Highlighters (2025)

Rift

A girl disappears without a trace while playing hide and seek with her friend. The friend is asked to explain how it happened, but the adults around him find it hard to believe his story. With visual originality, the limits of existence are allowed to be stretched in a film that depicts the incomprehensible from a child’s perspective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

SIN PIEDAD

Under the relentless sun, a killer stalks through the mountains, where the innocence of a young couple becomes prey. With no shadows to hide their fate, the hunt is a macabre game in broad daylight, where fear is not hidden in the darkness, but burns with the rawness of the unperturbed noon.

The Trial

The surreal tale of an unassuming man who is accused of a never-specified crime and shambles through bizarre encounters to escape this nightmare.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Between You and You All

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

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.

Kshya Tra Ghya

A stream of mysterious rituals and symbols are encountered as a young boy journeys to school in the fantastical world of Kshya Tra Ghya.

Memoirs of a Strangler of Blondes

First film by Julio Bressane shot in exile, "Memoirs" is a film about a man who repeatedly kills the same type of woman in same places, the same way. Filmed on the streets of London.

Lost Way

Collective experimental film by Team 8mm TENGOKU.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Broken

Plot unavailable

Jeff

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

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.

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.

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.

The Artist and His Canvas

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

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 Big Shave

A young man walks into a meticulously clean and sterile bathroom and proceeds to shave away hair, then skin, in an increasingly bloody and graphic bathroom scene.

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.