MICROCYCLE

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.

A girl takes her own life and ends up stranded in Limbo. Upon arriving and seeing Death from afar, she wants to finish the job; but on the journey, she meets someone who will change her mind about wanting to live.

Filmmaker and new media artist Tong Xie’s debut short probes the unease, confusion, and obsession experienced by the body as it crosses the urban physiognomy. Set amidst the shadowy loneliness of Paris at night, Absolutely No Sexual Favors je pense à toi 吾想汝顯 depicts the psychological and corporeal marginality of queer identity and desire through perpetually displaced figures.

In the heart of the Caribbean, a mother and daughter confront a malevolent curse erasing identities of all the island's women, propelling them on a daring quest to reclaim their rich cultural heritage and triumph over the encroaching darkness.

A spell of time in the life of the five-piece Haruno family in rural Tochigi Prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.

Shot in a series of long-takes over several days, the film follows a flower shop attendant (played by Devereaux, then actually employed at a small flower shop by the beach) in fragmented detail. The order of scenes resists chronology: moments recur, shift, or vanish, creating not the passage of a single day but the jumble of many, refracted into a meditation on routine and its quiet abstractions.

A touching story of an Italian book seller of Jewish ancestry who lives in his own little fairy tale. His creative and happy life would come to an abrupt halt when his entire family is deported to a concentration camp during World War II. While locked up he tries to convince his son that the whole thing is just a game.

A folk singer in 17th-century Kerala discovers a mansion. Inside, he encounters an enigmatic cook and a powerful master, setting in motion a chain of events that changes his life.

Marcus, an average young man awakens to find his apartment under quarantine and completely isolated from the outside world. Ominous messages about toxins and evacuations plaster each screen of his various electronic devices, leaving his next door neighbor as the only person he has contact with. Scared, and with few resources, the two try to navigate there way through the indefinite wait - staving off hunger, boredom, and paranoia.

Alinur, a student filmmaker, tries to make a film about the apocalypse for his capstone project. The movie itself happens to be about a mercenary named M who inadvertently causes an apocalypse. As he tries to “create” the destruction of this supposed apocalypse through utilizing technical gimmicks that he has enforced onto the production of the film, this supposed effort also creeps in as a force that starts to “destroy” him, piece by piece. The outcome of it tests the sincerity of not only the film itself but also of the performative efforts that Alinur has made as a filmmaker—even this test might not be as sincere as it seems.

El Topo decides to confront warrior Masters on a trans-formative desert journey he begins with his 6 year old son, who must bury his childhood totems to become a man.

The inner mind of Aaliyah Petra, a young black dancer fighting to withstand the immense pressure of being her family and community's “Moneybaby.” Aaliyah battles through the overwhelming pressure to succeed, discovers her own resilience, and realizes the true meaning of Black Excellence.

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.

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

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...

Lydia battles with visions of tragedy when it comes time for her to make important decisions.

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?

As a young woman walks home alone one night, a chance encounter with a missing dog incites the reclamation of her body and self — as she learns to bite as tough as her bark.

After suffering a terrible injury while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Irving must find a way to escape the woods alive and confront her inner demons with the help of a stranger.

This film is about what the routine of everyday life can do to the human mind and psyche. It also reflects on the importance of the choices we make and how limited these choices are in the first place. The plot evolves around a family of four. They live in the suburbs, in a strange villa that appears, through a complex game of mirrors, to be more like a piece of installation art than a real house. The main character, who hardly appears on screen, is the son, a man in his thirties. Suffering from asthma and eczema since childhood, he uses his condition to manipulate his parents and his sister. Thus the existence of the terrorized family turns into an endless ritual of attempting to satisfy his whims, and always on the alert for yet another one of his “health crises”. Las Meninas resembles the scattered pieces of a puzzle. It is up to the viewer to assemble them in order to form his very own picture – something that makes the film itself personal and unique.