced voices finally to be heard. – Jonathan Bygraves

BUS FILM

On route to a London protest, a group of activists play strange mind games with each other. Meanwhile, a bizarre creature is run over by a bus.

Reflective Encounters

On board the bus there is a sense of fraternity among the passengers, near-identical to each other in appearance and dressed in matching colours, initially redolent of football fans on another routine pilgrimage to an away game. So too is there a sense of gentle anticipation: one passenger, caught in a brief reverie, even seems to be in a state of sexual arousal. The bus itself, though, appears more apprehensive about the journey, its nose o ering a premonition of an impending obstruction. Why is a malformed figure attempting to impede the bus’s progress?

The answer seems to be in the revealed destination, a place where bodies traditionally congregate in order for their voices to be heard in unison. Shotguns are cocked, but they appear to be only a metaphor: power here is instead joyfully asserted in the simple act of mass assembly under a common purpose. As the music dies out, the grotesque figure once again tries to form a new impediment in the road; the buses and their passengers, we must hope, will continue to persevere against this tenacious opposition.

– Jonathan Bygraves

Director : Chris Childs UK / 2022 / 3 Mins

YUMMY MUMMY

Director : Gabriela Staniszewska UK / 2021 / 14 Mins

Ignored throughout her pregnancy, Lilith senses her identity is being smothered by her burgeoning motherhood. Her anxieties begin to have physical manifestations-and she starts to fall apart-literally.

Reflective Encounters

A dissociative loss of selfhood is intrinsic to the body horror genre, but traditionally this comes as a direct result of internal physical transformations. For Lilith though, it is only a secondary consequence to external factors, for in the eyes of those around her she is no longer Lilith: she is The Bump. For the majority of Yummy Mummy its commentary on how the pregnant are treated is played for absurdist laughs: the beleaguered motherto-be enduring a rotating parade of in-laws, health workers and strangers pro ering their unsolicited advice in the presence of The Bump, whilst increasingly neglecting the well-being of its bearer.

However, the horror of the situation soon escalates: after her mood-lifting cinema visit is admonished as a nutritional catastrophe, Lilith’s agency is diminished further, her state increasingly resembling a psychosis-laced form of locked-in syndrome. The film’s sobering final scene seems to carry an additional metaphorical resonance in the light of the recent overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States: when The Bump is elevated to the sacrosanct, the person bearing it is implicitly demoted to the status of its mere vessel. – Jonathan Bygraves

SEAGULL

Director : Dean Puckett UK / 2021 / 5 Mins

Seagull is a recovering drug addict who is about to have a very strange night.

Reflective Encounters

The film opens as the twilight descends on Paignton in Devon, the dusk performing its daily ritual of transitioning the esplanade from the sun-bathed wholesomeness of the daytime to the neon-lit gloom of evening. As the day’s last stragglers slowly perambulate along the seafront, a young man strides past them with an urgent purpose, headed, we learn, to an addiction meeting. If the seaside o ers the promise of fun for children and picturesque tranquillity for the elderly, for those in between it can be a dead-end, the shoreline representing both a geographic and a figurative terminus from which narcotic abandon might seem one of the few means of fleeting escape.

Seagull shares a kinship with other representations of such places, a curiously British cultural strain which encompasses both the dour melodrama of Morrissey’s daydreams of annihilation in ‘Everyday is Like Sunday’ and the Gothic seaside psychodrama of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud. So too does it recall David Seabrook’s All the Devils are Here a disturbing tour of the Kent coastline and the thanatotic misfits which litter its past and haunt its present, a book whose title finds a faint echo in the film’s eventual surprise reveal: all the devils are here indeed. – Jonathan Bygraves

SOUTH WEST SHOWCASE

A selection of the

works from South West talents.

THE PISS WITCH

Director : Jason Barker UK / 2022 / 7 Mins

They call her Wizzers to remind her that she has boobs. Clare tries to ignore them but still they just won’t leave her alone. Then a woman with a beard walks past. Everyone says “don’t look, it’s the witch” and Clare has an idea.

Reflective Encounters

Despite the weight of its themes, exploring family, gender, and bullying, there’s a playful and light quality to The Piss Witch. This is partly thanks to Orrin Niziblian’s great central performance as Clare, which moves from introverted and self-conscious to brave and defiant in the short’s humorous last scene. Equally convincing are the supporting cast, especially Mabel Aitkin as the woman labelled a ‘witch’ by the local school children. Her brief appearance looms over the rest of the film, providing the inspiration for Clare’s act of defiance in the story’s concluding moments.

The details of Clare’s bedroom lend a richness and believability to the film, with scattered and colourful posters, illustrations, and images. This fantastic production design creates a homely quality to the film’s environment, a sense that the character’s surroundings are livedin, a feeling of them having existed prior to the events onscreen.

Local legend and myth are a central concern of the short, and these themes are brought to life by the strange and folksy harp music of the film’s soundtrack (composed by Hutch Demouilpied). The resulting sound draws from the UK’s pastoral heritage, while also reminding one of Andrew Dickson’s lilting scores for the films of Mike Leigh. – Chris Childs

IRIS

Director : Sam Anghelides Wales / 2021 / 10 Mins

When a young man receives terrible news before a planned outing, he embarks on a journey both physically and mentally to understand how to process his emotions and deal with sudden grief.

Reflective Encounters

This short takes us into the inner world of its protagonist’s troubled mind, coming to terms with the sudden shock of bad news. Dance and choreography are central to the film’s power, as the movements of writer/performer Liam Wallace shift between the expressive and the self-destructive. At times, Wallace’s dancing is soft and flowing, at other times sudden and shocking (like the character’s pounding of his chest, suggesting the harsh rhythms of his heartbeat).

Wallace’s performance is as accomplished in the film’s quieter moments as it is in the dance sequences, shown best in the close-ups that study the small movements of his face. The decision to create the film without dialogue puts the emphasis on powerful visual storytelling, most apparent during a scene filmed on a beach. The wide and open environment means the character looks towering and majestic, and yet also small and lost amidst the gigantic ocean.

Particular attention has also been given to the sound design (created by Dominika Latusek), which shifts back and forth from the internal to the external world. Equally e ective is the ambient orchestral soundtrack (composed by Benjamin Squires), rising and falling in time with the performers’ movements. – Chris Childs

SWEET LITTLE DESPAIR

Su ering form sleep depravation, Lynsey’s day spirals out of control.

Reflective Encounters

The emotional weight and anxieties of parenthood are carefully exposed in this subtle and a ecting portrait, anchored by a masterful and restrained performance from Lynsey Murrell. Although it draws on the traditions of social-realist film, Sweet Little Despair’s best moments are when it transcends the everyday ordeals of modern life and moves into a more dreamlike space, such as a moment where the central character tries to steal some sleep while her baby cries next to her. Shot in a surreal birds-eye view, and using an imaginative approach to lighting, the scene brings us into the tired, restless world of childcare, where the nights often bleed into days.

Director Carolina Petro displays her gift for creating extraordinary images out of everyday moments. This is clearest in the film’s final shot, a tender image of parent and child that feels similar to portraits of the Madonna and child. At the same time, the naturalistic sound design (by Tim Bamber) brings us back to reality with the recognisable humming of a moving train. This tension between the beauty and harshness of reality is what makes the short such a powerful and hypnotic achievement.

– Chris Childs

Director : Carolina Petro UK / 2022 / 14 Mins

WHERE WAS I?

Director : Kae Bahar

UK / 2022 / 15 Mins

A young poet finds himself at rock bottom with nothing left to lose, he is given two choices to change his life.

Reflective Encounters

Where Was I? considers the pain of grief, and the di erent directions such pain can lead us in. Through the fragments we see of his past, we understand that JJ (Kori Roze) is left reeling from a traumatic loss, searching for ways to escape his thoughts. The character’s minimal, closed-o exterior is contrasted with excerpts from his journal, which reveal a sad and restless mind. This diary-like narration creates a thread of poetry that runs throughout the film, balancing out the darkness of JJ’s world.

The moments of surreal humour have a similar e ect, like the philosophy-quoting unhoused man (Mike Sailsbury), happily playing the ukulele outside a soup kitchen. It’s a standout moment within the film, highlighting director Kae Bahar’s approach, which involves giving each performer a moment in the spotlight. Anashe Danai’s performance as Riley – a character whose life and humour perfectly contrasts against the more reserved JJ – is a highlight of the short.

The film’s uncertain ending leaves the fate of JJ up to the viewer’s interpretation. It’s a narrative question-mark which shows the di erent paths open to the character, one leading to creativity and expression, the other ending in tragedy. – Chris Childs

MAB HUDEL

Director : Edward Rowe UK / 2022 / 11 Mins

Enys works the family farm with his widowed mother and grandmother. An exceptional rugby player, Enys leads his team to the final of The Cornwall Cup, all the while living with the pressures of his fathers legacy and a secret relationship.

Reflective Encounters

This heart-felt tale of gay love and Cornish rugby boasts great performances from its two leads (Chris Jenkins and Rick Yale). Jenkins’ portrayal of Enys is impressively restrained, perfectly capturing the conflicting feelings boiling beneath the surface. This restraint is broken during the harsh physicality of the rugby scrum, which lends a real heft to the short’s final scenes, a play-o against rival team St Just. The film’s conclusion ties together its emotional threads with satisfying intensity, cleverly comparing the aggression of sport to the closeness of intimacy.

Cornwall’s coastlines are beautifully shot, particularly in an emotional scene on the beach, where the characters swim in bright and dazzling waters. It’s refreshing to see the landscapes of the Southwest shown with such a luminous and dream-like approach, reminding us of the cinematic potential of such environments whilst placing the film in the tradition of similar ‘coastline-coming-of-age’ tales, like the works of Eric Rohmer.

The decision to film in the Cornish language brings an immersive authenticity to the short, as does the earthy photography of the protagonist’s farmland home. Mab Hudel is a promising addition to the independent productions emerging from Cornwall, spearheaded by the trailblazing work of Mark Jenkin (Mab Hudel features his collaborators Edward Rowe, as writer-director and actor Mary Woodvine, star of the upcoming Enys Men). – Chris Childs

UK STUDENT: RECONNECTIONS

Connections form and break all the time in life. These are films about getting back in touch with the things that make us happy, the things that challenge us, or the things that keep us grounded and alive.

CINEMA NOW

Director : Louis Holder

UK / 2022 / 14 Mins

There are many di erent types of cinemas presented in the documentary - from repurposed former industrial and historic sites to hidden gems and underground meccas. There is no limit to where cinema is found, which is certainly true of London.

VIRÁGOM, VIRÁGOM

Director : Anna Jarai

UK / 2022 / 10 Mins

The film highlights the beauty of craft, whilst recontextualising traditional folk narratives to show the strength and power of the often forgotten members of folk communities.

WHITEBOY

Director : Matty Crawford

UK / 2022 / 20 Mins

A British Filipino boy struggles to assimilate with his Filipino identity, after his Mother on a whim and after a heartbreak moves him back to Philippines to start a new life together.

HARRIER

Director : Ciara Flint

UK / 2021 / 15 Mins

How one woman’s connection to the natural world became a lifeline during an intensive recovery from alcoholism.

UAMH-BINN

Director : Ben Anstruther

UK / 2022 / 6 Mins

An atmospheric and immersive journey around the uninhabited island of Sta a which has been the source of inspiration for generations of artists, musicians and writers.

UK STUDENT: DISCONNECTIONS

Fragments of thoughts, and disintegrated feelings. Stories about reaching out and hearing silence in response, about trying to speak up and feeling su ocated instead.

ZONG

Director : Hope Robinson UK / 2021 / 11 Mins

Maisha’s utopia is disrupted when she is confronted with a dystopian dimension’s system. One that drains the blackness from a person for societal use. Leading her to make a decision: conform to or abolish the system for the advancement of her people.

TIME TRIP TIME

Director : Taewan Kim & Shunny Kim UK / 2022 / 3 Mins

A mad clock takes the viewer on a trip to a random planet. Which happens to work in a di erent conception of time than we know. Made in relay process, the results are unexpected and mind tripping.

CALLOUSED

Director : Lara Angelina

UK / 2022 / 4 Mins

Detailing how it feels to su er from bulimia.

WATCH ME VANISH

Director : Georgia Bardi

UK / 2022 / 4 Mins

This is an autobiographical film animated on paper frame by frame with the use of charcoal. It is conveyed in a surreal tone where the plot suddenly shifts to memory and dream sequences. The whole story flows like thoughts.

PEOPLE’S POND

Director : Chiahui Liao

UK, China / 2022 / 24 Mins

After a few drinks, Pingan agrees to Guo’s strange request and later wakes up in the hospital. What he doesn’t yet know is that his life will never be the same again.

SHATTERED PEACE

Director : Jakub Dvořák

Czech Republic, UK / 2022 / 4 Mins

Echoes of a violation of the soul.

STAY

Director : Yu Sun UK / 2022 / 5 Mins

Needles are used to repair the damage. A short animated film made using hand embroidery on tracing paper, depicting a father-daughter relationship. Don’t forget to spend more time with the people you love even though you are busy.

UK STUDENT: CONNECTIONS

A hug from a partner, a look of acknowledgment, a smile from a friend. Weaving threads that tie us together and testing their strength, these are intimate films about intimate feelings.

JAM

Director : Tasou Palisidou UK / 2022 / 17 Mins

Struggling to save their relationship, a lesbian couple starts uncovering all their issues. When their ugliest truths are revealed, and their inner thoughts are laid bare, they reach a point of no return. Do they stay together?

BENEATH THE SURFACE

Director : Musa Alderson-Clarke UK / 2021 / 6 Mins

Dee is struggling to come to terms with the challenges posed by fatherhood. He decides to go fishing to relax, but things take a turn for the worse.

MY NAME IS YOURS

Director : Clarenz Gutierrez Badlis UK / 2022 / 9 Mins

When a young Filipino couple move to England, constant unsuccessful job interviews and the building pressure of financially supporting their families abroad push the pair to desperation.

DZIFA

Director : Savannah Acquah UK / 2022 / 19 Mins

An intimate drama following Esther and Chioma as they navigate the nuances of their relationship. They find themselves at a Ghanaian naming ceremony where they are invited to reconnect in a rhythmic celebration of diasporic Black queer joy.

SUBURB

Director : Miles Jezuita UK / 2021 / 4 Mins

Compared to the bustling life of London’s City, in the quiet, static suburb, lurk foxes. This is a glimpse into what mischief these enigmatic creatures wreak on their man-made surroundings.

CHILDREN’S JURY

THEO THE WATER TOWER

Director : Jaimeen Desai France, Switzerland / 2021 / 9 Mins

Every morning, Theo the water tower cries and disturbs the village’s peace. Robert and his dog try to cheer him up by singing songs. But Theo is in no mood to sing and tries to escape, which leads him out of the village and into the city.

LAIKA & NEMO

Director : Jan Gadermann & Sebastian Gadow Germany / 2022 / 15 Mins

Nemo looks di erent. Nobody else wears a diving suit and such a huge helmet. But then he meets Laika, an astronaut.

THE GIRL BEHIND THE MIRROR

Director : Iuri Moreno Brazil / 2022 / 12 Mins

A transgender girl locks herself in her room for fear of the monsters that threaten her outside, until a new reality appears behind the mirror where these monsters do not exist and she is free to be who she is or who wants to be.

CUI WEN ZI TRAINING FOR IMMORTALITY

Director : Jiaqi Wang China / 2022 / 5 Mins

There was a beautiful creature in my dream. But I never see it again. Nature energy creates an energy field. We learn from nature, we want to find the truth of nature.

MISTER PAPER

Directors : Steven De Beul & Ben Tesseur Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands / 2021 / 5 Mins

What a beautiful day today! Mister Paper is always cheerful. When he needs something, he takes his scissors and cuts it out of his paper universe. Every day he creates something new. He can solve any problem with his scissors.

A WHITE-WHITE DAY

Director : Vasily Tchirkov

France, Russia, Canada / 2022 / 6 Mins

There are a lot of little things and stories around us. The sound of a passing train, the color of dry autumn grass. We usually pass by without noticing. But if we recognize these moments we feel how our own life is connected to them.

COLOUR!

Director : Britt Bailey UK, Ireland / 2021 / 10 Mins

On her first day at a new school, one vibrant little girl is constantly clashing with the crowd. Soon enough, all she wants is to blend in with the background. Can she learn to embrace herself? Or does she risk fading away entirely?

IMMERSIVE ENCOUNTERS COMPETITION PROGRAMME 1: COMING BACK TO EARTH

From a spellbinding journey through Earth’s geological periods and a dive into underground, narrow passageways, Coming back to Earth invites us to reflect on our past, and the position we occupy within millennia of the Earth’s history.

GENESIS

Director : Joerg Courtial Germany / 2021 / 14 Mins

As time travellers we embark on an emotionally intense virtual reality journey to experience the dramatic milestones in the evolution of earth and mankind. A 24h metaphor of 4.7 billion years of evolution that reveals: We are children of galactic luck.

CAVES

Director : Carlos Isabel Garcia Switzerland / 2021 / 19 Mins

Mankind has landed on the moon and flies around in space. But under our feet there are about a million kilometers of cave systems—only one per cent of which has been explored.

IMMERSIVE ENCOUNTERS COMPETITION PROGRAMME 2: PEOPLE AROUND

We are social animals and, as such, are defined and influenced by social relationships. People Around sets out to explore the ways we interact with others, the powerful connections that spark from mutual understanding, and the scars left by trauma.

CYCLE OF VIOLENCE

Director : Felicia Anna Aurora Bergström Germany / 2022 / 7 Mins

As time travelers we embark on an emotionally intense virtual reality journey to experience the dramatic milestones in the evolution of earth and mankind. A 24h metaphor of 4.7 billion years of evolution that reveals: We are children of galactic luck.

RIPPLES OF KINDNESS

Director : Oliver Lindsey UK / 2021 / 12 Mins

Created in collaboration with Hamed and Hessam Amiri to honour their brother’s incredible life, Ripples of Kindness invites small groups to share in the positive impact that Hussein had on everyone around him, from Afghanistan to Wales.

DEPICT!

With over 1,100 submissions from over 88 di erent countries.

Depict is Watershed’s super short filmmaking competition as part of Encounters Film Festival.

Here are the eighteen films selected.

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BLUE

Director : Emelye Moulton

UK / 2021 / 1 Min 30 Secs

The day-to-day experiences of a police o cer.

CHANGING SEASONS

Director : Belén León

Mexico / 2022 / 1 Min 29secs

When you’re lonely, you tend to look for the wrong people.

DEADLINE

Director : Sydney Agans

USA / 2022 / 1 Min 30 Secs

Max succumbs to the pressures of his work and spirals out of control.

DO YOU WANT TO PLAY?

Director : Liviu Rotaru

Republic of Moldova / 2022 / 1 Min 30 Secs

A short film about how (un)connected children are in the modern world.

ENOUGH

Director : Andy Sowerby

UK / 2022 / 1 Min 30 Secs

An animated portrait of personal thoughts and limiting beliefs.

FRUIT MARKET

Director : Pui Sze Chan

Hong Kong / 2022 / 1 Min

Hong Kong’s hustle and bustle inside Yau Ma Tei fruit market is animated with collage.

FUCKING SMOKE

Director : José Prats

UK / 2022 / 1 Min 11 Secs

A child su ers the health complications of his mother’s smoking habit.

IT’S GOING TO BE HERE

Director : Amaia San Sebastian

Spain / 2022 / 1 Min

She should not show her too old and ragged body. She should not choose when and where.

JACKPOT

Director : Joe Magee

UK / 2021 / 1 Min 30 Secs

Beware sharks in the amusement arcade.

MÉDECINE SAPIENNE

Director : Justin Lemay

Canada / 2022, / 1 Min 15 Secs

The removal of the natural human being and the implant of imaginary human concept.

MR. SUN

Director : Christina Wu

USA / 2022 / 1 Min 30 Secs

A girl with insomnia invites over a mysterious figure into her house.

MRS EL ARABY

Director : May Ziadé

UK / 2021 / 1 Min

Who is the Arab woman on our screens?

SHOW MUST GO UP

Director : Leo Liang

Taiwan / 2022 / 1 Min 30 Secs

The life of contemporary acrobatic artists in Taiwan

THE SPECTRUM OF RED

Director : Flo Humberstone

UK / 2022 / 1 Min 13 Secs

A short film made to reflect the vast number of euphemisms for the word “period.”

TRAIN

Director : Botir Abdurakhmanov

Uzbekistan / 2022 / 1 Min

The film tells the story of a train that settles in the mind of a young man named Doston.

WHEREVER, NEXT

Director : Benedict Webb

UK / 2021 / 1 Min 26 Secs

A bittersweet snapshot of leaving university and a home shared with friends.

WOODPECKER

Director : Fatemeh Askarpour Iran / 2021 / 1 Min 30 Secs

Humans who drown in social networks, feed on each other’s ruminants, but the never experience satiety

YEAH, I’M GOOD THANKS

Director : Hannah Lau-Walker UK / 2022 / 1 Min 30 Secs

Whilst messaging online a woman contemplates being honest about how she’s been doing

FILMS

A Human Certainty

A White-White Day

All the Crows in the World Alternative Economies

Amok

At Little Wheelie Three Days Ago BabyThump Backflip Bald

Becoming Male in the Middle Ages Beneath the Surface Blocks Blue Boddyssey

Born in Damascus Brutalia, Days of Labour

Bus Film Calloused Carbon Copy Changing Seasons Chthonios Cinema Now Colour! Confessions of an English Ant-Eater Cui Wen Zi Training for Immortality

Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti Curupira and the Machine of the Destiny Dawta

Deadline

Dear Passengers

Deep Blue Dinner’s Ready Do you want to play Dzifa

Enough - Short Fence

Flying Potato and Other Misunderstandings

Four Pills at Night Fruit market

Fucking smoke Garrano Happy New Year, Jim Harrier Heaven Hideous Hysteresis

I am Good at Karate Impossible Figures and other stories I In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket Iris

It’s going to be here

It’s Raining Frogs Outside Jackpot Jam Joy Juice Laika & Nemo Le Saboteur Lilith & Eve Love, Dad Lux Noctis Mab Hudel

Machines of Loving Grace Médecine Sapienne Mister Paper Molar Monsieur Le Butch Motherclucker Mr. Sun Mrs El Araby Mulika My Home My Name is Yours Nazarbazi / Neon Phantom Old Windows On Xerxes’ Throne Orthodontics

People’s Pond Perfect City: The Mother Phlegm Places We’ll Breathe Press(ed)

Primal Therapy Red Room Rootless Rules

Salvation Has No Name Science Around Us Seagull

Shattered Peace Show must go up Sierra Something in the Garden Squish!

Stay Steakhouse Stones Strangers Suburb Supper Suruaika

Sweet Little Despair

Tennis Ball on His Day O The Bayview The Camderina Diner The Cook The Fourth The Girl Behind the Mirror The Lighting The Piss Witch

The Sky Oscillates Between Eternity and Its Immediate Consequences

The spectrum of red Theo the Water Tower Thing Time Trip Time Tongue Train Train Again Trap Uamh-Binn

Under the Lake Urban Solutions Virágom, Virágom Virtual Voice Warsha

Watch me Vanish

We Know a Better Word Than Happy Well Wishes My Love, Your Love Where Was I?

Wherever, next While We Were Here Whiteboy Will My Parents Come to See Me Woodpecker

Yeah I’m good thanks You’re Not Home Yugo

Yummy Mummy Zong Zoon

A-Z DIRECTORS

Adrián Ja é Alex Crumbie Alexandra Brodski Amaia San Sebastian Anastasia Veber Andrea Gatopoulos Andrew Stephen Lee Andy Sowerby Anna Jarai Anssi Kasitonni Arif Abdillah (ARIV) Arne Hector, Luciana Mazeto, Vinícius Lopes & Minze Tummescheit Art Wild Azar Saiyar Balázs Turai Ben Anstruther Benedict Webb Botir Abdurakhmanov Britt Bailey Bryan M. Ferguson Carlos Gómez Salamanca Carolina Petro Chan Pui Sze Chiahui Liao Chihying Musquiqui Chris Childs Christina Wu Ciara Flint Clarenz Gutierrez Badlis Damiana Acuña Dania Bdeir Dániel Bárány Daniel Cook David Doutel & Vasco Sá Davor Sanvincenti Dean Puckett Derek Ugochukwu Diana Cam Van Nguyen Edward Rowe Elina Oikari Elizabeth Zu Emelye Moulton Evi Kalogiropoulou Fatemeh Askarpour Federica Foglia Flo Lucy Humberstone Franie-Éléonore Bernier Gabriel Gabriel Garble

Gabriela Staniszewska Gabriella A. Moses Georgia Bardi Greg McLeod Hannah Lau-Walker Helen McCrorie Hilke Rönnfeldt Hope Robinson Ian Killc Iuri Moreno Jade Ayino Jaimeen Desai Jakub Dvorak Jan Gadermann & Sebastian Grutza Jan-David Bolt Janaina Wagner Jason Barker Jeanette Jeanenne Jess Dadds Jessica Ashman Jiaqi Wang Joe Magee Johnny Kirk Jonas Bienz Jonatan Schwenk José Prats Joseph Brett Joseph Wallace Jude Dry Julian Glander Justin Lemay Kae Bahar Kaho Yoshida Kuang Hwa Wang Lara Angelina Laura Wadha Leart Rama Leonardo Martinelli Liviu Rotaru Louis Holder Luke Bather Luke Willis Madli Lääne Maisha Maene Malte Stein Manolis Mavris Marcos Sánchez María Belén Leon Gasca Maria Estela Paiso

Maria Steinmetz Marta Pajek Maryam Tafakory Matty Crawford May Ziadé Miles Jezuita Mo Harawe Mohammadreza Mayghani Mona Keil Morgan Quaintance Musa Alderson-Clarke Nadim Choufi Nikita Diakur Nora Longatti Paul Holbrook Pedro Neves Marques Peter Tscherkassky Rehana Zaman Robert Seidel Sam Anghelides Sam de Ceccatty Sander Joon Santtu Salminen Savannah Acquah Senne Driesen Shengwei Zhou Špela Čadež Steven De Beul & Ben Tesseur Sunčica Fradelić Suzannah Mirghani Sydney Jane Agans Taewan Kim & Shunny Kim Tasou Palisidou Thanasis Trouboukis Tiago Teixeira Tulapop Saenjaroen Vasily Tchirkov Viktor Schimpf

Vincent Bossel Vlad Ilicevici & Radu Pop Yann Gonzalezv Yi Tang Yoko Yuki Yu Sun

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