Gusla ou les Malins

Cinderella has to stay home while her evil stepsisters go to the ball. You know the rest except everyone here is a penguin (even the mice that become the "horses") and the lost slipper is more like a swimming flipper.

Animated clay paintings tell the true story of the last house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay, a large and important estuary and waterway in Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States. In an Old-Time Music ballad, the house sings of its life and the creatures it has sheltered during its lifetime journey from tree, to timber, to home, to an ultimate return to nature. It contemplates time, environmental change, and the rise of the seas.

Naked, on the back of a sheep, soft office worker Willie rides trough the forest. His body is still in the office, but his mind wanders between dangerous flowers, li-los and an imaginary friendship for a soft sheep.

In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family of a long dream being fulfilled of the hated Shah's defeat in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own.

Documentary that follows the lives of two pirates and their community on the Somali coastline; what are the incentives of the pirates, why did they become pirates, how did they grow up in a country with political chaos, war and extreme poverty? The narrative structure is built around two interweaving story-lines; one depicting the "present", the daily lives of the pirates and their community, and the second in the "past", revealing through epic animation, the unfolding of a recent hijacking.

Silhouette fairy tale film about a man who wins his true love with the help of the "wee folk".

A powerful, emotional and sometimes humorous look at the daily life of a prison inmate and a corrections officer.

Exploration of the connections between sex, love and technology.

In memory of the Japanese earthquake on 3.11, each director presents a 3 minute and 11 second short film in tribute to those who were lost that day.

The end of evolution awaits us in a wasteland dominated by bizarre trash formations, dust and rock. From the scattered remains of a long forgotten culture an electric ecosystem rapidly evolves into the ultimate form of existence.

Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a Poetry Festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather be in Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians, all who tell her stories that force her to confront her past; the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of Poetry itself. It’s about building bridges between cultural and generational divides. It’s about being curious. Staying open. And finding your own voice through the magic of poetry. Rosie goes on an unwitting journey of forgiveness, reconciliation, and perhaps above all, understanding, through learning about her father’s past, her own cultural identity, and her responsibility to it.

1987, 30 sec, color, sound Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television. In Birnbaum's vision, Fleischer's spilled inkwell releases cartoon bubbles containing images of women from MTV music videos. With wit and panache, Birnbaum reverses the traditional sexual roles of the producer and product of commercial imagery: The final image is that of a female artist on whose video "palette" we see a glimpse of Fleischer.

All alone, Yellow Guy tries to stop a lamp from teaching him about dreams. While Red Guy finds out the truth about the puppets' existence.

Short film by Mary Ellen Bute

In a society where the greatest concern is the size and power of one’s wings, nihilist Ciobeck tries to protect Moann. But how can one survive in a barren land populated by imprisoned-mind people?

A house is visited by a clean, organized, well-mannered guest.

White Tape explores the theme of boundaries: the frame, the space between brushstrokes and the implications of occupation.

When a small boy loses his favourite toy – a small teddy bear – this draws him into the inner world of his childhood. Nonetheless, he must destroy this realm if he wants to grow up.

LOVE is a short film describing affection in 3 different chapters, through an impact on a distant solar system.

A clear-eyed look at the inevitability of our demise, based on Philip Larkin’s poem of the same name.