Imperfect Journeys

In one of Jan Svankmajer's many mind-blowing, deliberately weird short films, a picnic consists of a suit sunbathing, a phonograph playing records, a shovel digging holes, and a camera taking pictures.

A non-narrative voyage round Sedlec Ossuary, which has been constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons (victims of the Black Death).

In stop-motion animation, a wardrobe moves through the countryside. It arrives in a house, a child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," and various objects, such as toys and dolls, move about, disintegrate, and play out archetypal scenes. Like Carroll's verse, the images are at once familiar and unfamiliar. A child's play suit, hanging in the wardrobe, becomes the adventure's protagonist.

A three-part depiction of various forms of communication.

1954 - Panic erupts when the citizens of Bellingham, Washington notice strange cracks in their car windshields. What is causing this mysterious phenomenon?

Two forms of alien intelligence analyze the contradictory behavior of their human test subjects.

Brad seeks approval while vacationing in Iceland.

Eleven-year-old Alice lives on a ranch with her father, her favorite horse and confidante, Red, and the love of Red's life, Molly.

Technology fails a woman isolated in her home.

A Muslim American teenager struggles to reconcile desire with family obligations.

15-year-old Julie feels that time stands still in the suburban neighborhood where she lives with her helpless mother and older sister. When her sister's boyfriend drops by the house a warm day during summer vacation she sees the opportunity to not only escape from the heavy weighing atmosphere of her childhood home, but also to satisfy some of the restlessness and curiosity that lives in her evolving teenage body.

In the year 2050, the Philippines braces for the coming of the fiercest storm ever to hit the country. And as the wind and waters start to rage, poets are being murdered.

Ohrid, 4th of may 1980. Marko, son of the cook in the Marshal's villa, get's a chance to try the food that has been cooked in front of his eyes all his life.

The record of a human intervention in nature: A static shot shows part of a landscape, a serene body of water in front of a mountain. A motorboat enters the picture from the right, obeying the directions sent by radio and forming a spiral in the water's surface. The boat then turns to the left and leaves the scene; solely its wake is visible for a time.

A glacier. Icebergs. Cold fog gliding through the folds.

A landscape either prehuman or post-apocalyptic. The movement of the waves, the circling of the birds, the lifting of the cloud cover. A moment of complete disorientation created by the landscape’s sheer endlessness.

Black Rain White Scars depicts a twilight of reality. With the steady shot of a Gotham-like cityscape, Lukas Marxt guides us between vestiges of visionary architecture and narrow planted apartment buildings. As we’re searching for our relational point within it, the overwhelming murmuring of the human, car, and boat traffic, at the same time marginalises our position. We are a part of the scenery, though secluded and apart from it.

Paul Devlin’s fictional short stars James McCaffrey (co-star of Rescue Me) as Tony O’Neil, a talented, but very distracted neon artist. Tony loses everything he touches. And if he's not careful, that includes his girlfriend Corrin. Desperate, Tony seeks the help of Shah, a strange and powerful mystic who has learned to use science to achieve spiritual goals. Shah's newest invention is a pair of extraordinary glasses. Try them on, think of an object that's lost and in a moment, it can be seen. The glasses need field-testing and Tony is the perfect subject. At first, Tony is back in control, finding all the things he's lost. But the glasses are more complex than he ever imagined. Tony is about to discover that sometimes, the worst part of losing things, is finding them...

It's an afternoon in Versailles, during the reign of Louis XIV.