HMAS Unicorn

A vibrant anthology of LGBTQ+ short films and music videos that delve into the complexities of youth, identity, and desire. This diverse collection showcases a range of cinematic voices—both emerging and established—exploring the exhilaration, vulnerability, and confusion of coming-of-age through stories that celebrate queer love, self-discovery, and the breaking of societal boundaries. Blending narrative shorts, experimental visuals, and music-driven pieces, the anthology offers an evocative, multifaceted portrait of innocence transformed.

Once a dream wove a shade, and pitying I dropped a tear. But I saw lights near, that light the ground while the soul wanders.

A fatally ill mother with only two months to live creates a list of things she wants to do before she dies without telling her family of her illness.

Cecilie and Joachim are about to get married when a freak car accident leaves Joachim disabled, throwing their lives into a spin. The driver of the other car, Marie, and her family don’t get off lightly, either. Her husband Niels works in the hospital where he meets Cecilie and falls madly in love with her.

Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film, which unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students, complies with several aesthetic principles of Dogme 95 movement.

A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.

A man becomes engrossed in an audiobook while walking home on a summer night.

A distant boy and a disturbed girl discover a blue tongue nest, but not all is as it appears.

Chantal Akerman explores Jewish American identity in this multilayered portrait of the immigrant experience. Shot in Brooklyn near the Williamsburg Bridge, Histoires D'Amérique takes the form of a series of first-person addresses delivered by a cross-section of Jewish New Yorkers, whose by turns tragic and humorous tales speak to a collective history of trauma, displacement, and resilience.

Socialite Vita Sackville-West and literary icon Virginia Woolf run in different circles in 1920s London. Despite the odds, the two forge an unconventional affair, set against the backdrop of their own strikingly contemporary marriages.

Henry lies at the side of the road, bleeding out from a gunshot wound. A young mother with a bizarre sense of appropriate uses his final moments as a teachable lesson for her 6 year old son.

In 1995, several cargo containers are discovered high in the Bolivian Andes. Inside are potentially toxic chemicals, and local policeman Mariscal soon becomes charged with the task of smuggling the containers into neighboring Chile. He recommissions an old train to haul the toxic waste out of Bolivia, but encounters one mishap after another, beginning with the local townspeople who know what's inside, halting the train's path.

The tiricia is an illness of the soul when the heart is saddened. A story of three generations afflicted with being tiricientas: Ita, Justa and Alicia – grandmother, mother and daughter – who have at different times suffered, tolerated and allowed abuse, dragging on the disease. Alicia decides to break the cycle, eradicating it for future generations.

A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.

Manhattan explores how the life of a middle-aged television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.

A young woman must make the choice whether to allow her abusive father back into her life.

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.

A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

Vincent grew up in a violent surrounding, his own family. After a new family feud Vincent decides to call the police but is taken to a youth center unintentionally. There Vincent beats up the director who touched him improvidently. It seems that violence looms large in Vincent's life. Then he meets Butterfly, a diffident young boy who collects butterflies to bear his parent's death. Vincent gets curious about the butterfly boy and tries to empathize. Step by step Vincent gains the friendship of butterfly. But one day his mother reappears to tell him he is not wanted at home anymore. Vincent is stunned. All of a sudden his feelings burst out and he beats up his defenseless roommate: Butterfly.