Benjamin Rabier's Animals

From Malkuth to Kether and back, the whole spin of the wheel. A retelling of a series of dreams and visions experienced by the director in her Great Quest.

In a tall, abandoned, and oppressive house, Luz pursues Mira, her childhood friend who takes refuge in the darkness, terrified of being seen. Amidst labyrinths of books and interwoven memories, their reunion clashes with reality. Argentine psychological and surreal horror about destructive love and the cost of vulnerability in fiction.

For the past 40 years, Jan Svankmajer (Faust, Conspirators of Pleasure) has been hailed as one of cinema's most consistently surprising, wildly imaginative, and remarkable surrealists of our time. Utilizing a delirious combination of puppets, humans, stop-motion animation, and live action, Svankmajer's films conjure up a dreamlike universe that is at once dark, macabre, witty, and perversely visceral. KimStim (and Kino) is proud to to offer this collection of remarkable short works from an artist that has mesmerized audiences the world over and has inspired filmmakers from the Brothers Quay to Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.

A military scientist successfully creates robot soldiers in the shape of crabs, which turn out to be deadly warriors, but soon he discovers that his ambitious invention evolves in unexpected ways.

A visualization of how dreams mush up unrelated events together to make up a single story.

A woman takes a light bulb on a romantic dinner, a certain skeleton has family issues, and one girl has a very peculiar appetite.

Through dreamlike and surreal landscapes, the author explores the depths of her subconscious, where identity fragments, birth and death intertwine, and the female figure emerges as both muse and shadow in an infinite cosmos.

A darkly brilliant stop-motion adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin about a plague of rats that punish townsfolk corrupt with greed. One of the most ambitious Czech animation projects of the 1980s, notable for its unusual dark art direction, innovative animation techniques and use of a fictitious language.

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.

Several episodes, each focusing on a different figure. Towards the end they all come together to replicate the famous painting by Édouard Manet that provides the title.

At the Katnip Kollege, we see a roomful of cats taking a course in Swingology. Everyone swings except Johnny, who can't cut it and has to sit in the dunce chair. Miss Kitty Bright tells him to look her up when he learns how to swing. Finally, listening to the pendulum clock at night, Johnny gets the beat. He rushes out to where everyone is playing and sings "Easy As Rollin' Off a Log" to Kitty Bright. She joins in; he grabs a trumpet for an instrumental break, with the complete band. They both fall off a log; she covers him with kisses.

A train dispatcher encounters a mute stranger who appears out of nowhere, and finds himself mysteriously involved with a murder in Poland. The end of the eighties in the twentieth century. Alois Nebel works as a dis­patcher at the small railway station in Bílý Potok, a remote village on the Czech–Polish border. He's a loner, who prefers old timetables to people, and he finds the loneliness of the station tranquil – except when the fog rolls in. Then he hallucinates, sees trains from the last hundred years pass through the station. They bring ghosts and shadows from the dark past of Central Eu­rope. Alois can’t get rid of these nightmares and eventually ends up in sanatorium. In the sanatorium, he gets to know The Mute, a man carrying an old photograph who was arrested by the police after crossing the border. No one knows why he came to Bílý Potok or who he’s looking for, but it is his past that propels Alois on his journey…

A young girl is lost in a forest filled with eyeball trees, skeletal animals and a nephilim

A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead. A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. A collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks death ... a parabolic parable.

A restaurant opens for the night. The diners include: A man dining alone, who orders a plate of spaghetti that becomes his dining companion. A couple; the woman talks endlessly (and unintelligibly), as her head mutates into a variety of shapes. Her ravenous companion refuses to pay, and the restaurant reclaims its food. A family with two children; they play, rather elaborately, with their food.

Paris, 1930. Luis Buñuel is penniless after the scandal surrounding the release of his last movie. Sculptor Ramón Acín, a good friend, buys a lottery ticket and promises Buñuel that he will pay for his next movie if he wins the prize.

Life is not easy for Laika, a dog on the outskirts of a big Russian city. She is caught and forcibly retrained to become a pioneer in astronautics. Soon after her lift-off into space, a number of animals follow that are hurriedly launched from Houston and Baikonur. The animals travel astray, but finally manage, with the help of a black hole, to colonize a faraway planet. After a short period of harmonious, undisturbed co-existence with indigenous life forms, however, first human cosmonaut run ashore on their planet, and their harmonious life, indeed their very survival, are suddenly in jeopardy.

The fourth instalment in the surreal Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared videos in which the three returning characters enter a sinister digital world through their computer.

A happy little potter is approached by a huge hand which wants him to sculpt its statue. The potter refuses, wanting nothing more than to be left alone with his only friend, a potted plant. As the hand's request gives way to bribery, demands, and threats, the potter becomes more desperate to escape its clutch, leading to tragedy.

A construction worker destroys Bugs' home with a steam shovel and refuses to repair the damage.