A man on the brink of death, has a conversation with a stranger. The pair philosophize about the meaning of a life well lived.
A man obsessed with motivational and right wing culture war videos goes on a hollow road trip of discovery.
In a strange place where daily broadcasts require everyone to “keep the silence”, the long-isolated residents of Edifice 129, trapped in their apartments and by distant memories, creep forwards, day by day. / Edifice 129 is a particular collaborative project, created by filmmakers across three countries. In the midst of the COVID-19 lock-downs, Linda Gasser — director of the Arc Film Festival in Mainz, Germany — invited filmmakers to join her Creatives Across Borders initiative. The aim was to meet via Zoom, support each other, and talk film, but talking film soon turned into developing a film. Meeting regularly, sometimes weekly, four writer/directors and a digital 3D artist created short films designed to work both as standalone projects and, when inter-cut, as one cohesive story, despite being filmed in Germany, the UK and Malta, and with the filmmakers never having met in person until after the films were finished.
A view of the end-of-the-century Mexican family. A father who comes back home after a long absence, but who would rather be somewhere else. A daughter suffering from a trapped pain. A son full of guilt and recriminations. A little kid who soaks up all the tension in the house, like a sponge, and a self-effacing mother who would like to go away and leave everything behind.
Allal, a street vendor who sells vegetables to cover the expenses of treating his seriously ill daughter, decides to travel to another city due to bad conditions. He works as a truck driver and lives in the hope of working for a large company owned by the son of one of his friends who comes from abroad.
A short portrait of a mother-daughter relationship.
The ennui of a filmmaker, trapped between aspiration and reality, frames Lana Jing’s quirky, sarcastic, and cinematic-joke filled quarter-life crisis. At her lecture hall job, where aging white men wax on, self-involved, Lana accidentally frames her friend and co-worker when she destroys the only copy of an aging tech-bro’s high-profile lecture. Lana is forced to navigate stop motion animation, a secret admirer, and terrible bridge traffic to sort out a way forward to her destiny… kinda.
So Nice To Love You is a short film of six stories from six individuals with interlocking lives, capturing one significant moment remembered from each of their relationships.
In the upscale Toronto strip club Exotica, dancer Christina is visited nightly by the obsessive Francis, a depressed tax auditor. Her ex-boyfriend, the club's MC, Eric, still jealously pines for her even as he introduces her onstage, but Eric is having his own relationship problems with the club's female owner. Thomas, a mysterious pet-shop owner, is about to become unexpectedly involved in their lives.
A rock singer, escaping from her abusive boyfriend, forms an unlikely friendship with a struggling photographer with scars of his own.
After being compared to a dancing monkey by one of the factory owners, Wayne, a factory worker sets out to find an answer to a question that will decide his fate and those around him.
The Place is short film about Palestine that calls out the Palestinian suffering and what the people of Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood are going through right now.
Appalachia, 1946: a seamstress welcomes home her tailor husband to find they are not the team they were. Trying to stitch their old life back together, time and again it threatens to fall apart - with each of them pulling at the thread.
A famous stand-up comedian debates on whether telling or not a polemic joke he just wrote. His whole night changes when he realizes that he has lost the ability to hear laughter...
Damian, grieving his girlfriend's death, travels through Mexico seeking solace. Along the way, he connects with strangers and witnesses their coping rituals, finding a path through his own memories and regrets.
With not much to show for in his life, Andre takes his health to extreme measures by attempting an eating challenge at his local diner.
Every day, Jay travels the length and breadth of Tokyo in his taxi, looking for his daughter Lily. In the 9 years since he has separated from his wife, he has never been able to get custody of his daughter. Having given up hope of ever seeing her again, he is about to move back to France when Lily hops in his cab. But she doesn't recognize him.
A doctor works in a clinic in a village run by his sister's father-in-law. When he meets a villager, he realises that he and his gang had ragged and murdered his son at the medical college's hostel.
At a parole board hearing, James Carter asks for a freedom he is not certain that he deserves.
Deep in the snowy Green Mountains, two damaged lives come crashing back together when they discover something in the forest not of this world.