Desk Set

Eight very different couples deal with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London.

Filmmaker Talya Lavie steps into the spotlight with a dark comedy about everyday life for a unit of young female Israeli soldiers. The human resources office at a remote desert base serves as the setting for this cast of characters, who bide their time pushing paper, battling for the top score in Minesweeper, and counting down the minutes until they can return to civilian life. Amidst their boredom and clashing personalities, issues of commitment—from friendship to love and country—are handled with humor and sharp-edged wit.

An unhinged office worker who planned to go on a shooting spree at his workplace struggles with his newfound status as a hero after he ends up stopping a shooting spree instead.

Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.

Maksim, an investing manager, is too busy reading the news in his social network feeds fails to notice his own problems, until the news really start to influence his own life.

Side by side in a leafy suburb, Thom lives in one flat, Alethea in another. It's pretty clear that their respective, unsatisfying lives would improve enormously if they just met each other. But with a wall literally between them, this seems highly improbable. Then there's the building's Power Box, having an existential crisis about the eventual collapse of the universe, and the super nova from five thousand years ago. Then there's time travelling on an equation for the speed of light and too much sugar. There's demon magpie attacks, laptops in love, cats dancing to Prince and sock puppet nightmares. And a tiny prayer by the Wall, hoping that all of these pieces can come together for one magical moment of love.

Mr. Dithers leaves Dagwood in charge of the office for a short period. Poor old Dagwood manages to gum things up when he falls for a confidence scam engineered by the duplicitous Toby Clifton. He even finds himself in a compromising position that seriously endangers his future connubial happiness with his wife Blondie. Once again, it's up to Blondie to straighten out the mess.

High school student Asako moves all of her belongings to the refuse area of her apartment complex and stops attending school. Kazuyoshi, a precocious young boy, invites her to join him in an online chatroom venture where she assumes the identity of a married temptress named "Miyabi".

At the end of the 20th century, humanity sent a series of documents into space representing Earth's culture. Among them were images, sounds, brainwaves, and various popular science articles. The goal was to establish galactic intercultural connections and share our culture with outer space. All of these documents have been floating through space without a response… until now.

When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.

In a world where society is made up of two species, Feathers and Fur, Samuel is a rare Hybrid of the two. While he navigates a world that's not built for someone like him, he copes with the attention he gets due to his appearance. Especially at work... This time, Samuel's coworkers give him some unsolicited advice on the different ways to flirt with his office crush.

Fong (Miriam Yeung) is already at odds with Wu (Edison Chen), one of her bosses at an ad agency, when she makes a major mistake at work that puts her job on the line. To save herself, she feigns pregnancy, which, under Hong Kong law, means she cannot be fired for 10 months. However, while there may be some perks that accompany her "pregnancy," she is eventually forced to concoct increasingly elaborate lies and involve everyone around her in the charade.

Miles Harding buys a state-of-the-art computer that starts expressing conscious thought and emotion after an interaction with spilled champagne. Things begin getting out of hand when both Miles and Edgar, the computer, fall in love with beautiful neighbor Madeline Robistat.

Egon is starting to be a little forgetful; he forgot the zone number, so he fails to open the strongbox. When he gets out of Vridslose State Prison, Kjeld and Benny have become associates of Yvonne's cousin Georg from America. He is not just some old-fashioned strongbox thief that can't remember like Egon, but a young hip IT criminal, that thinks that everyone else is inferior. However, Egon doesn't take lightly to the Georg's patronizing so he sabotages Georg's computer and ruins his cup. This time Egon's ambitions reaches a new high, when he and his gang break in to the World Bank, and they get away with it. Of course, thanks to Yvonne, they aren't rich very long.

Two business executives--one an avowed misogynist, the other recently emotionally wounded by his love interest--set out to exact revenge on the female gender by seeking out the most innocent, uncorrupted girl they can find and ruining her life.

Dick Wallace wants to marry a minister's grand-daughter but his father, who wants him to get work on his company's business, is opposed. She takes a job with the company to prove she's okay.

A kindly occupational therapist undergoes a new procedure to be shrunken to four inches tall so that he and his wife can help save the planet and afford a nice lifestyle at the same time.

Happily married for three years, Ann and David Smith live in New York. One morning Ann asks David if he had to do it over again, would he marry her? To her shock, he answers, "No". Later that day, they separately discover that, due to a legal complication, they are not legally married.

Lt. Fergie Howard teams up with Lt. Beau Gilliam and Navy scientist Jason Eldridge to turn a supercomputer with missile-tracking capabilities into a tool to predict where a roulette ball will land. They dock in Venice, Italy, and begin making a killing at the casino, but their shore-to-ship signals get misinterpreted as signs of attack by Adm. Fitch, putting a serious crimp in the officers' get-rich-quick scheme.

Various citizens of Toronto anxiously await the end of the world, which is occurring at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day.