Highlighters (2025)

Tommy

After a series of traumatic childhood events, a psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind boy becomes a master pinball player and the object of a religious cult.

London to Brighton

It's 3:07am and two girls burst into a run down London toilet. Joanne is crying her eyes out and her clothing is ripped. Kelly's face is bruised and starting to swell. Duncan Allen lies in his bathroom bleeding to death. Duncan's son finds his father and wants answers. Derek – Kelly's pimp – needs to find Kelly or it will be him who pays.

Ploy

A husband and wife are locked inside a single hotel room with a stranger named Ploy. Subtle suspicions build up to jealousy as the young woman triggers devastating consequences for the couple.

Cheers,

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

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.

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?

(NULL)

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

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.

Between You and You All

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

Heartstorm

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

The Abyss of shadows

Ayush suffers from sleep paralysis and dark hallucinations, haunted by shadowy figures that represent his repressed fears. Trapped between dream and reality, he confronts these manifestations of his inner turmoil.

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.

Soft

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

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.

A Trip Elsewhere

During the Covid-19 pandemic, four anxious strangers take a record-breaking dose of LSD, catapulting them into a shared psychedelic dream where they must find solace and redemption before they can return to the real world.

2bhk

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

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.

The Little Foxes

In 1900, a clan attempts to strike a deal with a Chicago industrialist to get him to build cotton mills in their Deep South town.

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.

Allure

An introverted girl struggles to form connections through a strange social media site.

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.

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.

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.

Flooding Memories

Haunted by flooding memories of their parents' verbal abuse, an insecure person decides to stop reflecting and start living the life they never knew they could have.

Butterfly

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

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.

Maine Man

A loop of a guy in Maine hanging out in his room.

Lost Way

Collective experimental film by Team 8mm TENGOKU.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Bad Behavior

The McAllister family house is the setting for Gerry and Ellie's grapples with work, children and how to get the bathroom fixed. Both have reached the stage where reason cannot be heard above the ticking clock of experience and ambition. When temptation comes, how will they react?

Purgatorium

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

From Forest To City

The story takes place in the year 1977 about the hero fleeing into the forest during the time when soldiers, police suppressed the communists. One day he meets the first villagers, everyone is afraid, but when the hero observes and analyzes that this villager is not disguised. A true villager Little knowledge due to loneliness of having to watch the spot alone, the hero tells the villagers to come back and forth. They are close to each other. It can be seen that only political ideology can divide us. One day the villagers suddenly didn't come as scheduled. The protagonist goes looking for the villagers. making the hero see bad things again

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?

Lost Footage

How would a found footage film look if the footage was never found? This conceptual art experiment questions the very nature of film and cinema while serving as an ironic tribute to the found footage horror pop culture. The found footage format provides the narrative justification for such a film to exist: the non-existence exists because the footage existed yet it was lost and never found.

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?