Bruja

Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.

A twist on the morality tale of forbidden love between the beautiful Belle and the feared Beast. As the villagers are being brutally murdered and the Beast is hunted down as the one responsible for the mayhem, Belle and Beast team up to defeat the real killer; the power-hungry witch's malevolent troll.

A filmmaker recalls his youth in the town of Onomichi. In the present, he shoots a film in Onomichi alongside his cast, crew and family.

1938. Austria has been annexed by Nazi Germany, and Switzerland has closed its borders for Jewish refugees - a death sentence for thousands. But not all Swiss officials observe this inhuman order.

In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.

Lois Patiño dissects the movement of a fire, analyses its fleeting ephemeral forms, and transforms them with sound to enrich the meaning of the images. The Image Burns begins as a reflection on our perception and becomes an intense interaction between the parts, between the images and the spectator. We look at the fire and the fire looks back at us.

Contemplates the notion of "identity" through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US. In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, the film tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned, lesbian Puerto Rican photographer / videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, this experimental narrative becomes a meditation on class, race, and sexuality as shifting differences.

For a young boy, ordinary facts and things of daily life seem to have great importance.

Set in puritanical Boston in the mid 1600s, the story of seamstress Hester Prynne, who is outcast after she becomes pregnant by a respected reverend. She refuses to divulge the name of the father, is "convicted" of adultery and forced to wear a scarlet "A" until an Indian attack unites the Puritans and leads to a reevaluation of their laws and morals.

A Philosophy - Monopáti

Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neo-liberal elitism, and a mix of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse. The film begins in a sacral space, where Randi, a figure that references Ayn Rand, transforms a parapsychological medium into two digital clouds and sends them on a journey through a megalopolis in full growth. There they materialize as two bodies, which go by the names of Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence.

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.

In this avant-garde look at a series of unique or eccentric men and women, director Stavros Tornes has created a film that is visually engaging, but too obscure in many points to be understood. The main protagonists are a young taxi driver -- a man who has had some very unusual, puzzling, and inspirational experiences -- and a middle-aged painter he gains as a new friend. The two men are complemented by a few tough women (all played by the same actress), a pair of verbose politicos, and a handful of other distinctive characters. By the end of the movie, transformations are in store for the pair of friends, reflecting the tenor of the film throughout. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”

"Mapang-akit" is an offshoot of a documentary project made with an Icelandic filmmaker and uses the outtakes from the Hudas Hudas festival in Antique, where a community bonds over a large effigy of Judas Iscariot during Holy Week. Amidst it is a found story of a man who returns home to his death after pursuing a woman in a neighboring village.

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas