Special Selections

Shy teenage monster making new friends in a new place. In a world where humans live alongside monsters, Martha finds herself stuck with a major identity crisis.

In the vestibule of a hospital room, a young boy waits to see his dying mother. The clamor and spiralling movements of bodies around him intensify, forming a grotesque circus—a cacophonous circle that pushes the child back, depriving him of one final touch of his mother's hand. Using rotoscoped drawings suggestive of charcoal sketches, as well as 3D and object animation techniques, The Circus compels viewing with its unsettling realism. Colour is employed metaphorically to subtly express the promise and the memory of maternal affection. Nicolas Brault's highly personal film, suffused with poetic modesty, casts a poignantly sincere gaze on the heartbreak of a child facing the fearful, mysterious experience of his mother's death.

The guards of honour stand in front of the historical symbol of the state. No matter what season and weather is out there, they fulfil their duty. Is there a limit beyond which this honourable duty begins to look exaggerated?

In a clearing amongst a forest of pines lives a reclusive old man who struggles to keep himself warm in an unrelenting winter, though help comes from an unexpected friend.

It is a comedy film which is put on the motives of A. Milne's known poem in S. J. A. Marshak's translation. It tells us how for the sake of trifling whim of whimsical king the whole kingdom was agitated.

The Tartlet

As Hélène Cixous would say, we precisely live in this time when the conceptual basis of an age-old culture is being undermined by millions of moles of a species never seen before.

Childhood memories of fishing with grandpa grow so vivid they visit the protagonist's present experience.

In the midst of a searing heatwave twos little kids find the way to cool everyone down.

Neighborhood cats come to the tiny Ko-Ko Theatre to watch Ko-Ko and Fitz stage a variety of entertaining acts, from acrobatics to high-diving to statuelike tableaux vivants.

A chick lives behind a fence in a farm and conducts a choir of the other chicks. After meeting a self-important turkey, the chick also becomes conceited and decides to make his name in the world outside the chicken coop. After being nearly killed by birds, fish and a cat, he returns home chastened and decides to stay where he is.

“Sweet Spot” is an experimental animated short film that uninhibitedly explores the dialog between the work and its authors, Jorge Ribeiro and Paulo Patrício, whose points of view and creative approaches, both in terms of cinematographic language and ways of being, are quite different. Through this duality, and starting from a shared but at the same time individual process, the directors seek to understand at what point the short film they are making together reaches its “sweet spot”. In other words, the ideal point at which the work is considered finished.

A girl journeys through a vibrant, pulsing, macrocosmic landscape, but a precipitous incident compels her to venture up a mountain in an attempt to save herself. A story about illness, perseverance, and our connection to everything around us.

A psychopathic husband tries to feed his nonexistent family.

Long ago in a land with an ailing king, there was a pair of boys who looked exactly alike, a pauper called Mickey and the other, the Crown Prince.

A man is bombarding his environment by throwing everything he owns out of his balcony. The peace is lasting only for a short time, until a fly starts to trouble him again.

Small dog Poldek lives with a poor old lady in a small one-room apartment. The tenement block is part of a tumbledown grey town out in the nowhere, forgotten by prosperity. The dog is hungry, howles and eats flies that are magically attracted by the old woman. She leaves home every day to seek some eatable stuff. An unsavoury little horrorstory with a lot of action.

An emotional and generational conflict between mother and son in the twenty-first century, except for one detail: Mother is none other than death.

Animators and urban planners both create worlds, but Czech stop motion specialist Jiří Barta's ingenious paper cut-out short punctures the stifling architecture of communist housing. Skilled hands blueprint an apartment tower standardized specifications. Envelopes contain the elements of each home. Family dwellings, bachelor pads, scholarly studies and artist studios: different social configurations are permitted but restrained to the same uniform box. A dystopian revision of the REAR WINDOW scenario, THE DESIGN's darkly comic social critique still has teeth.

While enjoying a date in a park, a man carelessly tosses an empty bottle onto the ground. His selfish littering promptly summons an imposing figure wearing a white hockey mask. The gruesome events that follow tell an admonishing tale about the importance of preserving the outdoors and defending the environment from the ugly menace of litter. The short was made for the tve YouTube Relay project, but wasn't included because it's too violent.