The Last Rung (2023)

Unchoosing Yourself

Presenting a short film I made during a 24-hour filmmaking challenge at my university. The theme was "Unchosen Dream," and we had a maximum duration of 5 minutes.

Without Transition

The road can be long when allowing yourself to love again. Shy and self-effacing Léo leads a solitary existence, but an encounter with the confident Thom turns his world upside down.

The Curtain Closes

During a robbery attempt at the local cinema-plex in 1977, Shawn Davis reflects on the last three years of his life. Movies, cars, girls, college, drugs and personal life-changing decisions.

The End of My World

Filip tries to reconcile himself with his new life after his long-term boyfriend broke up with him.

Deer Boy

A story about a hunter's son, who was born with antlers, and about how each man kills the thing he loves.

Apollo

Apollon is a teenager hung up by the social ideals of masculinity. He fantasizes about having the perfect body - complete with big beefy muscles and a big banana.

Awaiting

A young woman named Yeon-hee is traveling to Pyongyang with a coach full of elderly people. As she flips through old photographs, she remembers telling her husband Min-woo that she wouldn't allow him to "cross over" to North Korea given the political situation of the day. But Min-woo left anyway and never returned home, and their marriage was torn apart by the Korean War. Now, sixty years after the division of Korea, she looks forward to reuniting with her beloved Min-woo again.

The Devil's Instrument

A jazz bassist who surveys a beautiful girl at a gig decides to try to get her home. But the devil is getting into the game too.

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".

Monstrus Circus

Plot unavailable

Exposure

Camille, an assistant at an art gallery, hosts Masato Kimura, a Japanese video game designer who has come to France to promote his latest creation. Indifferent to his world, Camille finds the man inscrutable until Masato asks to use her face in his next game.

Turkish Gothic: Portrait of a Family

An upper-class family who wants to have a picture of their family made meet with a famous painter. In this process, the painter, who witnessed the inner dynamics of the family, helps these people to face their own reality through painting.

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.

Suspendu

At dawn, in a great classical dance conservatory, a boy falls while rehearsing some movements. Something breaks in his foot, causing sharp pain. But it's exams day and the boy refuses to quit: he tries to face his dance partner and classmates, convincing himself his body has no limits.

Shanghai Express

A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey.

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl

The love story of an abused English girl and a Chinese Buddhist in a time when London was a brutal and harsh place to live.

The Man Who Would Be King

Tired of life as soldiers, Peachy Carnehan and Danny Dravot travel to the isolated land of Kafiristan, where they are ultimately embraced by the people and revered as rulers. After a series of misunderstandings, the natives come to believe that Dravot is a god, but he and Carnehan can't keep up their deception forever.

Hello Yesterday

A young professional gets so caught up in her 'life' that she loses perspective on the things that truly matter.

Mae

Mae and Gemma spend one last night together knowing that, in the morning, their relationship will be over. Mae struggles to get through to Gemma, who does everything to cling onto what she thinks is the perfect relationship. Through manipulation and seduction, the two women try to understand how what is tearing them apart is also what is keeping them together.

Chicken

Mick and Kev, teen Irish lads, are at the shore, throwing rocks at empty cans, drinking cider. Mick's the pushy one, engaging Kev in a game of mumbly peg, his hand on top of Kev's, fingers splayed. As Mick moves the knife between their fingers, a train is heard approaching. What's Mick's purpose?

Mustard

Eilis is addicted to mustard. When she falls madly in love, she's sure her demons are finally banished, but when the relationship breaks down her shameful addiction to the yellow stuff returns with a vengeance.

Plus. Minus.

Told in reverse chronological order, an aspiring drag queen creates a world out of desolated motel rooms with the guy he met online.

In the Bedroom

Summertime on the coast of Maine, "In the Bedroom" centers on the inner dynamics of a family in transition. Matt Fowler is a doctor practicing in his native Maine and is married to New York born Ruth Fowler, a music teacher. His son is involved in a love affair with a local single mother. As the beauty of Maine's brief and fleeting summer comes to an end, these characters find themselves in the midst of unimaginable tragedy.

Homework

A young father, his twelve-year-old daughter, a night club, two secrets and a lie that will solve everything.

Dirty

Marco cuts class to spend the afternoon with his boyfriend, Graham. Things do not go as planned.

Lance (in a Neck Brace)

After a devastating breakup, Lance listens to instructional cassette tapes on how to heal his broken heart.

Balance

The setting is on a floating platform where a group of evenly and carefully placed men live. Each man is aware that the platform is not stable and in order not to fall to their deaths, they maintain a careful balance of weight to prevent the platform from tipping too far and cause them all to fall.

Boys Beware

This anti-homosexual social "scare" short film focuses on the dangers of young boys talking to strangers.

O Beautiful

Being gay-bashed and left in a corn field in rural America takes an unusual turn when one of the bashers returns with remorse and a secret.

Estepario

Ernesto goes through one of the hardest tests in his marriage. The situation has led him to live in a different way.

Richer and Richer

Losing her lover, mother, and hope for tomorrow, Gisele, the daughter of a crime syndicate, is forced to confront its oppressive leader – her father.

Alazar

In contemporary Ethiopia, a farming community's exodus is disrupted when the patriarch of a prominent family disappears from his grave. Tessema, his son, begins to question the church's divine explanation, forcing him to launch his own investigation.

My Senses Are All I Have to Offer

Lourdes and Lana met telepathically using “sensory pills”, a technology that allows access to other people’s sensations from a distance. After months of relationship, Lourdes decides to visit the country house of her parents, Vicente and Carl, and introduce them to her girlfriend.

STOP

A routine traffic stop finds a New York State Trooper face to face with a storied stranger from his past. The chance encounter powerfully alters their fates...again.

Plastic Girl

A young writer finds herself promoting her new book in a televised interview, but things are not what they seem when the interviewer starts to challenge her.

Truckload

Following a near-fatal traffic accident, Lizzie's moving out of her mum's care and back to London (or as Mum calls it, the city of death). But Lizzie's going to live.