Shorts Competition

After another night of insomnia, a man comes across a strange community living in his building and discovers the elaborate illusion they have created.

 “There were so many of us, but when it all ended, each of us went our own way.” We see footage of the Green Movement, a wave of protests in Iran that began in the summer of 2009, in response to the presidential election fraud in favor of the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We see the chaos, the solidarity amo...

Marianne and Pétion live in Haiti and wait impatiently for a call from their son in the USA. The promise of the American dream now seems to elude them, as the line between hope and reality becomes increasingly blurred.

A filmmaker undergoes a series of home remedies and spiritual rituals as their family attempts to purge their gender-fluid identity. Caught in a struggle of love, legacy, and belief, a Southwest Chinese family seeks to rid their queer heir of what they perceive as an unwanted entity.

A girl tries to prevent her mother from drowning in depression, after the death of a fish.

In the claustrophobic depths of the Mutoshi mine in Katanga (DRC), Ndjimu follows The Rememberers – a community labouring in unsafe and brutal conditions to extract coveted minerals from the ancestral soils to feed global tech empires, to their own detriment. Set to a soundtrack of metallic rock being crushed, Ndjimu i...

A light kept on to deter makes it hard to see past your reflection. In Fear Nothing, we take a nightly ride into the fears and anxieties of Johannesburg’s wealthy inhabitants by following the work of the private security guards hired to protect them. The illusion of security slowly dissolves as we dig into a fragile cl...

On a remote Adriatic island, goats have roamed freely for 40 years, following a failed farming project. Now deemed a problem, armed men arrive to restore “natural balance” through a chilling cull – revealing how easily violence can be justified as the only solution.

An urgent desktop diary made at the intersection of a hectic digital landscape and the inner violence of modern colonization. The film chronicles the sleepless nights of a group of activists, eyes fixed on screens as they follow the news from Palestine and across the region. In Amsterdam, far from their home countries,...

Blending virtual reality, family photos and studio conversations, Home is where the heart is delves into the protagonist’s past, laying bare the violence of incest and the enormous strength and effort required to survive it. The film shows how trauma shapes and defines our memories and haunts our present, but first and...

In 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long kills 8 Asian women in massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia as a way to suppress his uncontrollable sexual desire. Dutch-Japanese filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus writes letters to the young murderer to find out what his killings have to do with her sexual life. What do our racial fetis...

Shayma’ was six years old when the Second Intifada broke out. More than twenty years later, she opens a box of old videotapes that starts her search for memories. In voice-over she addresses her mother, who says she is blessed with a poor memory. Shayma’, by contrast, still remembers exactly what she wore on her first ...

Jerada is a mining town in Morocco where coal extraction, although officially halted in 2001, continues informally to this day. L’mina recreates the current work in informal mining pits using a set design created in collaboration with the town’s residents, who perform in their own roles.

Accused by the authorities of not working hard enough, Vladimir is punished by being forced to live with a man deemed an “idiot.” He selects Vova from a psychiatric institution. Vova communicates almost exclusively through a single utterance: “ouh.”

A Kafkaesque courtroom drama set in 19th-century Liverpool, recounting the trial of a corpse with neither name nor past. Dozens have gathered for the absurd ceremony — and perhaps to deliver justice.

Set against ethereal visuals from the natural world, snippets of text stitch together memories of domestic abuse inflicted upon a set of sisters over a period of more than a decade. Seen through the eyes of one sister, the project takes viewers behind the closed doors of an unsafe home, as she flashes through a lifetim...

Within the revelry of Rio’s Carnival, Ilma writes to her son. How does she sense his presence in the crowd? Suspended in time, the celebration becomes a space of memory and political resistance.

In search of a bullet whose trail has been captured on surveillance camera footage, the film follows its trajectory and those of its main protagonists. Blending the early cinema technique of chronophotography with CGI, Sixty-seven Milliseconds questions the legitimacy of policing in France and warns of its excesses.

An industrial slaughterhouse somewhere in Germany. Jakob is a security guard, while Boris from Bosnia does the slaughtering. Amid the cold and the violence, a silent bond develops between the two, as does an unspoken longing for freedom.

A young Roma boy is chosen for a television feature after word spreads of his unusual gift. As expectations rise, his quiet talent faces the harsh glare of media scrutiny. What follows is a quiet unraveling-for him, and for those around him.

Rooted in wetlands, páramos and centennial forests at the verge of disappearing, memories and a speculated future collide. Five hundred years of exploitation, exile and resilience are nourished by a collective pain and a desire to crack through it all.

Sister remembers that Brother had dark eyes, hair like her own, shoulders as fragile as a bird’s wings, and that he knew the way to the river by heart. Sister has forgotten nothing about Brother.

Revealing portrait of the family formed by director Anaël Dang and his parents. Twenty-one years after a painful family secret came to light, they reflect on the past and their mutual bond.

At 18, a young man commits to 17 years in the military. Inside the system, he witnesses things he hadn’t thought possible. Many of his comrades consistently make mistakes or lack the physical and mental endurance. The military is well prepared and quietly removes the deviants from the countless formations they have to ...

In the volatile moments after a car crash, before the authorities arrive, a hot-headed yet desperate tow truck driver fiercely protects his tow. But the situation quickly spirals out of his control.

Samir and Nadyn, a Lebanese couple, spend a sleepless night anxious and fearing an Israeli airstrike could shatter the glass walls of their home. With their children peacefully asleep, they battle with whether to flee or risk the worst and stay.