A young woman under the influence of narcotics finally realizes how she’s been spending her nights.
In an alternate reality where the decline of nations has given rise to corporatist regimes, any trace of culture or tradition is suppressed by these new leaders to prevent the masses from reclaiming a national identity. However, rebel cells have emerged to counteract this agenda.
Time passes but nothing changes. Opportunities are missed one after the other. Until finally there's a way out.
In Bloom is an abstract Gothic Romance short film by writer-director Christopher Rosica, blending experimental cinema with the timeless themes of love, loss, and memory. Crafted with a meticulous attention to atmosphere, the film offers a haunting exploration of the boundaries between the living and the dead. Shot in evocative black-and-white on a Fujifilm XT-30 by up-and-coming cinematographer, Xuepei Hou, In Bloom pays homage to the aesthetic traditions of visionary filmmakers such as Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Fellini, while drawing narrative inspiration from literary icons like Mary Shelley and Henry James.
A night of tortured and solitary sleep, in which fears unfold and a bell tolls.
Kaito lost his sister who was his lover in his childhood. He severed all contact with the outer world for twenty years and devoted his time to writing down memories of his sister. One day, a week before the manuscript is to be completed, a woman visits his room. She burns all his papers and takes him to the city to cut him off from his memories. Nevertheless, Kaito cannot stop writing about his sister. The woman decides to lead him on a journey to ultimate hell.
Mara—the spirit of the night, the weaver of darkened dreams—pressed upon my chest as sleep held me captive. My memory. In the haze of a dream, I saw those I loved, their faces bathed in an otherworldly glow. The nightmare was not the shadows nor the fear they whispered, but the cruel certainty of waking—of losing them to the morning light
Two stories about different ways two people overcome loss; which may or may not be connected.
The Black Box
travelling through time and space to a place where, it seems, you used to be happy in.
A tormented man struggling with his inner demons, seeks desperately a way to be at peace with himself.
Reenacting the suicide episode of the last Ming emperor, Chong-zhen from the classic Cantonese Opera Floral Princess, this experimental short film blending Cantonese Opera and modern dance elements reveals the journey of the defeated emperor accompanied by his faithful eunuch, Wang Sing-yan, on their way to the summit of Coal Hill to end their lives. Apart from inviting new perspectives towards their ambiguous queer overtones, it also explores the crossroads of life and death, authority and obedience, love and sacrifice, power and duty, that befall under the traditional patriarchy.
A woman uses an AI chatbot to try to find closure with someone she lost.
Shadow plays flicker, birds call, and colour leaks into grey walls. In Starlings, live action collides with puppetry and poetic visuals as a teen girl transforms loss into light, reviving the fractured bond with her father through the fragile power of art.
Set beneath a surreal green sky on a distant, crumbling world, the film captures the last survivors of a dying civilization—women who perform a synchronized ritual dance to summon an ethereal extraterrestrial presence from another realm.
Questions how we as individuals are psychologically relying on our inhabit spaces and how we as society are influencing and being influenced by our surroundings.
In a loose retelling of the Revolutionary Girl Utena TV series, Utena Tenjou arrives at Ohtori Academy, only to be immediately swept up in a series of duels for the hand of her classmate Anthy Himemiya and the power she supposedly holds. At the same time, Utena reunites with Touga Kiryuu, a friend from her childhood who seems to know the secrets behind the duels. Utena must discover those secrets for herself, before the power that rules Ohtori claims her and her friends, new and old.
This is an amateur student mood piece comprised of footage I've filmed with my Camcorder at uni over the course of the first half of 2023. The prompt given for this was 'belonging' and so I've gravitated it around the premise of navigating a place that you feel as though you don't belong in, to the point where you become detached and alienated from your own identity. - Toby.
A small collection of red rocks from the beach cycle through the primary colours before ultimately losing both their colour and form, abstracted through digital degradation. An experimental short film exploring newfound issues in preservation in the digital age and how this ties to our own memory, fading as the years go by.
A man on his way to an interview stumbles upon a surreal VOID, ANCIENT TEXTS, and ENIGMATIC FORCES.