Aconite (2024)

Amelia 2.0

After his wife Amelia suffers an aneurysm that leaves her bedridden and slowly dying, police officer Carter Summerland searches for a way to revive her. He's approached by Wesley Enterprises pioneering a new program to extend life through robotics, they get caught in a public debate over human’s relationship with technology and her right to exist.

Me + Her

Creating a universe between two small pieces of Cardboard. When Jack and Jill of Cardboard City are separated by Jill's torrid illness, Jack must think outside the box to assure they will be together again.

Reflection

As she keeps watching old home movies isolated in her hotel room, the screen becomes a mirror from which she tries to see herself. Levels of subjectivity, narrative, and reality entwine into a surrealist fever dream of scopophilic cinéma pur. The final layer of meaning is all of us watching the film on the screen-mirror in the theatre.

Days, Months, Years and Nothing Else

This short film, built around a randomly chosen name and composed of scenes shot within a single room over the course of three hours, features an introspective monologue that was shaped and adapted during the editing process. The narrative aligns closely with the emotional tone and visual rhythm of the piece, particularly in harmony with the non-original music selection, Maggot Brain by Funkadelic.

Go Forget Me

Robert Estragon has worked his way to the top of the food chain as a doctor in the city, but it has driven him to self-imposed delusion. Here, we listen as he sits and projects himself onto the mad world he observes. It all comes to a head when Willie Krapp, a young colleague, invades this world, hoping to teach Robert that it was wrong to let his own daughter die in the operating room.

Three Walls and a Window

A nuclear family sits in front of the television. The phone rings.

Jeff

A phone sex operator loses her grip on reality, caught in a hypnotic relationship with a caller making disturbing confessions.

The Artist and His Canvas

An experimental film revolving around how an artist perceives a man and a woman.

The Tuba Thieves

A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.

A Fair Trade

In this black comedy crime epic, eighth grader Tommy Uris is pushed into a teenage drug dealing business run by his two classmates Frank Newton and Patrick Reynolds after walking in on a drug deal between them. As their business falls apart, so does their trust for each other, and they need to either resolve, or kill each other in the process.

Crías

After the death of their father, two sisters who have gone their separate ways meet again to settle the inheritance.

154

The prototype [TEST TYPE • 154] is a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence, which is capable of autonomously acquiring notions from its surroundings and - eventually - developing autonomy of thought. Given the nearly human nature of its learning capabilities, the laboratory that programmed it hires a kindergarten teacher, asking him to instruct the machine as if it were a newborn child. The learning process - which spans 7 days - becomes increasingly insidious in the long run, posing a peculiar yet crucial problem: can there be a form of autonomous thinking that excludes emotions?

Rosewater

A solitary man struggles to cultivate beauty in a desolate urban world. Lonely and dislocated, he drifts in and out of a dream state envisioning the promise of regeneration. ROSEWATER tells a story of hope sustained through perseverance, ritual and, ultimately, revelation.

Lurch

Filipino-born Ella works as a nanny in a prosperous Moscow family. Day by day, she carries out the same routine actions: washing, cooking, cleaning, babysitting. But once she accidentally hurts her arm, her smooth repetitive life gradually gives a lurch…

I’d like that corner seat over there

An omnibus film based on Kim Oki's album Hip Hop Retreat. Twenty characters share the same table at different times, in different emotional states, each with their own story. Shot in one day, edited in one day.

Kino Kopf

Born from steel and glass Kino Kopf is created by two inventors. They are assembled by their mother, a nurturing artist, and their Father a greedy entrepreneur. Kino Kopf is the first of its kind a sentient humanoid VHS camera. They are given a life by their mother but presented to the world by their father. Kino Kopf is the next big sensation and spurs a technological revolution. They are soon forgotten and alone as new models surpass them. Kino Kopf is left alone to contemplate if they ever had a soul, as visions of an electric cowboy dance through their dreams.

Summertime

Middle-aged Ohio secretary Jane Hudson has never found love and has nearly resigned herself to spending the rest of her life alone. But before she does, she uses her savings to finance a summer in romantic Venice, where she finally meets the man of her dreams, the elegant Renato Di Rossi.

Cobweb

In the 1970s, Director Kim is obsessed by the desire to re-shoot the ending of his completed film Cobweb, but chaos and turmoil grip the set with interference from the censorship authorities, and the complaints of actors and producers who can't understand the re-written ending. Will Kim be able to find a way through this chaos to fulfill his artistic ambitions and complete his masterpiece?

The Dog that Drinks Seawater

The short film tells the story of a woman who was betrayed by the man she loved and lost her unborn child. The depressed woman arrives at a deserted beach, where she becomes a silent witness to the clarification of her life story.

3 Women

Two co-workers, one a vain woman and the other an awkward teenager, share an increasingly bizarre relationship after becoming roommates.

The Green Ray

A lonely Parisian woman comes to terms with her isolation and anxieties during a long summer vacation.

Maalbeek

Sabine is looking for a missing image: a day that has left its mark forever and that everyone remembers but her. But maybe this absence is what allows her to move on with her life?

Blocked Together

Whilst a boy mourns the passing of his younger brother, hope of unity is found in his grief.

Rent-a-Cat

A young woman who rents out cats to lonely old folks finds her life turned upside down when a young man from her past shows back up in her life.

Preface to a History

A couple, Vlad and Sophy, navigate their relationship as well as their own struggles with mental health in the context of a highly connected, politically uncertain modern world while on a trip to a remote Canadian island in this avant-garde feature film. PREFACE TO A HISTORY, created with a tiny crew of four people, represents an experiment in using minimalist tools to create an overwhelming aesthetic experience in service of a simple, but specifically contemporary, story about two people attempting to navigate a fraying relationship amid all the anxieties and external pressures of modern adulthood in a technologically-interconnected and politically unstable era.

Red Autumn

A Experimental Docu-Drama about the Red Army Faction's formation, and events leading up to their imprisonment and death, from 1970 to 1977.

Cheers,

A bartender takes on the physical form of her imagined alter egos.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

A solitary scholar discovers an ancient bottle while on a trip to Istanbul and unleashes a djinn who offers her three wishes. Filled with reluctance, she is unable to come up with one, so the djinn tries to inspire her with his stories.

Undo

Moemi is not overly pleased when Yukio brings home a couple of turtles to keep her company. Although Yukio works at home as a writer, Moemi feels neglected and desired a dog or a cat, but neither is allowed in their apartment.

Guinea

Yukari Nishihara, 25, earns her living as an art model and aspires to become an actress. One day, while she was out, she saw “a man's face about to jump off the roof of a building”, and since then she has been suffering from a peculiar constitution: she sees a suicide while on her period, faints, and develops a fever. The goddess of love does not smile on Yukari, who is unable to become a sweet girl with a nice boyfriend. The only things that can save Yukari now are her best friend Hana, who has a keen intuition, and a suppository that can break a fever in one shot. On the day of an important audition, Yukari has decided that this is her last chance. However, Yukari realizes that she has forgotten her antipyretic suppositories, and her eyes meet those of another soon-to-be suicide victim. She is in a desperate situation. What does Yukari do?

Lonelyhearts

Burdened by a family secret, Adam White lands a job as a newspaper advice columnist. Little does he realize that it's all part of a nasty desire by cynical editor William Shrike to crush the souls of his underlings. Adam feels his readers' pain, and eventually, he takes an assignment to meet with Faye Doyle, who is exasperated by her crippled husband. When Faye tries to seduce Adam, he must choose between his job and his girl.

Born In Summer

A filmmaker plays with diary-docu and fiction as his camera joins his ventures into a phone dating club. Bored to death, hormones running, and desperately wanting to talk to someone his own age (preferably a girl), he walks into a local phone dating club. Can he hook up with someone? Borrowing the form of a diary-movie, the director unfurls an unpredictable and imaginative look into his own persona. 8mm experimental film by Murakami Kenji, the film that made his name.

Relax With Ease

A three part meditation.