Dashing in December

The story of the birth of Christ brought to life in this claymation short film.

Mo Geum-san is a barber living in the rural area, who once aspired to be an actor. He starts to have doubts about his humdrum life after the village health center advises him to be examined at a larger hospital. He comes up with a plan to give a gift to his beloved ones in the coming Christmas. The plan is to invite everyone to the local culture center and to screen his self-made comedy movie based on his own tragic life.

After breaking up with her boyfriend and losing her job, Noelle full fills her lifelong wish of getting a puppy. But Buster (the puppy) is the perfect pup she imagined and by spending Christmas with her co-workers quirky family she discovers the true spirit of Christmas and what it means to be family.

Flavio, immersed in the sadness of nostalgia and regret, faces his daily loneliness, seeking solace in the solitary ritual of smoking a cigarette. Each puff becomes a journey back in time, an immersion in a parallel dimension that brings to light the moments shared with Alberto. The warmth of those hugs, the echo of shared laughter and the tears that bathed their cheeks become present, as if they had just happened. Every blurry image that surfaces, every fleeting glance that materializes and every whispered word that resonates reveal the fragile nature of human balance and the profound gravity of the choices that shaped their relationship. But in that very smoke lies a strange consolation, a sense of acceptance that begins to germinate in his heart. He accepts the end of the relationship, with all its painful consequences, and launches himself into a new future, leaving behind what has been and opening his arms to the unknown that awaits him.

Julia has just lost her life partner, Barby. Torn between her grief and a world that is crumbling without her, she strives to preserve the restaurant they built together and her bond with their son León. A relationship now threatened by a wilful grandmother and the return of an absent father.

The heterosexual man Axel is thrown out of his girlfriends home for cheating and ends up moving in with a gay man. Axel learns the advantages of living with gay men even though they are attracted to him and when his girlfriend wants him back he must make a tough decision.

A small suburban town receives a visit from a castaway unfinished science experiment named Edward.

Will Freeman is a good-looking, smooth-talking bachelor whose primary goal in life is avoiding any kind of responsibility. But when he invents an imaginary son in order to meet attractive single moms, Will gets a hilarious lesson about life from a bright, but hopelessly geeky 12-year-old named Marcus. Now, as Will struggles to teach Marcus the art of being cool, Marcus teaches Will that you're never too old to grow up.

Eyal, an Israeli Mossad agent, is given the mission to track down and kill the very old Alfred Himmelman, an ex-Nazi officer, who might still be alive. Pretending to be a tourist guide, he befriends his grandson Axel, in Israel to visit his sister Pia. The two men set out on a tour of the country, during which Axel challenges Eyal's values.

Following the tragic death of her teenage son, Manuela travels from Madrid to Barcelona in an attempt to contact the long-estranged father the boy never knew. She reunites with an old friend, an outspoken transgender sex worker, and befriends a troubled actress and a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.

Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.

In 1960s Wyoming, two men develop a strong emotional and sexual relationship that endures as a lifelong connection complicating their lives as they get married and start families of their own.

A threesome becomes a foursome in this sensitive drama. The tale begins with the relationship between a recently divorced man and woman (from different marriages) and the bisexual they get involved with. At first all three are happy in their new arrangement, but then the divorced fellow suddenly leaves and those remaining in the relationship become quite tense. Fortunately the fellow returns with another, more conventional fellow. Eventually the three persuade him to join them.

It's a classic case of opposite attraction: Handsome Ben Bennet is a gay, affluent, stylish attorney at the top of the genteel social set in southern Virginia, while Lee Darcy is a rough-hewn welder with a secret that he nightly tries to blot out with an excess of liquor.

A secret story of a same-sex love affair between two Myanmar men. After getting into a forced marriage with a rich girl, one of the men is killed in a plane crash. Much later, his wife is approached by a man, a bestselling writer, and soon suspects that he may have been her husband's lover. But now a real mystery begins to emerge as the evidence mounts her husband may still be alive.

Harry has been partying for 48 hours when he meets Johannes on the dance floor of a club in Berlin. With 15 hours until his flight home, Johannes offers to help him print his boarding pass. This mundane task leads to a day together wandering the city. The contrasts in their lives and values force each one to confront their own truths.

Isobel Gray plans a storybook Christmas with her boyfriend, including a snow-covered cottage in the Northwest, and a carefully composed bucket list of classic holiday traditions. But when the boyfriend goes AWOL, the list proves challenging and a tempting new romance turns her life upside down. Will Isobel have a White Christmas ending under the mistletoe?

The Male Gaze is a new series of releases from New Queer Visions that showcases short LGBTQ films from across the world. The first instalment, First Kiss, brings together five shorts that are based around men experiencing romantic and/or sexual interaction with other men for the first time. It takes in films from Sweden, Indonesia, USA, Australia and France giving a rounded look at how similar experiences are depicted across the world. The films are: Naked [Naken] (2013); Pria (2017); Walk With Me (2018), One Night Only (2018); Michel's Mouse [Tapette] (2016).

With the threat of having to close her father's candy store, Wendy and her six-year-old daughter Grace travel to the big city in hopes of making extra holiday cash to save the store. When she's offered a job in the toy department of Wolmans, the city's biggest department store, Wendy can't wait! Her excitement doesn't last long when the store's manager, Teanna, destroys the Christmas spirit throughout the store and replaces Santa with a hunky male underwear model surrounded by elfin "babes." What Teanna is unaware of is that she has in fact sacked the real Santa. Unaware of his real "Santa" status, Wendy reaches out to the old man but it seems even he has given up hope. With her daughter losing faith in the holiday, Wendy realizes she must bring the true meaning of Christmas back to Wolmans before it is too late.

Daniel got lucky tonight: this time he is not going home alone again. But is that enough to pull him out of his reality?