Held Back (2025)

Café Limbo

A young waitress in a desolate café surrounded by an overpowering snowstorm challenges an evil presence when she's forced to save the life of a female guest in labour.

The Garden

Frank visits his friend Josef, who introduces him to his pedigree rabbits and his wife Mary. Frank is more interested in the slightly unsettling fact that Josef and Mary's garden fence is entirely made up of living people holding hands.

King Ubu

A grotesque Shakespearean tale of Ubu who comes to power in a bloody way. When his absurd reforms fail and the treasury gets empty, Ubu and his flatterers start implementing terror across the country.

Santa Sangre

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his mother – the leader of a strange religious cult – and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

Space Mom

A grieving son turns to intergalactic postage to find closure.

Serpentine Pink

Set in the desert-weird wilds of Joshua Tree, California, Serpentine Pink is a distinctively visceral and surreal independent, female-centric film that digs into the various and rigorous ways a heart heals from trauma. Inspired by France's Grand Guignol style of horror theatre, and utilizing a lyrical language both visual and verbal to capture the strange poetry of the Mojave land and soundscape, Serpentine Pink follows a reclusive biker woman and her John Wayne-obsessed exotic dancer lover's disturbing fallout after a violent acid attack. An ethereal psychic and her aspiring healer companion converge with supernatural forces in an attempt to confront and then heal the women's - as well as their own - deep-rooted, personal pain that comes from trying to break the cycle of possessive love.

The Dark Hours

Dr. Samantha Goodman is a beautiful, young psychiatrist. Burnt out, she drives to the family’s winter cottage to spend time with her husband and sister. A relaxing weekend is jarringly interrupted when a terrifying and unexpected guest arrives. What follows is an extraordinary night of terror and evil mind games where escape is not an option.

Damnation

Karrer plods his way through life in quiet desperation. His environment is drab and rainy and muddy. Eaten up with solitude, his hopelessness would be incurable but for the existence of the Titanik Bar and its beautiful, haunting singer. But the lady is married and Karrer is determined to keep her husband away...

Interstate 60

An aspiring painter meets various characters and learns valuable lessons while traveling across America.

Takeshis'

Beat Takeshi lives the busy and sometimes surreal life of a showbiz celebrity. One day he meets his blond lookalike named Kitano, a shy convenience store cashier, who, still an unknown actor, is waiting for his big break. After their paths cross, Kitano seems to begin hallucinating about becoming Beat.

The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz

The last day of creation. A stranger arrives in London. No one knows who he is or where he has come from. By the time he leaves, the entire universe will have been erased.

The Spirit of Christmas: Jesus vs. Frosty

Four children, all but one of whom go unnamed, build a snowman which comes to life and threatens their town.

Hour of the Wolf

While vacationing on a remote German island with his younger pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.

Wowzers

A tormented young woman haunted by a recurring dream is catapulted into a peculiar and deviant world where she is confronted by the duality of her existence.

Iblard Time

A quiet stroll through the imaginary world of Iblard, originally depicted in the paintings by Naohisa Inoue, influenced by Impressionism and Surrealism.

Ocean Waves

At Kichijōji Station, Tokyo, Taku Morisaki glimpses a familiar woman on the platform opposite boarding a train. Later, her photo falls from a shelf as he exits his apartment before flying to Kōchi Prefecture. Picking it up, he looks at it briefly before leaving. As the aeroplane takes off, he narrates the events that brought her into his life...

The Reflecting Skin

In 1950s rural Idaho, a young boy watches helplessly as his friends and brother fall under the spell of a mysterious widow living up the road and becomes convinced that she is a vampire.

Society

Bill Whitney is worried that he is different to his sister and parents. They mix with other upper-class people while Bill is more down to earth. Even his girlfriend seems a bit odd. All is revealed when Bill returns home to find a party in full swing.

Allegro non troppo

The film is a parody of Disney's Fantasia, though possibly more of a challenge to Fantasia than parody status would imply. In the context of this film, "Allegro non Troppo" means Not So Fast!, an interjection meaning "slow down" or "think before you act" and refers to the film's pessimistic view of Western progress (as opposed to the optimism of Disney's original).

Blue Velvet

The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.

Videodrome

As the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn is desperate for new programming to attract viewers. When he happens upon "Videodrome," a TV show dedicated to gratuitous torture and punishment, Max sees a potential hit and broadcasts the show on his channel. However, after his girlfriend auditions for the show and never returns, Max investigates the truth behind Videodrome and discovers that the graphic violence may not be as fake as he thought.

Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray

An immersion into the surreal and dreamlike world of painter, photographer and filmmaker Man Ray (1890-1976), one of the most prolific American visual artists, through four of his short films, brought to life by the atmospheric music of SQÜRL.

I Am Cuba

Four vignettes on the lives of the Cuban people in the pre-revolutionary era. In Havana, Maria is ashamed when a man she loves discovers how she makes a living. Pedro, an old farmer, discovers that the land he cultivates is being sold to an American company. A student sees his friends attacked by the police while they distribute leaflets supporting Fidel Castro. Finally, a peasant family is threatened by Batista's army.

Safe Space

Three couples and a lonely friend visit an isolated escape room in the middle of the desert run by a mysterious Ukrainian performance artist.

Songs from the Second Floor

A monumental traffic jam serves as the backdrop for the lives of the inhabitants of a Swedish city.

Images

While holidaying in Ireland, a pregnant children's author finds her mental state becoming increasingly unstable, resulting in paranoia, hallucinations, and visions of a doppelgänger.

Murder in a Blue World

Set in the future, the story follows a nurse who tries to bring her own style of relief to people condemned to die. Her identity is a mystery and she may not be quite what she seems.

The Exterminating Angel

A formal dinner party starts out normally enough, but after the bourgeois group retire to the host’s music room, they inexplicably find themselves unable to leave.

The Singing Detective

Tormented and bedridden by a debilitating disease, a mystery writer relives his detective stories through his imagination and hallucinations.

Possum

A disgraced children's puppeteer returns to his childhood home and is forced to confront his wicked stepfather and the secrets that have tortured him his entire life.

Black Moon

There is a war in the world between the men and the women. A young girl tries to escape this reality and comes to a hidden place where a strange unicorn lives with a family: sister, brother, many children and an old woman that never leaves her bed but stays in contact with the world through her radio.

Performance

In underworld terms, Chas Devlin is a 'performer,' a gangster with a talent for violence and intimidation. Turner is a reclusive rock superstar. When Chas and Turner meet, their worlds collide—and the impact is both exotic and explosive.

The Boston Strangler

Boston is being terrorized by a series of seemingly random murders of women. Based on the true story, the film follows the investigators path through several leads before introducing the Strangler as a character. It is seen almost exclusively from the point of view of the investigators who have very few clues to build a case upon.

Camille 2000

Marguerite, a beautiful woman of affairs, falls for the young and promising Armand, but sacrifices her love for him for the sake of his future and reputation.

Mr. Freedom

Mr. Freedom, a bellowing good-ol'-boy superhero decked out in copious football padding, jets to France to cut off a Commie invasion from Switzerland. A destructive, arrogant patriot in tight pants, Freedom joins forces with Marie Madeleine to combat lefty freethinkers, as well as the insidious evildoers Moujik Man and inflatable Red China Man, culminating in a star-spangled showdown.

On the Silver Globe

A small group of cosmic explorers, including a woman, leaves Earth to start a new civilization. They do not realize that within themselves they carry the end of their own dream. They die one by one, while their children revert to a primitive native culture, creating new myths and a new god.

Haze

A man awakes to find himself trapped in a dirty, confined crawlspace. He barely has enough room to move. He also has no memory of why he's there, or why he's bleeding from a stomach wound. Apparently drugged, he occasionally 'zones out' of his surroundings as he tries to edge towards his way to freedom. But the more he explores, the more pain he has to endure, and the more frightening his predicament becomes.

Dr. Jekyll & Mistress Hyde

Dr. Jackie Stevenson is a Los Angeles based therapist and scientist who tries to invent a serum to separate the pure from the lustful side of the female psychosis. After she has an unsuccessful experiment with a female client named Martine, which drove her patient to insanity and to a mental hospital, Jackie tries part of the serum on herself and becomes her lustful alter ego Heidi Hyde; a voracious lesbian who prowls the streets of L.A. after dark looking for carnal pleasures.

A Snake of June

A woman is being stalked by a stranger. His stalking turns to blackmail when he sends her copies of photos of her in an embarrassing position. Now he controls her and she has to do anything he says. Anything.

The Broken

The life of a successful radiologist spirals out of control when she sees the spitting image of herself driving down a London street. While attempting to uncover who the imposter could be, she stumbles into a terrifying mystery that her family and closest friends are somehow involved in, leaving her with no one to trust.

La nuit littéraire

Marta, a young girl, finds herself locked in a library at night. The books begin to come to life and the real and the unreal merge.

Moondog Airwaves

On the stormy night of July 5th, 1995, Trick Stuart works the graveyard shift with his plus-sized pal Meathead at the Delta Kream, a 24HR fast food joint. As they practice their brass band routine, a very unexpected visitor arrives.

The Eve of Ivan Kupalo

Petro is a modest farmhand living in an impoverished village in some unspecified long-ago era. He wants to marry the lovely Pidorka, but her stern father won't hear of it. The mischievous demon Basavriuk, offers a deal, enticing Petro into crime for the sake of fortune. Based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Eve of Ivan Kupala” (“St John’s Eve”) and Ukrainian folk tales.

The Sweet East

A high school senior from South Carolina gets her first glimpse of the wider world, picturesque cities, and woods of the Eastern seaboard on a class trip to Washington, D.C.

Werckmeister Harmonies

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

Citizen Dog

Pod decides to change jobs after losing his finger at a sardine packing plant. His new job as a security guard comes with an unexpected perk in the form of a lanky maid who carries a mysterious white book.

Aria

Ten short pieces directed by ten different directors, including Ken Russell, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, and Nicolas Roeg. Each short uses an aria as soundtrack/sound, and is an interpretation of the particular aria.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo drive a red convertible across the Mojave desert to Las Vegas with a suitcase full of drugs to cover a motorcycle race. As their consumption of drugs increases at an alarming rate, the stoned duo trash their hotel room and fear legal repercussions. Duke begins to drive back to L.A., but after an odd run-in with a cop, he returns to Sin City and continues his wild drug binge.

Vanilla Sky

David Aames has it all: wealth, good looks and gorgeous women on his arm. But just as he begins falling for the warmhearted Sofia, his face is horribly disfigured in a car accident. That's just the beginning of his troubles as the lines between illusion and reality, between life and death, are blurred.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

In the questionable town of Deer Meadow, Washington, FBI Agent Desmond inexplicably disappears while hunting for the man who murdered a teen girl. The killer is never apprehended, and, after experiencing dark visions and supernatural encounters, Agent Dale Cooper chillingly predicts that the culprit will claim another life. Meanwhile, in the more cozy town of Twin Peaks, hedonistic beauty Laura Palmer hangs with lowlifes and seems destined for a grisly fate.

Kejsaren

Before World War II, Swedish workers had to deal with low wages, scarce work, and the extensive importation of foreign labor, particularly for the purpose of breaking strikes. This did not make foreigners of any stripe very popular, and those from "guest worker" countries were particularly disliked. In this film, set in 1938, a half-Polish boy goes to Poland in search of his mother, runs into financial and psychological difficulties there, and is sent back to a Swedish mental hospital. In another story, an unfortunate woman suffers a miscarriage and ends up at the asylum where the Polish boy is being kept.

Momo

Momo is a young orphan girl who lives in the ruins of an old Roman amphitheater and becomes friends with everybody in the neighborhood. But when a powerful international corporation starts stealing everybody’s time, nobody has any time left for her, let alone their friends or families. Momo, together with Master Hora, the custodian of time, are the only ones who can go up against the time thieves before all is lost forever.