Razors

Psychedelic animation that impresses with eyeballs and other motifs.

A psychedelic animation that starts with an irregular ink spread and develops while increasing the degree of confusion.

In this 57-second short film, a dog-like doll faces another doll. It begins with an innocent, playful tone, but quickly turns dark and unsettling. Bach’s classical music adds a heavy, melancholic mood to the scene. The Dog of Sarandi Alley is a strange and brief story about violence, loneliness, and the secrets hidden behind the simple faces of toys.

Host Scott Forrest presents a curated compilation of eight independent short films in this rapid-fire science-fiction feature. Genres collide, narratives twist, aesthetics clash, and even humor, both campy and dystopian, showcase the vast creative possibilities of each story's individual world, offering the viewer a brief glimpse into the lives of every character's attempt to survive the otherworldly chaos around them. Released in 2001, the selected shorts span original creation dates of 1997 to 2001; most of the featured filmmakers also appear as themselves in short video interviews to talk about their inspirations, creative process and motivations while working on their individual shorts.

Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.

SEELE orders an all-out attack on NERV, aiming to destroy the Evas before Gendo can advance his own plans for the Human Instrumentality Project. Shinji is pushed to the limits of his sanity as he is forced to decide the fate of humanity.

After a period of time where her hearing begins to overtake her sight, Casandra searches for the cause of her problem, isolating herself from society. She starts having visions that remind her of the past and promise an apocalyptic future.

An individual finds that the world that intrudes upon his personal life cannot be escaped, and he turns to the next generation.

Living his life in black and white, a man is haunted by a supernatural force who inexplicably makes him lose his sanity.

Der Mann im Keller

Trapped and alone, a young man must confront the pain he's ignored when he finds himself face-to-face with consequence.

Darkness and light, as seen by VIFF’s favourite Buddhist erotist. Part of the TOKYO LOOP animation anthology produced by ImageForum Japan.

El Retiro

The infamous story of Benjamin Barker, a.k.a Sweeney Todd, who sets up a barber shop down in London which is the basis for a sinister partnership with his fellow tenant, Mrs. Lovett. Based on the hit Broadway musical.

Matarile

A meditation on the Moon as a series of spheres melting away. The audio-visuals are synchronized via a repeated glitch process: the same values that databent the visuals are also used to change the base audio samples, creating a translation between a visual glitch and an audible one, even though in the final presentation they seem entirely different.

Searching for life in daily rituals, Losing Touch undertakes a shift in perception and presents the city as an ugly yet ecologically rich landscape. The film depicts the internal dialogue on coping with the grief and fear of ecological degradation, using the local streets of Berlin as a means to materialise and confront these emotions. As both the body and mind begin to wander, encounters with the landscape over a 24 hour period are transformed into an overstimulating and emotionally charged journey. Camcorder footage, film developed in beer and cyanotype create sensational and playful depictions of the surroundings, joining the rats scurrying on the ground and fleeing the night lights with the moths. Creatures of metal and flesh interact within and between the frames, coming together as an ugly yet vibrant community. Subverting the nature-culture dichotomy, a new image of nature is formed, not only as a romantic, distant place, but rather a dirty, omnipresent force.

Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.

Four friends leave Seattle for a weekend in a remote, rain-soaked corner of Washington State's rustic Skagit Valley. The foreboding October landscape begins to warp their minds, plunging each of them into alternate realities where they must grapple with personal demons, sexual tensions, and a sinister natural world as they claw their way back to sanity.

A young man, convinced he's a vampire, goes to live with his elderly and hostile cousin in a small Pennsylvanian town, where he tries to suppress his bloodlust.