Shorts Competition

Aban is a short film about a 9-year-old transgender girl who lives with her mother Nazanin after her parent's divorce. Under constant pressure from her ex-husband, Nazanin should turn Aban away from her feminine taste. One day, while Aban is convinced that she will undergo the surgery she dreams about, she will get cir...

Daniel Asadi Faezi and Mila Zhluktenko film the Aral Sea shore’s last inhabitants, who have lost their way of life to the desertification of their environment. Aralkum is a cinematic kaleidoscope of a desert landscape that used to be a lake. The surreal flickering of the Aral desert transforms into the waves of the for...

A young Swiss woman tries to find out more about her Armenian roots. Various lovingly animated drawers of the simultaneously accumulating family archive open. This very personal examination of collective generational traumas of post-migrant communities finds images and words for racism and the difficulties of talking a...

A six-year-old boy living in the outskirts of Nairobi uses an unusual ability to escape a harsh reality, in this wildly imaginative and emotionally affecting tale of childhood by Kenyan director Mbithi Masya.  This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Glimpses into Others’ Lives.

Babajanja is a heartfelt short documentary that borrows horror elements and includes them in the investigation of director Ante Zlatko Stolica’s childhood fear. Stolica’s dreams are being haunted by ‘Janja’, an allusion to the Slavic fairy tale character of Baba Yaga. Stolica traces his fears by digging through his mem...

A chase, footsteps closing in; as you approach your house, it moves further away. This is a recurring nightmare, shared by many Syrians who have fled their homeland. At night they find themselves back in their hometowns, running, chased by invisible men. They’re looking for a safe place that they can never reach. BACK ...

A Garrano horse is forced to pull a heavy load under a blazing sun. Young boy Joel discovers a man who is about to set a forest on fire.   This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Glimpses into Others’ Lives.

On a remote coast of the Russian Arctic in a wind-battered hut, a lonely scientist waits to witness an ancient gathering. He is holding out in order to observe a natural event that occurs here, every year. But ocean warming is taking its and overwhelms the scientist, as documented in a film by Evgenia Arbugaeva and Max...

Every day, a man and his son descend from their vertiginous house, stuck on top of a precipice, to travel to the village on the plain below. Here, they sell the ice which they produce daily.  This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Growing Pains. 

A fragmented portrait of a moment, a person, and a place, seen through the subjective memories of a young Black girl, Imani, and rookie police officer, David, who both have wildly different recollections of the same faithful moment in a corner store that will leave their lives altered forever. This short film is part o...

A Holocaust survivor reads a letter he wrote to the pig who saved his life. A young schoolgirl hears his testimony in class and sinks into a twisted dream where she confronts questions of identity, collective trauma, and the extremes of human nature.  This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Facing the Past.   ...

In Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s unforgettable documentary a group of Ukrainian sculptors and metalworkers shift their efforts, as war rages in their country, toward a very different kind of output than the solemn religious statuary that otherwise fills their cavernous workshop.  This short film is part of the programme...

A mother sings lullabies to her 12-year-old daughter in order to calm her down. But, when the lullabies end, and the daughter comes to her senses, the reality turns out to be much grimmer, and life-altering.  This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Growing Pains. 

Ale, a seventeen-year-old woman, lives in rural Costa Rica with her two younger siblings. The film visualises the burder of motherhood and projects this onto Ale. Through landscapes fueled by silence, resentment, and brief moments of joy, Ale will try to protect them from the seething truth, that their mother has left ...

Marko and Ankica never got over the death of their only child Ante in the war. When their neighbor Stipe suggests renting out their son’s room to tourists, Marko sees that as an insult but Ankica manages to talk him into it. Renting rooms is easy money, especially for retired people, but having an unknown man sleeping ...

“The portraits depict president Putin, Kadyrov Senior and Kadyrov Junior. They observe me from everywhere. They penetrate my thoughts. It is almost impossible to believe and accept. Exactly a year ago I began to capture the feeling of totalitarianism that these portraits conveyed and did this through a distorted lens i...

Young Fatima holds a secret that could change her fate; she must place her trust in a doctor to make a tough decision between cultural tradition and medical ethics.  This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Glimpses into Others’ Lives.

Lloyd Lee Choi film Same Old shows a New York City delivery driver’s bad night as he spends the night trying to find his stolen e-bike. This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Glimpses into Others’ Lives.  

Saving Some Random Insignificant Stories is Anna Vasof's goodbye film to her parents’ house. One night in December 2021, after an unusually extreme weather event, Anna's parents’ house flooded, and they had to be rescued by a boat. They lost almost everything that night, including their dog and their cat. Two days afte...

“Some people lose their sense of perspective; I have lost my sense of scale.’’ Driving along the motorway, Will loses his sense of scale. As his condition deepens, he struggles to unpick the sequence of events that led to this predicament, before he’s lost forever.  This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Thro...

Subtotals is an essay film compiled from Iranian 8mm home movies. A meditation on the uncertainties of a life that doesn’t hand you any bills.   This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Facing the Past.   

Spring 2022, Russia: Can a film be an act of resistance despite censorship? Yes, in a detailed contemplation of the Kremlin wall, for example. This short film is part of the programme Shorts: Through the Eyes of Others. 

The earth is eroded by an incessant rain, its matter collapses, nothing remains of the landscape except a long field and narrow pillars rising against an immense sky. On one of these islands a survivor stands motionless, clinging to his umbrella, his only weapon against the deluge. It is in the narrow confines of this ...

As a mountainous village in Greece sinks under the lake, the memories of its inhabitants emerge from the water.  This short film is part of the programme Shorts: The Memory of Water. This shorts programme has been curated in collaboration with Go Short - International Short Film Festival Nijmegen.

After a period in New York, young Chinese filmmaker Shuli Huang returns to his hometown of Wenzhou in search of himself. Being left without his partner, who is starting an education in Belgium, he is completely dependent on his family. A long-delayed conversation with his mother about his sexuality plunges them both in...