Aishiteru (2022)

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.

Hai Mangiato?

A mother feeds her son to the point of possessing him.

Tyngsboro

During his visit to a graveyard, a young man is suddenly projected into a dream-like realm. Empty and removed from time, the familiar landscape forces him to confront certain pains when blood suddenly effuses from his hands.

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?

Wander

Percieve the images how you will; Wander is designed at having a different influence over each audience member and provoking self-reflection and deep thought. There was no singular intended storyline, instead prompting a unique perception from each viewer.

Say My Name

A violated girl is trapped in an underworld of shame. As a child, she was exploited by her father and his friends, and then thrown to the streets as a vulnerable teenager. Despite life going against Mel at every turn, she is determined to see the good in people and find hope before her past catches up with her.

Soft

A portrait of new found sobriety and love unravels as a young woman moves through the motions of melancholic life in seclusion.

Escargots

An adaptation of a children's poem called Chanson des escargots qui vont à l'enterrement by Jacques Prévert, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Filmed in Paris, France and Los Angeles, California.

Ophelia

At night, a woman at different ages loves, suffers and frees herself. She’s called Ophelia.

Triumph and Ruins

History as immersion and dispersion in the fragments of the past, a visionary journey accompanied by the voice of Patty Pravo. Presented at the Taormina Festival '97.

Jusqu’au silence

Anna comes from a violent past that has left her a recluse in her solitude.When a man knocks at the door her infancy returns....Will Anna open the door to the universe that she has created for herself to let life enter?

Self Portraits or: How to talk endearingly to possible victims

Quinn is a grade school teacher who is exploited by a group of memoryless individuals who reeducate his long-term partner Amy.

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.

Desert Vows

Hunter, a bride-to-be, feels overworked and unappreciated. Her artistic spirit is squelched by the shallow corporate world she’s in and she has had enough. Unfortunately, she feels as if she can’t turn to Ian, her commercial executive fiancé, for solace. As her wedding day approaches, Hunter and her three bridesmaids embark on a road trip to Las Vegas for one last hoorah together. As the girls venture from the city, they decompress and let their personal barriers fall. An impromptu sightseeing excursion into the desert leads to a clash of anxieties and attitudes between Hunter, the bridesmaids, and her fiancé as Hunter searches for the road that’s right for her.

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.

Bramayugam

A folk singer in 17th-century Kerala discovers a mansion. Inside, he encounters an enigmatic cook and a powerful master, setting in motion a chain of events that changes his life.

Between You and You All

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

Broken

Plot unavailable

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.

Processing...

A man attempts to operate a mysterious device, but with each attempt comes a new set of problems.

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.

Copy/Paste

A man contemplates whether or not it is possible to do something unique.

Guaret

Pedro is Mallorcan, born to a mother from Burgos and a father from Mallorca. Due to his distant relationship with his father, Pedro doesn't fully master Mallorcan as a language. He turns to the works of Damià Huguet to remember his father, as only his poems can fill the void left by his death. The poet's words transport Pedro to his childhood and his roots, even though many of the words are unknown to him, despite them belonging to his language. This becomes the driving force behind the protagonist's search for his own identity, his origins, what it means to be a man, father-son relationships, collective identity, and "mallorquinness". Pedro constantly questions the emotions stirred by Huguet's poetry, and, most importantly, who he is and where he belongs.

The New Flesh

On an isolated farm, a woman finds an injured and frightened woman in her old chicken coop. Moved by an inexplicable instinct, she decides to help her, without imagining that this silent encounter will awaken buried secrets. When tension finally gives way to trust, something dark approaches, bringing a truth that no one could have foreseen.

The Artist and His Canvas

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

Three Walls and a Window

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

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.

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.

Ground Control

A journey to an unknown star, a children's theatre play, an untalented writer and the fear of becoming the worst version of oneself. A mixture of live-action footage and animated scenes. A stream of (un)conscious stereotypes.

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.

To the Wonder

After falling in love in Paris, Marina and Neil come to Oklahoma, where problems arise. Their church's Spanish-born pastor struggles with his faith, while Neil encounters a woman from his childhood.

Reversal

Two souls: One seeks to know her life's true essence and the other is haunted by foreign sights of himself, as they both are influenced by an existence beyond human realm—whom continually oversees them across eras, trapping them in a game of time and the unknown.

Heartstorm

A young woman goes on a cathartic journey through memory and imagination inspired by the performers at an open mic.

De Civitate Rei

Costante dies and leaves his wife Torella his computer discovery. Torella entrusts the disk to her husband’s friend Gervasio, a lazy man scorned by his family. Twenty years later, Torella tries to get back the disk but Gervasio, who has become rich thanks to the discovery, agrees to go to court over it and comes away the winner. He therefore summons divine misfortune: he loses his third son, suffocated by wealth; kills his wife in a blind rage; and is executed by his first-born son who, after a violent panic attack and reckoning with his conscience, chooses life.

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.

Michelle

Plot unavailable

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."

Génesis

In an inner world suspended between oblivion and creation, a female figure moves through a dreamlike space where forgotten ideas take shape. Genesis is an experimental piece that explores the journey toward the origin of an idea — of oneself.

Cheers,

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

A Sad, Sad Ghost Picking at the Hairs of Their Knuckles

A wandering young woman explores the crevices of her apartment, of her corporeal creases, as well as the shadows made up of those things. Through her journey, she comes into contact with fellow vagrancies: a nondescript man of around similar age; a young girl with similar, even familiar, eyes; streets that can only exist during those brief moments of glazing stares. The rain comes and goes, but the A/C never turns off.

The Cross Giveth,

A young actor, trapped in an abusive film set, starts spiraling in an anxiety induced attack and reflection as he ponders on his work and role in society. His attack and thoughts get heavier and more sporadic as he sifts through interviews he's done throughout the years - all showing the pain that lies within.

Highlighters

Inside a bathroom, a woman dissolves. Not into water—but into identity. Set in an oneiric, liminal space, this experimental short dissects the most banal of routines—eliminate, change, wash—and refracts them through the prism of identity. What do we flush away, what do we conceal with powder and polish, what residue do we scrub from the self? The film doesn't offer answers. It exists in the space between viewer and image, where meaning is slippery and selfhood runs down the drain.

Goodnight and Goodbye

In their third session together, a troubled sex addict seeks help from a therapist for his isolating, self-destructive vices.

ALICE

During a turbulent night marked by the announcement of a pregnancy and escalating violence, the camera clings from one character to another at the heart of Wonderland.

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.

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.