Terma (2021)

Follow Me

Jasper (20), on the edge of adulthood , wanders around lost in the Port of Ghent. Fragments of a phone call betray a loss.

Five Minutes a Day

Working in a small security kiosk, two men take advantage of the shift change to get to know each other and forge a touching bond.

Polaroid

Giuseppe, 33, is still struggling to build his life in a small Italian town where he has to hide his homosexuality. With a Polaroid in hand, he decides to leave for Berlin to find Peter, a summer love he has never forgotten. The shock of a cosmopolitan city is nothing compared to the moment he realizes that the German artist has a "normal" family. For him this represents the possibility of 'losing' himself and meeting Marco, who takes him around all night to arrive at dawn to the conviction that love is the only strength to find one's identity. "Polaroid" is one of five short film segments in an omnibus feature titled "A Quintet".

The S.O.S.S.B.U

3 Cornell students are broke and left with no money, they must come up with a plan to seek their way into wealth. Will they succeed?

Final Exams

Four friends are waiting for their final exam results... and their lives to begin. In the mean time, Lang-Vonh is worrying about his Asian heritage, Cédric is struggling to come to terms with being gay and Gaëlle and Chloé are trying to forget about everything until the results are in.

Escaping Gravity

To finally gain her father's acceptance, transsexual Leonie decides to return masqueraded as a man to the world of her childhood: the funfair. Though even the old owner of the ghost train has something to hide.

La Fin des étés

In this short fiction film, Marie has been living in the midst of a nightmare since the accident of Bernard, her brother. Clinging excessively to this handicapped being, she wants to take charge of it. Étienne, her fiancé, has no taste for sacrifice. He reproaches Marie for languishing in her adolescence. Love will prevail. In a definitive gesture, Marie will free herself from the bonds that still held her back to her childhood.

Two Funerals

"Two Funerals" is a film that focuses on portraits one individual, how does one's mind and values changes? How does social pressure affect him? Compared with the film about social issues, such a story reflects the intrinsic value of human beings.

Arrival

This traditionally animated film tells the journey of how a young boy's personal discovery affects the long-distance relationship he keeps with his mother.

By the Sea Where We Played

A short story about a boy who is honest and courageous despite being paralyzed.

Kind Mother

An estranged mother arrives at the silent retreat that her daughter is attending. When the two women engage in an unusual - and fantastical - power struggle, limits are tested, generational trauma is brought to light, and together they must grapple with mortality and forgiveness.

The Red Kiss

Passion brews quietly between Qian and Vicky, as they rehearse for the school anniversary drama performance in their form 5 summer holiday. The two girls gradually lose in their exquisite tension and growing intimacy. Right before the new school year begins, the kissing plot is exposed and their show is banned. Yet, it unfolds Qian’s courage that she decides to make a bold move on the first school day.

Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man

A child is born. We see underwater swimmers representing this. He is young, in a jungle setting, with two fanciful "instincts" guiding him as swooping bird-like acrobats initially menace, then delight. As an adolescent, he enters a desert, where a man spins a large cube of metal tubing. He leaves his instinct-guides behind, and enters a garden where two statues dance in a pond. As he watches their sensual acrobatics of love, he becomes a man. He is offered wealth (represented by a golden hat) by a devil figure. In a richly decorated room, a scruffy troupe of a dozen acrobats and a little girl reawaken the old man's youthful nature and love.

BEE, My Friend

Zhi Xuan is a new teacher at her alma mater. One day, her troubled student, Zhe Yu commits a misdemeanour which reminds her of a past mistake. Zhi Xuan is determined to help her student solve his family problems, and also seeking redemption for herself.

Light

Haunted by trauma and trapped in sex work, Light meets Shuo, an undercover cop who offers him shelter. But healing isn’t easy—can Light choose a new path?

The Dreams Of Lonely People

After twenty years in prison, a man returns to his homeland to wait for death in peace. His world is completely changed when he accidentally meets a character from the magical world of nature.

Liyoki

Liyoki, a silverback gorilla, lives peacefully with his family, when they are attacked by poachers.

Stockholm Daybreak

At the break of dawn, teenagers Axel and Love are on the way home after a night out partying. As the sun rises, they start to see each other in a whole new light... Elin Övergaard's remarkably tender portrait of the struggle to say what you mean to the person you care for the most packs a considerable emotive punch in only just a few minutes.

Gaze in Silence

Yun Fei’s twisted curiosity turns critical when Yan Xin’s life is threatened. Will he stay in the shadows—or act?

The Line

On an ordinary day, Yoon-jin(26) finds Ji-hoon(14) crouching down on a stair in the hallway in front of her house.

Mac-boogie

Hyo-seon is diagnosed early menopause, and his son Jinsu calls for a MacBook. One old cow that would be the money in the house.

The Summer House

A young girl flees to France to forget her boyfriend; first his letters pursue her, then he himself follows her there. During a party to celebrate the moon landing she takes her own small step...

Reckless

An uncompromising and controversial short set in the Scandinavian suburbia on the hottest day of the summer. A sister reluctantly babysits her little brother. Two young boys catch her attention, and she makes a crucial decision.

Cowboy and Indian

When a young Bengali bride collapses in the desert, a cowboy appears out of the sunset and rescues her.

A Regular Thing

Love has a price in this quirky sex comedy. Sten is a 30- year-old librarian. Over a book he meets supersexy Katja, the woman of his dreams, and they soon end up in bed together. It's love at first sight, but the next thing he knows, Katja wants money every time they make love. Otherwise their relationship will become trivial, she says. Reluctantly Sten agrees, but then Katja puts up the price.

The Idyll

A modern adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's short story about a man and a woman sharing an unexpected encounter on a train as it travels through a beautiful and surreal landscape.

Islands

A sexual reverie unfolds over the course of one ethereal night. Characters wander through an erotic maze of love and lust, blurring the lines between wet dream and lucid nightmare as a macabre, erotic stage performance sends a ripple of lustful desires through its audience and performers.

Other Black Boys

A queer, black college student is forced to confront the masks he wears in his relationships.

My First Suit

14-year old Steve is caught between creatures he does not fully understand: two parents with very different ideas about the suit he should wear to his first school dance. Meanwhile everywhere he seems to look, images of men are taking control of his imagination. In Stewart Main's comical coming of age story Steve escapes his parents' good wishes, to discover his true desires. They aren't quite what his no-nonsense father had in mind.

Triptych on Matter and Death

A young woman, injured and alone, desperately seeks refuge in an empty house before finding an abandoned train car. Haunted by surreal visions, she repeatedly collapses. At dawn, her motionless form draws the curiosity of local children, leaving her fate uncertain.

A Chiara

Chiara feels that there is something wrong. She has a strange feeling she cannot explain to her mother or sister. During the night, after overhearing a heated argument between her parents and witnessing something shocking, her world is overturned and her safety net crumbles. Reality and dreams start to blur and Chiara’s life will never be the same.

The Room

Mariana must sacrifice her dog Frida after violently beating it for having destroyed her recently deceased son's toys. The pet's death helps Mariana accept and overcome the loss of her son.

Debut

Ivan has just scored a goal and rushes to kiss Marko.

Don't be late, Myra

Ten-year old Myra is forced to walk home alone, dodging men harassing her on the streets of Lahore. Soon things escalate in this thriller where a sinister turn quietly awaits her.

Dilution

Dilution is an experimental short film that explores the transit between resistance and (di)ssolution, between holding and releasing and a path towards obsessive repetition. They are layers, exposed pores, matter that oscillates between remaining or disappearing. The sound is not a background, but a puncture: friction, tearing, water that drags what still persists. A sensorial testimony of what refuses to vanish completely.

Goldfish

Two couples, in the same room, try to keep it together. The human couple fare differently to the pair of Goldfish in their fish tank. An artful piece exploring choice in life and love. The humour is derived from the wistful musings, in Cantonese, of the male fish and narrator.

Sugar Glass Bottle

Near-future Tokyo. Kou, through the help of his high school best friend, finds a surprising way to express his mounting frustration at the insidious forces of commercialism that are forcing out the neighbors he cares most about. Initially inspired by a prank that the writer-director Neo Sora (The Chicken, 2020) had pulled on him in his childhood, a sense of warm nostalgia and cold, material reality intermingle to tell a tale set in the not-so-distant future about disappearing spaces and the forces of policing and gentrification that drills this process forward.