Flesh in Turmoil (2023)

Between You and You All

A chronicle of the lives of a couple and the gradual dissolution of their relationship.

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.

Cheers,

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

Grilled

Maurice and Dave sell high-end cuts of beef, but after hitting a patch of no sales, they're facing being fired. Maurice needs money to enroll in his final semester of acupuncture school, and the recently-separated Dave needs money for his daughter's birthday gift. Their final client card—a beautiful woman—is attracted to Maurice, but a desperate call from a suicidal friend interrupts her signing the contract. Still hoping to close the sale, they offer to drive her to the friend's house—where their troubles multiply.

Winter Portrait

A misty afternoon returns a Mapuche couple to their wedding video. In their civil ceremony, they are noted as one of only two couples married in the indigenous language of Mapudungun.

Bramayugam

Thevan, a folk singer of the Paanan caste, has a fateful encounter when escaping slavery, leading to discover an ancient tradition altering his destiny.

From the Kill Pen

Horse slaughter is more than inhumane. It's big business.

Bestia

Man is constantly confronted by the one eyed beast. When peeking through the hole in his box, he discovers a truth that transforms his life. Every time the beast observes him and the darkness approaches his box, he becomes an embarrassed being.

Blocked Together

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

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.

(NULL)

An unknown girl breaks out of her daily grind by undergoing an intense audio-visual trip.

Yo, Diablo

Joey works as a waiter for a hedonistic community of summer holiday makers in a small Mediterranean paradise. It is unclear if their exaggerated behaviors are due to the fact that the summer is coming to an end or if its just the last of their summers.

Kendra and Beth

A dark comedy about the only female employee in the warehouse of a sausage company who forms an unlikely bond with a stranger that throws both their lives into disarray, leaving them forever changed.

Illusion Travels by Streetcar

Confronted with the unfortunate news that their favorite Streetcar, no. 133, is going to be decommissioned, two Municipal Transit workers get drunk and decide to "take 'er for one last spin," as it were. Unfortunately, the "one last spin" ends up being an all-night and all-day scramble to stay out of trouble, as they are confronted with situation after sometimes bizarre situation that prevents them from returning the "borrowed" Streetcar!

Double Exposure

A photographer girl enters a street to take street photographs as usual and takes a few photos that she thinks are normal. When she washes the photos and hangs them, she sees that she is actually in one of the photos and goes in search of that person.

Vegetarian

An ordinary housewife, Yeong-hye, who has nightmares every night, finally becomes a vegetarian, throwing away all the meats in her refrigerator. Her husband Kil-soo starts to complain about her actions. Her family also worries about her health. During a family lunch, Yeong-hye tries to kill herself due to her father's abrupt violence. Observing all the happenings, Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, Min-ho, a videoartist, hears from his wife that Yeong-hye has a Mongolian spot on her hips. Min-ho gets inspiration from this and starts to sketch.

Birth

During Childbirth, a mother is told the child is stillborn, and she struggles to finish the birth in order to survive.

Anhell69

A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a Class-B movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is casted for the film, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.

Echo

A reframing of the classic tale of Narcissus, the director draws on snippets of conversation with a trusted friend to muse on gender and identity. Just as shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities, so does the concept of a gendered self feel unknowable except through reflection. Is it Narcissus that Echo truly longs for, or simply the Knowing he possesses when gazing upon himself?

Star

In this experimental short film, a young man and woman enter into a relationship with one another and quickly learn the ups and downs of intertwining their life with the one they love.

A Dying Tree

As the day ends for a worn-out office worker, he encounters the mysterious gaze of a chimpanzee, sparking a silent exchange that prompts him to make an irreversible decision.

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?

SIN PIEDAD

Plot unavailable

Portrait de Rosa, à la française

Poetic, delicate, engaging. "Portrait de Rosa, à la française" gently draws you into this passionate love story, with a love text that fits well with the images of Rosa's smiling face. A narrative that recalls the “nouvelle vague” interpreted with today's eyes.

Black Kettle

A student moves into their accomodation, only to find their room already decorated, a strange, inhuman flatmate, and a kettle that won't stop boiling.

Puffer Rhapsody

By fabricating her biography, Luo Su, a young Chinese white-collar worker from a low-income family, hopes to wed Mr. Win, an alluring bachelor. But when her mother's shocking TV interview exposes her deceit, she loses everything and ends her own life. Left in limbo, she is mystically given one last opportunity to alter her fate within 72 hours - albeit within the body of a man.

DARKMAN

Seeing himself as a form unable to experience intimacy, he is given the chance when brought to the household of twin sisters.

hægtesse

Plot unavailable

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.

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.

Opulence

Amidst the realm of her parents' upscale nightclub, a young woman embarks on a surreal odyssey to confront her identity, only to find herself inescapably mirroring her father.

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.

Queens of the Qing Dynasty

A suicidal teen develops a candid rapport with the student from Shanghai assigned to watch her in hospital. A nightly exchange of secrets, text messages and possessions quickly expands the boundaries of their relationship and alters their inner chemistry.

Michelle

Plot unavailable

Prelude: Dog Star Man

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. Part of the Dog Star Man series of experimental films.

Stone

Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the Crimea, though that is never made explicit."

Blue Bedroom

June has had the same dream every night for the past three months. Lorelai is worried something bad is going to happen. Things get weird.

Declan Sennott’s 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.

I Should Call Her

An overly anxious man mysteriously finds himself unable to leave a bathroom.

Letters to Paul Morrissey

Three celluloid letters sent from different parts of the globe to Paul Morrissey, director of Trash, Flesh and Heat, collaborator with Warhol and agent for the Velvet Underground.

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?

WAR TIMES

An exploration of two souls inhabiting bodies from 1940's Hungary, and the beginning of the digital age.

2bhk

2 flatmates unfold the layers of their relationship on a random Sunday afternoon after they encounter a power cut.

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?

The Familiar Tide

After reminiscing on her life, an abused older woman kills her husband. On her way to dispose of his body, she is forced to confront her guilt head-on.

Hebe

Hebe, in her journey from childhood to adulthood, finds herself compelled to explore the boundaries of the real and the illusory through her extrasensory perceptions. Endowed with a singular gift: glimpsing the past and future as an eternal present, Hebe defies temporal convention, questioning whether her premonitions are pre-written destinies or mere whispers of chance. Inspired by true events, Hebe invites us into the fabric of time to discover whether her gift can and should be controlled or whether she should surrender and succumb to it.

Resonances

"Resonances" is an abstract journey that invites diverse interpretations. For some, it’s the tale of an ant that delved too deep, for others, a puppet seeking freedom. The narrative evolves with the viewer, offering no single path but rather a multitude of meanings. Free and autonomous, "Resonances" challenges you to explore with your mind and question with your soul. Only through personal reflection will the answers reveal themselves, making the experience uniquely yours.

ghost town.

A young man has an anxiety attack and in an attempt to feel something, he skips through Kanye West's 2018 release, ye, until he lands on Ghost Town.

Purgatorium

After his death, a young man stuck in purgatory attempts to cope with the afterlife.

Three Mirrors Creature's Flashes of Flesh

In the aftermath of an emotional shock, a ruthless high-class manager faces her own abyss, becomes pervaded by a sensory spirit and undertakes a purifying voyage.

Lost Way

Collective experimental film by Team 8mm TENGOKU.

Relax With Ease

A three part meditation.

Butterfly

A short experimental film, exploring the concept that one small change can have a profound impact on a person's life.

The Grass Dwellers

Juan Méndez Bernal leaves his house on the 9th of april of 1936 to fight in the imminent Spanish Civil War. 83 years later, his body is still one of the Grass Dwellers. The only thing that he leaves from those years on the front is a collection of 28 letters in his own writing.

The Train Conductor And The Cross Dresser

The lives of both a train conductor and a cross dresser become mixed within one another.