Three young men and two young women dance in a specially designed space resembling the inside of a box. Some of them are more attractively dressed than others, but all of them perfectly follow the precise choreography, completely surrendering to the rhythm and feeling that carries them.

Marie Zechiel is a dancer and choreographer who was born and raised in Germany and today lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in contemporary dance from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. In the course of her career, she has performed professionally in various dance troupes and stage productions in Europe and globally. As a co-founder of the Siciliano Contemporary Ballet troupe, she continuously works on improving dance movements and performances. She considered herself a physical storyteller, an artist who uses the body as a storytelling tool and movement as a fundamental form of expression, not only in dance and on stage but also in film, photography and performance art. Her choreographic skill is based on authentic movements, characterisation and character development and the interplay of bodies in different forms of dance. As a dancer and choreographer, she participated in the making of various music videos, advertising films and fashion shows. Among the artists she has collaborated with are the German musician and producer Herbert Gronemeyer, the German rap duo Zugezogen Maskulin and the companies Vodafone and Deichmann.

Music video for the song Cigarette by the Hungarian musician and singer Előd Marosvölgyi, who works under the stage name Bambi. It is difficult to say whether the gold heist was successful – it seems that the young robber has been arrested as he is in an elevator with two police officers who are escorting him to a vehicle with rotating lights in the parking lot. But what if the police officers are actually the young man’s partners in disguise?

Hungarian artist Előd Marosvölgyi was born in 1997 in Budapest. He is an actor and scenographer who started working on music videos as a director and production designer in his first year of university. His first music video was released in 2017, and more of his work can be found on YouTube, among it the video for the recently released song Kelbimbó. He returned to acting in 2021 with a role in the popular TV series FBI: International and has played several notable roles, among others in the TV series Keresztanyu and Drága örökösök. He points out authorial visions, industrial interiors, long shots and complex characters as the common features of the projects he chooses to work on.

One evening, standing on a balcony, smoking, a middle-aged man tries to remember everything that had happened to him recently. Then, he first receives an unexpected photo on his phone, then someone knocks on his door demanding to be let into the apartment immediately. When he obliges, he finds himself in the kitchen of another apartment, where two men who are cooking tell him that the police have inquired about the events that took place the day before. Unfortunately, he has no memory of those events and only has vague recollections of images and people he had met. He goes down to the ground floor of the building and finds himself in what appears to be a night club, where different people keep reminding him of the unpleasant events of yesterday. There is also a young girl who has to tell him something but will not get to – he meets his son and together they go out to the terrace, where a gunshot suddenly pierces the air.

Polish author Paweł Czarkowski was born in 1982. In his homeland, he first graduated in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy, then completed a course in creative writing begore finally graduating with a degree in directing from Warszawska Szkoła Filmowa in Warsaw. He is an avid photographer, musician and writer whose film combine his experiences with different art forms. He is an advocate of a new spirit in cinematography, of new approaches in the depiction of the relationship between humans and reality, especially as these relationships continuously escape expectations and the definitions that we try to assign to them. Paweł is fascinated by the possibilities of interactive film and multimedia projects, which is why he chose to make his debut project Dvorac as a fiction-documentary hybrid. Afterwards, he made several short fiction films with legends of Polish theatre, among them Jan Peszek and Miroslaw Zbrojewicz, who also plays the main role in the film we are showing. He is currently working on his debut feature-length fiction film.

about the author

Iranian actress, producer and director Sohibanoo Zolghadr was born in 1979. She has been working in film for almost a decade and a half, ever since her acting debut in 2009 in the TV drama Saat-e Gij-e Zaman directed by Farzad Motamen. She acts both on television and film, has appeared in both feature-length and short productions. The most important author she has collaborated with to date is Asghar Farhadi. Sohibanoo played a noted supporting role in Farhadi’s 2011 drama Nader and Simin, A Separation, which won the Golden Bear, Academy Award and Golden Globe and was awarded at the Pula Film Festival. While she continues to work tirelessly as an actress – recently playing an interesting supporting role in Hossein Darabi’s thriller Maslahat in 2021 – Sohibanoo is increasingly active as an independent author. The film we are showing is her second directorial achievement, made five years after her directing debut, Sedaha-ye Khamush.

While playing on the street in a Nepalese province by drawing chalk characters on the ground, a boy hears the voice of a waste collector who rides a bicycle and buys other people’s waste for a pittance with the intention of reselling it. The boy offers him his old textbook, which the man agrees to buy for four rupees, but the sale is not finalised because the man does not have change to give back to the boy. A few moments later, the boy takes some money from a man’s belongings that had been left at the foot of a tree and rushes towards another man with a bicycle, this one collecting voluntary contributions for the treatment of a gravely ill eight-year-old girl.

Nepalese artist Mohan Shrestha (Mohan Avilashi) is a gifted creative, writer, director and playwright. Numerous theatre plays were staged and performed under his direction, and he also directed short and medium-length fiction films and music videos. He teaches acting at several schools and related theatre and acting institutions. Mohan is also a media personality, an influencer with a base of mostly young followers, who has worked as a social worker in the mental health sector as well. He has won several awards, including the Banita Multifaceted Talent Award in 2022 and the Godhuli Art Service Award in 2023.

At the end of March 2023, many citizens of Israel spontaneously took to the streets, protesting against the government and its prime minister for what they interpreted as an attempt to change the delicate fabric of Israeli society and state, that is, for attacking democracy. At 9 p.m. on Monday, March 27, the events escalated into conflict with the police, some protesters were injured, and the amalgam of dissatisfaction and anger turned into a loud cry from the frustrated crowd. The film we are showing captured these events – what the author calls “burning democracy” – without any editing and in continuity.

Israeli producer, screenwriter and director Yaniv Berman was born in Haifa in 1977. He graduated from the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programme at Tel Aviv University at the Department of Film and Television. After gaining directing and screenwriting experience while working on the acclaimed short TV film My Last Novel from 2001, he turned to solo filmmaking and made Naked Laura, a short film that earned him recognition. His 2006 short Even Kids Started Small about youth taking over their school was screened in the Cinéfondation Selection of Cannes Film Festival. He had spent full six years filming an IDF (Israeli Defense Force) military reserve unit and eventually turned the footage into the award-winning documentary The Alpha Diaries in 2007. In his 2016 debut feature film Land of the Little People, awarded at prestigious international festivals in Tbilisi and Phoenix, he tackled the traumatic process of child recruitment in a violent militarised society. Yaniv also has a passion for literature and has been dedicated to the art of storytelling for as long as he can remember. It is then no surprise that in 2021 he published his debut novel, a thriller titled The Spinning Tops.

Gunshots echo in the night and heated voices can be heard as three people try to cross a border in the back of a truck. Two of them are wounded; one man’s face is beaten and covered in blood, and the other person, by all accounts a girl, is in serious condition, with a completely bandaged head. The third person seems to be completely unharmed and is trying to help his companions. Outside the vehicle, the explosions, gunshots and shouting are not subsiding.

Lola Dubettier grew up in the mountains, in the Savoie department in eastern France. Most of her childhood she spent enjoying nature and watching films. She enrolled in a film school at the age of 15, first in Annecy and then in Lyon, and had spent 12 years working as a camera assistant on film sets before finally deciding to make her own film. The film we are showing is her debut work, shot with no budget, but with the indispensable cooperation from several friends. She is currently working on her first feature-length film, guided, as in all else she does, by ideas of the world’s beauty and nonviolence, and the desire to tell stories about the fates of the so-called ordinary and small people.

It is a sunny winter’s day in Paris, but Theo has no time to enjoy it. Before his girlfriend comes back from downtown Paris, he has to cover his traces as thoroughly as possible. This means washing the blood-stained knife, airing the room to get rid of the telltale smell and disposing of the bloody cloth wrapped around something – as soon as possible. When his partner returns, surprised that all the windows are open despite the cold, Theo throws the wrapped cloth out the window, accidentally hitting the neighbour in front of the building, who soon comes knocking on their door.

French director Franck Marchand always collaborates with his colleague and friend Joss Berlioux, and has been doing it as part of their screenwriter-director duo Les Casquettes since 2022. One of their films is the short thriller L’ascension filmed in 2022, which won them the best French film prize at the 48HFP film competition, for which authors are required to create a short film within 48 hours. The same film was then crowned with the Grand Prix Canal + award at Paris Courts Devant, after which TV stations Canal + and TF1 purchased the rights to show several of their films. The duo continues to work tirelessly and aims to professionalise their work as much as possible. They are currently preparing a TV series and a feature-length film. Franck was active in film even before partnering up with Joss, making 14 prominent short films and video projects from 2018.

As he enters his grandfather’s old house, a middle-aged Indian writer recalls a strange afternoon from his childhood, the day that his grandfather died. The house seemed deserted and cheerless that day, his mother, exhausted, slept for a very long time, even into the evening, which she normally never did, and several geese were freely walking around the house. The writer also saw his grandmother then, confusedly walking around and uttering prayers, and seemed to also see things that must have been supernatural. To this day, he is unsure whether the memory is real or just a figment of his imagination. However, he does clearly remember his grandmother’s words that dreams dreamed at dusk never come true...

Indian filmmaker Somudra Banerjee studied directing and screenwriting at the Film and Television Institute of India, a prestigious educational institution in the city of Pune, run by renowned filmmaker Shekhar Kapur. He had spent several years working as a journalist and writer before devoting himself to film and considers his rich literary and journalistic experience a valuable asset in his work. In 2023, he finished his thesis film titled Towards an Exegesis on Dying Inayat Khan.

Two women share the common space of an apartment. While one is dressed somewhat more traditionally and is just getting ready to go out, the other woman is dressed in modern clothes and seems to be suffering from a headache, for which she has to take a pill. What connects them is a mobile phone – when it rings, the first woman reaches for it, then the other. They seem to feel each other and are seemingly surprised by the other’s presence. Is the phone really the only connection they share?

Iranian author Lida Ansari says she has had a love for poetry and music since childhood. Although she did not grow up in a family of artists, she got involved in art semi-professionally already as a teenager, when she discovered her gift for painting, an activity she occasionally engaged in. At the encouragement of her family, she attended costume design studies and remained active in the field for a while by designing clothes for small stage productions and pursuing fashion design as much as it was possible in Iran, but this career choice did not bring her enough satisfaction. She decided to devote herself to writing, first taking a course in story writing, then in writing screenplays. She eventually turned to directing and started a master’s programme in dramatic literature. Studying dramatic literature allowed her to achieve some of her dreams; it helped her realise that she loved film and that every experience of working on a film with students proved valuable to her. She tried her hand at filmmaking several times, but she either did not like the story or the projects turned out to be too demanding. Despite this, she remained determined to make one. The film we are showing is the result of her work, and she already has a new project in mind.

Today is Mia’s 25th birthday. She is a student from Ukraine who lives in London and has family and friends who love her. After the birthday party, her best friends Peter and Jo stay to keep her company. As they are opening the remaining presents, their good mood is disrupted when Mia’s emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend knocks on the door, desperately wanting her back. Deciding to ignore his advances, Mia isolates herself in her room, leaving Peter and Jo in the company of her ex. However, the date is February 24, 2022 – the day the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

Lana Luchka is a Ukrainian-born screenwriter and director who lives in London and has been directing short films for the past five years. The film we are showing is very personal to her, as it represents her own experience on the first day of the Russian attack on Ukraine. With this film, Lana wants to support her compatriots in the fight against the occupiers and hopes that it could help attract additional support for Ukraine from the international community.

about the film

about the author

about the film

about the author

The consequences of Iran’s economic crisis are also affecting Aman, a middle-aged factory worker who was recently fired from his job. To make matters worse, Aman’s younger daughter is sick, the costs of her treatment are high, and the whole family is deep in debt. While his wife Mehri cleans other people’s homes, Aman comes up with the idea of selling his sick daughter to much wealthier people who cannot have children. Although he has already agreed on the sale, Mehri and their older daughter, who shares a bond with her sister, do not approve of his plan.

Iranian author Mehrav Nouri was born in Tehran in 1980. He is a stage and film director, screenwriter and playwright. He is a member of the Persian Encyclopedia Art Group, devoted to the research of poetry written by children and youth. He graduated in Theatre Studies from Arak University, received a diploma in film from the University of Teheran and also holds a diploma from the Iranian Youth Cinema Society, where his film education started in 2000. His debut short film Asir won the Special Award at the first Student Short Film Festival at Azad University, led by the distinguished Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Reza Aslani. Mehrav considers attending the Mythic Cinema workshop with Bahram Beyzai an important part of his career and is particularly proud of the fact that he has shot more than ten short films that he was recognised for. He also works in the theatre – together with Ali Rafei, he has staged Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba as a dramaturge, and directed Bondar Bidakhsh’s Record, Char Akhshij Pit, Ferdowsi’s Letter and Family of Death. In addition, he also wrote the script for a fiction film, which he intends to shoot in the future, and is working on books about film and theatre, Seven Thousand Years of Drama in Iran and Cinema Myth.

A full six and a half decades after leaving the orphanage, the already aged Bill – a survivor of the Australian institutional care system – is back to where he started. He thought he had left the world that once surrounded him for good, but now, in the course of one night, he is forced to face its terrible reality again.

Producer, cinematographer, screenwriter and director Farshid Akhlaghi was born in Tehran in 1981. He is an independent Iranian-Australian filmmaker who began his career by directing short narrative and experimental films. He has directed 15 short films to date, including several documentaries, which participated in various festivals around the world. In 2012, he moved to Australia to continue his education and make films in a new environment; he was awarded a Special Award for his work at the prestigious Camerimage Film Festival six years later. His first feature-length film, the 2018 biographical music documentary From Music into Silence, was released in Australian cinemas the following year, while the short music documentary Pain is Mine, made in the same year, screened at more than 30 festivals, winning numerous awards, including Best Documentary Short at the DOC LA festival in 2018.

A young woman dressed in blue is sitting on the rocky shore of the Dead Sea. She seems to be meditating as she watches a sailboat move across the surface of the sea. While the camera slowly approaches her from behind, human voices in the background warn of keeping the distance from others for one’s own safety and carrying all belongings with you. The coronavirus pandemic is ongoing, and the laptop that she holds in her lap reveals that she has experienced both illness and death in a unique way.

Bilhan Derin is a Turkish-German filmmaker and artist born on the coast of the Black Sea in Turkey, from where she moved to Germany with her family when she was a child. She started creating art at a young age, and worked in the field of theatre and film for many years. She studied directing at Die Deutsche Film- und Fernseakademie Berlin and has been living in Israel with her family for several years now. She has conceived and executed numerous artistic projects there, mostly at the Dead Sea, among them the film we are showing. Her standout projects include Ayla und die Strumpfhoze from 2001 and Banu from 2003, for which she also wrote the script. In addition to being a director and screenwriter, her credits as an actress include a supporting role in the feature-length comedy drama Im Schwitzkasten from 2005 directed by Eoin Moore.

When young Javi’s mother returns home, she unexpectedly finds herself in a shockingly tragic situation. Her son, covered in blood, is incoherently trying to explain that something terrible had happened, while a lifeless girl lies on the couch in the back of the room. Apparently, Javi was in a relationship with the girl who is his age, neither his parents nor anyone else knew about them, and the girl comes from a dysfunctional family with neglectful parents. Faced with a terrifying situation, the mother has to make difficult, quick and perhaps tragic decisions herself.

Spanish actor, producer, screenwriter and director David Luque was born in 1972 in Madrid, where he still lives today. He graduated in English philology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and has been active in theatre, television and film since 1994. He was the first Spanish actor to participate in the famous Royal Shakespeare Company troupe and began his professional career as an actor performing in two languages in several British theatre companies, later joining the ensemble of Teatro de La Abadia. In New York, he studied with Leonardo Petit and Joan Merlin at the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio and with Anne Bogart at SITI Company. He also completed clarinet and German language studies. His acting credits include many TV series, while his film collaborations include working with director Costa-Gavras on the historical drama Adults in the Room, with Miloš Forman on the biographical historical drama Goya’s Ghosts, with Carlos Saura on the biographical war drama Goya in Bordeaux and with Paul McGuigan on the crime drama The Reckoning. In addition to film, he has acted in a lot of TV series. In 2011, he and director Fefa Noia founded the production company Los Lunes, which mainly produces theatre plays.

One night in 1965, somewhere in Indonesia, an elderly superior of a Christian monastery receives an order from a general to do something in secret. Soon, a young pregnant woman is brought before her. The superior takes her to a room with a tub filled with water, where the young woman should be baptised. However, the woman complains that the site does not meet her expectations; she was hoping for a larger room in the church. In response, the superior emphasises that the most important thing is that the act itself be performed; in order for her child to grow up safe and clean from sin, the mother must free herself from the evil spirit of the unclean ideology of communism.

Alessandro Manuel Restanto is a director of Indonesian descent who lives and works in Prague. In the earlier stages of his career, he was known under the stage name Cak Nunu. He studied film directing and screenwriting at the famous Barrandov Film School under the mentorship of the distinguished Polish filmmaker Wiktor Grodecki. He describes his growing up as painful and unhappy due to being the black sheep of the family and years of exposure to bullying at school. Through these experiences, he developed a sensibility towards sad stories not only from his country but from all over the world, towards stories of injustice, oppression and exploitation. Although the films he creates vary in genre from surrealist satirical comedy and romantic drama to horror, all of them dissect hidden and hushed up cases of human rights violations that took place in his homeland’s past. Alessandro believes that cinema is universal and, wanting truth, justice and humanity to always prevail, dedicates his work to oppressed people around the world. The film we are showing is dedicated to the vast number – over a million – of victims of mass killings (politicide) that took place in Indonesia in 1965–1966.

A snow-covered rural landscape in a winter evening would be idyllic if the silence was not disturbed by the sound of not-so-distant gunshot and explosions. We seem to be witnessing war, but as the door of a cabin in the frame opens, two undressed children and a woman run out into the snow. The cabin is in fact a sauna, and the three of them are having a great time. After the children and the woman return inside, a shadow of a man emerges from darkness and enters after them.

Russian filmmaker Marat Narimanov was born in 1981 in Moscow. He holds a degree in cinematography, has spent ten years in Moscow’s drama theatres, and currently works as an illustrator/designer and director of animated films. In the past ten years of screenwriting, directing, and producing, his films have successfully screened at more than 300 festivals around the world, including the prestigious Shanghai International Film Festival, World Festival of Animated Film – Animafest Zagreb, Palm Springs Shortfest, Flickerfest in Sydney, Cleveland International Film Festival, Busan International Short Film Festival, and many others. He has won a series of awards, most notably at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and Interfilm Berlin International Short Film Festival.

A young girl is sitting on a bed in a room. After a telephone conversation ends, she sadly looks at the screen on the verge of tears. When a man’s voice is heard and his hand enters the frame, it becomes clear that she is an actress shooting a scene. The director, however, is not satisfied with how she conveyed being on the verge of crying and, moreover, the actress feels that he is not entirely clear about her character’s disposition nor the way in which the scene should play out.

Spanish filmmaker Adrián León Arocha was born on the Canary Islands in 1993. He discovered his passion for film and filmmaking at a young age and made his first short film at the age of 14. His love for filmmaking later led him to move to Madrid, where he studied screenwriting and filming. Driven by the desire to gain as much knowledge and professional experience as possible, he had also spent some time in Los Angeles before returning to Spain with the aim of producing his own project influenced by the ways and themes of avant-garde art, independent film and local urban musicians.

French-American actor and director Miles Drexler was born in 1994 in Paris, where he is still based. From 2013 to 2017, he studied cinematography at Université Paris 8. He says that he is passionate about acting and likes to direct films with people from his immediate environment. His other great passion is theatre – he tries to do just as much on stage as on film. Over the past few years, he has made a number of short films in different roles: as a director, he is credited for the 2019 film Je suis un chou à la crème, in 2019 and 2020 he appeared as an actor in the films Je suis une photo pour elle and Ariane by his colleague and friend Emeric Gallego, and as a technician (electrician) he collaborated on Gallego’s film Je suis devant la télé in 2021.

Young Rose is an attractive girl dressing up as if she is about to embark on an exciting social outing, when a woman she does not know, approximately her age, rings her doorbell and introduces herself as Angela, a housewife and wife to a man who is cheating on her with Rose. Angela is temperamental and possessive, wants to save her marriage, and openly attacks Rose. She is surprised when Rose starts defending herself in a conciliatory manner, acknowledging what she is doing, sharing that it does not make much sense to her either – and that she is seriously contemplating suicide. The relationship between the two women slowly begins to change, and a surprising ending awaits when it becomes clear that they share some common traits.

Lia Fortes is a 19-year-old filmmaker born in Rio de Janeiro, where she is currently studying film at Universidade Federal Fluminense. She is one of the founders of the independent film production collective Apolo Filmes, and has won three awards and earned more than 20 nominations at film festivals around the world. She has taken part in the organisation of renowned film events, such as Festival do Rio, the largest film festival in Latin America, and participated in the making of more than ten short fiction films, as well as one feature-length film. She currently works independently as a film editor, cinematographer and assistant director, and has recently started working as an intern in the music content analysis department at Globo, the largest media and communication company not only in Brazil but the whole of Latin America.

A hard is throwing pebbles on a surface that looks like a frozen pond. It is a metaphorical and auto-discursive construct that invites viewers to establish a personal and distinct relationships to the images on the screen. On a metaphorical and connotative level, a dialogue develops that generates different angles of reflection.

Yolanda Moreno Torrado was born and raised in the Spanish city of Badajoz, where she still lives today. She graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca and teaches sculpture and audiovisual media in public high schools. She develops her work through different disciplines, from photography and painting to graphic design and video art. In recent years, she has mostly focused on creative photography, experimental video, and short documentary and fiction film. She has made two short films so far, the documentary Con Pájaros y sin ellos and the fiction film Entre Líneas. She also works for the organisation CinHomo, where she designs posters and graphic solutions.

Something strange and apparently terrible is happening in the spaces of the Infinity Arts Academy in Chicago. There are distraught people running down a corridor, and scattered belongings, shoes and cell phones with unanswered calls are abandoned on stairwells and floors. A dark-haired woman is hurriedly checking the classrooms, side corridors and toilets. In one of the classrooms, a man is standing in front of the window, looking out, his hand dripping with blood. The woman, in hurry and in fear, manages to find a couple of students and get them to safety outside.

Ruby Fuller and Jacob Schindler are award-winning film students from Chicago, Illinois. Both have been studying film at the Infinity Arts Academy in Chicago for over five years, working intensively on film projects since the beginning of their studies – Ruby for a litter longer, since 2019, as a cinematographer, screenwriter and director, and Jacob since 2022, not only as a filming and technical assistant but also as a director and actor. To date, they have made several short films together that have successfully screened at international film festivals, with some receiving awards. Their most notable short is Bicycle, the story of the life of a bicycle as it interacts with its five keepers, which won them the Golden Lion Award for Best Long Narrative Film and Best Screenplay at the All American High School Film Festival in New York in 2022.

One evening, four masked motorcyclists set out to rob an illegal casino located in an underground garage. When they reach their destination, armed with guns and an explosive device, they head towards a small room and throw the latter inside. Before the smoke clears, they barge into the room and, met with almost no resistance, overpower and disarm a group of men who had been drinking and playing cards. Nothing seems to stand in their way of carrying out the heist.

Greek author Apostolis Gkanatsios was born in 1996. By profession, he is a network programmer and front-end developer, and has produced a number of works as a designer over the past few years as well. In his free time, Apostolis is a poet whose first collection of poetry is soon to be published. On top of that, he is an avid cinephile; the film we are showing is his debut project, inspired by the works of his favourite directors.

After having sex with his girlfriend, who is not very happy with how things went down, a young Taiwanese man goes out into the night from their shared apartment. There are not many people on the streets, and the young man is quite thirsty. He stops at a store to buy a can of beer, then continues to wander around the city, feeling increasingly nauseous both because of the beer and because of what had happened before. His father calls him soon after, and the young man tells him a story about being a diligent student. When his girlfriend calls shortly after that, he realises that she wants to end their relationship. This, however, is not the full extent of the problems the young man will have to face in the same night.

One evening, a middle-aged woman and her partner are making love in a house in the suburbs of an unnamed American city. When she later asks him where something is, he tells her that he doesn’t know because it’s not his house. As she goes to the bathroom, the presence of unusual energy is felt in the house. That energy lifts one of the photos of her with another man from the hallway wall and throws it on the floor. This is just the beginning of a series of supernatural events that lead to tragedy.

Sebastian Hou was born in China in 2001. Today, he is a student at Chapman University in the city of Orange in the county of the same name in California. He has been actively involved in film since his high school days; his 2019 short film Days was successfully screened at the All American High School Film Festival in the same year and is available on YouTube. The film we are showing won Best Thriller in Top Shorts International Film Festival’s monthly competition in June this year.

In 2020, on the day the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic in Macedonia, middle-aged lawyer Mira plants a bomb under the car belonging to her brother Stevo, hoping that this would save the whole family from disintegration. Not long after, she sees her estranged husband Kosta – whom she still loves despite their differences, just as he loves her – and their conversation, garnished with convulsive sex, gradually reveals the details of a story riddled with misunderstandings and wrong decisions, but not lacking in love and passion. A year later, the grand opening of a movie theatre called Love, owned by Stevo, is taking place. Stevo became disabled as a result of the explosion and, by opening the cinema, fulfilled Kosta’s lifelong wish.

Jani Bojadži was born in Strumica, North Macedonia, in 1970 in a family of refugees of the Greek Civil War. After finishing high school in Macedonia, he studied film art at the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. As a writer, screenwriter, producer and director, Jani is equally active in film, theatre and television. He also teaches film directing at the International University Europa Prima in Skopje and serves as the chief executive officer of the Macedonian TV station Alfa TV. He has been active in film and television for two decades, often working on international productions. The films he has worked on most notably include his own projects Krajot na svetot from 2010, Mocking of Christ from 2018 and the film we are showing. This year saw the premiere of the acclaimed and eagerly watched TV drama Bistra voda, an ambitious project that Jani co-wrote and directed.

When he takes on the case of the kidnapping of a girl named Laura Silverman, the private investigator does not know what kind of trouble the case is about to get him into. The girl’s kidnapping hides many secrets, and uncovering them will take the detective to the edge of the abyss where nothing is as it seems.

Uruguayan filmmaker Eduardo Granadsztejn was born in 1982 in Montevideo. He studied digital animation and audiovisual production at Universidad ORT Uruguay from 2004 to 2009 and specialised in professional animation, character animation and post-production at the Animation Campus in Montevideo during 2007 and 2008. He is a film director, actor and one of the co-founders of the production company RQM Media. His compatriot and colleague Marcelo Sanguinetti was born in 1989, also in Montevideo, and graduated with a degree in audiovisual communication from the same university, Universidad ORT Uruguay. He works as first and second assistant director, collaborating with several production companies, and considers the experience he gained while working as a cameraman and editor on feature-length documentary projects to be invaluable for his work.

In an Iranian province, next to large cornfields and not far from a railway line, two men pull a third man’s bloodied body out of a vehicle. While they panic about getting rid of the body, a car pulls up near them, and two young women get out. One of them is looking for a great photo location – and this seems to be an ideal spot. The two women go walking through the cornfield, and the two men carrying the body realise they have to run. Sooner or later, their paths will inevitably cross.

Iranian screenwriter and director Javad Mozdabadi was born in 1973 in the holy city of Mashhad. After studying industrial design at Tehran University, his film career began with acting engagements in a series of television projects, most notably Brilliance and Rainland. He made his directing debut in 2003 with the short documentary Yek ghafas azadi and went on to make many more short films and television projects in the following two decades, most of them very well-received. He simultaneously worked on several popular TV series and directed several feature-length films, the most widely recognised among them being Ice Cream, No Entrance for the Blind and Ababel.

In the Iraq-Iran War, the Kurdish city of Sardasht in western Iran was attacked by Iraqi forces, becoming the first target of a deliberate chemical attack against Iranian civilians. Mustard bombs were dropped on the city on Sunday, June 28, 1987, at 4:15 p.m. For most of the residents of Sardasht, the afternoon before the catastrophic event was quite a normal one. Those walking by the river were occupied by different affairs: a young man successfully wooed a girl, a boy bought a colourful toy from a toy seller, a man in the company of a woman considered picking up a dropped apple, some had fun riding bicycles. No one suspected that their idyllic moments would soon be disrupted by fighter planes, with tragic consequences.

Iranian artist Pejman Alipour was born in 1975 in the city of Sardasht in the western part of Iran, the first city in the world whose residents became victims of mustard gas chemical weapons, killing more than a thousand and gravely injuring more than eight thousand civilians, many of whom were left permanently disabled. Pejman still lives in Iran, in the city of Mahabad. He has an MA in animation directing from the University of Art in Tehran, and actively works as a director, animator, illustrator and caricaturist. The film we are showing is his fourth short animated film to date included, among other festivals, in the competition section of Animafest Zagreb 2022. Previously, in the period from 2000 to 2006, he made the films Cold War, Small Heart and I Don’t Know the Way My House. He also participated in the making of various animated series, most notably several seasons of the popular series Injoriyeh and two seasons of Hamin hala, hamin farda. He was worked as a producer and screenwriter on the animated series Adi and Bodi.

At first, the scene in front of the camera suggests that it might be capturing a desert landscape – cracked soil under vibrating air, swallowing the horizon. But then, birdsong and birds flying into the shot point to something else. Soon after, a group of people enter the shot from the left; they appear to be a family consisting of several adults and several children. They are walking in the area along the Amazon that, shot under certain circumstances and from certain angles, takes on almost surrealistic qualities.

Brazilian author Lucas de Albuquerque Rebelo was born in 1991 in the city of Santarém in the state of Pará. He moved to the city of Belém in the same state in 2014, first to study multimedia production at Universidade Federal do Pará for the next five years, then going on to specialise in audiovisual production at Instituto de Estudos Superiores de Amazónia (IESAM). He began working more intensively in film in 2018, when he assisted in the production of several dance videos. A year later, he started producing his own videos and posting them online. In addition to video, he also creates music, digital photography and digital art in general, and occasionally writes. Whatever he does, the focal point of his activity is above all experimentation and improvisation. The film we are showing is the first segment of a web series which aims to portray the nature of the Amazon, specifically the beach along the Tapajós River, in the realest and most concrete way possible.

Cato Fossum lives and works in Oslo. His primary occupation is distributing independent and art films. He does this under the auspices of the film agency Jack, which he co-founded. He is also a film critic and publicist whose works have been published in various publications and media. The film we are showing is his first short film after the short video Why Jack? made in 2021 as part of the Mapping Distribution: New Norwegian Initiative project, in which he introduced his agency. The video explores alternative ways of distributing independent art films and was created as part of the collaboration between Kunstnernes Hus Cinema from Oslo and On & For Production and Distribution from Brussels.

Due to a multitude of obligations, our daily lives rarely allow for the opportunity to slow down and take a break. Still, what we should do is to stop, even if only for a short time, in order to free ourselves at least a little from the pressure of the powerful forces that influence and direct us. In contrast, in the story we are watching, it is as if nothing is happening at all. And yet, we just have to be patient. A cow lies peacefully and chews her cud by the side of a dusty dirt road. The cow’s utter calmness gives the scene the impression of a painting. From time to time, she wags her tail to ward off flies and shakes her big black ears. She is alone, seemingly left on the sidelines, practically at the edge of the frame. It is a scene that is not too unusual but not entirely ordinary either.

János Kis is a Hungarian avant-garde author and photographer who studied sociology and film. In his work, he aims to capture the passing of time, slow it down and make it visible, while thematically focusing on the unpredictability of everyday life. He shoots minimalistic projects using long static or tracking shots. As much as possible, he prefers to use natural light, low lighting and audio recorded on location. He often shoots in only one very long take, paying attention to diegetic sounds outside of the frame. His work questions the non-narrative forms of experimental film while capturing unpredictable occurrences in everyday life. His aspiration is to open up space for a theoretical re-examination of under-explored aspects of the temporary and that which lies beyond, in which he is guided by Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of synchronicity. The film that we are showing was shot in Cambodia.

At a time when China, like the rest of the world, is affected by the coronavirus pandemic, an elderly woman with a mask is sitting on a bench in a small square between buildings. It is evening, darkness is slowly descending, and the woman is evidently bored. That is, until her peer, also masked, approaches the bench that she is sitting on. They strike up a conversation, mostly about the other woman’s children and grandchildren; she is pleased with how her family members have succeeded in life. But the women also comment on the weather; it has been a long time since it last rained. It then occurs to the second woman that, at their age, it would be good for both to move as much as possible, and the two women go for a walk in the square hand in hand.

Lai Chun was born and raised in China, where he still lives today. He is a poet and film director who has been making films since 2021. He has made three documentaries to date, a short that is screening at the festival, and the somewhat longer documentaries Poetry · Football · Country School and The World Outside My Windows, in which he subtly dabbles in fiction.

Emeric Gallego was born in Paris in 1995. He has been in love with film from an early age, which he credits to the fact that his parents did not properly look after him, so cinema and film became his main occupations. When he started film studies at Université Paris 8, he began to suffer from eating disorders and other ailments. A woman played a crucial part in helping him overcome them and, ever since, women have always played central roles in his films, which he considers to be a golden rule of his authorship. Emeric is also an award-winning photographer whose work focuses on portraits and travel series. He takes all of his photographs in natural lighting as he is keenly aware that this emphasises the authenticity of the subject. During the past eight years, he directed around twenty short films, shooting and writing many of them as well.

A funeral is taking place at a cemetery on the edge of a Moroccan village. The area is desolate and barren, and the funeral procession is approaching a spot where several people are digging a grave. It is a traditional ceremony, and the one most affected by the death is a boy. He is saying goodbye to one of his closest family members. His pain is immense, and he will be the last one to linger, crying, on the mound.

Moroccan author Karim Tajouaout was born in 1992 in the city of Oujda in the north of the country. He works as a director, cinematographer and photographer. After graduating with a degree in applied arts in 2013, he started editing and special effects studies at L’Institut Spécialisé Métiers du Cinéma in the city of Ouarzazate the following academic year. He later specialised in the field of audiovisual arts, graduating in 2016.

A family is celebrating a little girl’s first birthday. Everything is set: the table, with a clean tablecloth, a cake with a single birthday candle. The little girl’s family is all gathered together: her mother is busy trying to make everything go smoothly; her grey-haired grandfather is wishing his granddaughter a long and happy life, her father with her older brother, and another man. At first, everything seems to be going really well, until Grandpa complains about a strange pressure in his chest.

Turkish director Ali Şenses was born in 1967 in the city of Saray in the district of the same name in the province of Tekirdağ, European part of Turkey. He is married with a child and currently works as a family physician in the city of Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey. He has made several short and three feature-length films to date, and the film we are showing is his second short film, filmed a year after his debut titled MAVI. The film was successfully screened at a series of festivals, including the 6th edition of the International Uşak Winged Seahorse Short Film Festival, the Montreal Independent Film Festival, the 4th AFSAD Festival and the Eternal International Film Festival, where it won Best Film Experiment in 2023.

Young Florence Bright is a fashion design student working for a large fashion house. One day, she decides to use her lunch break to stay in the room with suits and women’s hats to try to practice something that had been bothering her for a while – she has fallen deeply and passionately in love, but the person in question is not aware of this. And so, Florence decides to practice approaching the person and telling them how she feels. But are things really that simple?

Melanie Hierhammer is a German musician, poet and prose writer who has passionately devoted herself to filmmaking in recent years as well. She jokingly claims that, for her, it all started at the age of three, when she played the popular children’s song Alle meine Entchen on the kids’ piano. A few more years had to pass before she wrote her first poems, short stories, and later several piano compositions. She emphasises that impacting people is the most important thing for her in everything she does, from music and literature to film. Her piano compositions are partly wistful and partly classical or sensually playful ballads. Each of her works tells a story, thematising life, emotions, people, dissonance or contrasts – whether a discrepancy between reality and wants, love and loss, or pain and hope. This is also the theme of her independent screenwriting and directorial debut – the film that we are showing. Her work on the film benefited from the experience she gained while working as a director on the popular TV series The Challenge Show.

As a subjective camera follows the descent of an escalator, a male voice in the background is proclaiming that a fully coherent and integrated social order cannot be maintained under only one functional principle. A different and unique perspective of society is presented to the audience as the narrator questions the pragmatic idea of modernity. He challenges the way in which maintaining the social status quo selects and marginalises certain social elements based on whether and when they support or disrupt it, ultimately offering the possibility of changing the current dominant social structure.

American-Mexican author Gabriela Villasenor is an award-winning director and artist whose work encompasses a wide range of fields. Her fiction and documentary films have been shown on five continents, at prestigious festivals, in museums, on digital platforms and TV. She is the founder and director of the production company and media arts organisation Tekños Films, which organises affordable film workshops and provides access to technical equipment to emerging filmmakers and community organisations. She started practicing art as a child, when she took her first acting steps in the theatre. Her affinity for the stage and performing arts continued throughout her childhood with performances in the stage productions of Snow White, Annie and Jesus Christ Superstar. What she likes most about acting is the possibility of sharing emotions and warmth with the audience and her colleagues. Her interest in film naturally followed after many years of doing theatre for children and youth. She started making short films during her high school years, which had led to the opportunity to participate in more ambitious film productions in college, when she not only acted but also worked as a producer, screenwriter, cinematographer and editor. Eventually, she began to write and direct her own films, which are now being selected for festivals around the world.

Integrating itself within the micro-level of high-speed cosmic dust particles, the nanogenerator encodes models, conjectures and possibilities using an unknown protocol. The process encompasses firmly elaborated scientific theories and theses, doubts and phantasms, imaginaries and fringe discourses at different scales. The interior architectonics of the pataphysical machine are scaled up from the nano-level and render emergence with their movements. The spiral rotation with variable speed within the particle simulates, but potentially also realises formation. The top of the null cone represents the process of energy exchange in the form of absorption and emission of photons. At the centre point is the observer in the present moment as an interactive part of formation with an indeterminate future in the making. The film is not an attempt at scientific visualisation but an energetic construct.

Vladislav Knežević was born in Zagreb in 1967. After studying directing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, he went on to study at the Audio-Visual Department of De Vrije Academie in The Hague. He has been involved in experimental film, video and sound since 1988 and started working as a director of various television formats and programmes five years later. He is a media artist and director who creates using recorded video material, digital photography, micro-animation, stereoscopic 3D and generative electronic sound in an attempt to create a new film-watching experience. His interests revolve around concepts related to the marginal areas of reality categories, the experience of new media images, digital aesthetics, utilitarian/fantastic constructs and the consequences of technological and scientific research for the human experience. He is the initiator and organiser of the programme Reference to Difference, a TV programme about experimental film and video called Videodrom, co-author of the TV programme about animated film Animatik and the co-founder of the international festival of experimental film and video 25 FPS. His experimental and art films have screened at over 200 festivals and exhibitions in Europe, USA, Australia, Japan and Brazil.

A portrayal of part of the operation of Iceland’s largest hydroelectric power plant, Kárahnjúkar. In order to build it, it was necessary to submerge the second largest unexplored natural area in Europe, a move that destroyed a unique ecosystem to provide foreign aluminium manufacturers operating in Iceland with affordable, cheap energy. The film aims to test the integrity of the viewer: on the one hand, under the impact of the palpitation-inducing changes in what they observe and, on the other, in the face of external forces beyond their control.

Marcellvs L. was born in 1980 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and has been living between Berlin and Seyðisfjörður, Finland, since 2006. He works in both video and sound, and has exhibited extensively in Finland and abroad since the mid-2000s. Over the past twenty years, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, including the 27th São Paulo Biennial in 2006, the 9th Lyon Biennale the following year and the 16th Biennale of Sydney in 2008. His work was also exhibited at MAC – Musée d'art contemporain in Lyon, the Helsinki Art Museum, Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, Living Art Museum in Reykjavik, Singapore Art Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe and the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. His awards include the Ars Viva Prize for 2007/08 and the Grand Prize from the 51st International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen in 2005.

While several people on thin long tables grab and throw fish using sticks, bird’s-eye view shows one man drawing several specimens of the fish on paper. He seems to be aware of human kind’s indiscriminate exploitation of the sea and lack of concern for nature and the environment.

Asghar Basharati was born in 1977 on Iran’s Qeshm Island. He has been doing photography for seventeen years and actively pursued film in the past three years as well. He is ready for and open to new knowledge and experiences, whereby he is especially attracted to experimental films, a genre in which he believes himself to be quite skilled already. He has already won more than 30 awards for his work on film.

about the author

Somewhere in Europe, a Greek owes money to a Frenchman, who in indebted to a Slovenian woman, and she to an Italian who owes money to the Greek. A German woman does not owe anyone, she just wants a quiet life and careless dreams, while a British seeks a way out of an uncomfortable situation he had ended up in. The "invisible hand od Adam Smith" – an expression used by economists to describe the self-regulating nature of the market and the whole global economy – will intervene in all of their plans and struggles.

Director and screenwriter Slobodan Maksimović was born in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in 1975. He graduated in Film and TV Directing from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana. His first student short film 1/2 screened at the 60th Cannes Film Festival's Tous Les Cinémas du Monde. His short films 1/2 and AgapE have participated in competition programmes at more than thirty international festivals, winning 14 international awards. The film Hvala za Sunderland is his first feature-length film, which won four Vesna awards at the 15th Slovenian Film Festival in Portorož, including the Best Film award. His second feature-length film Nika was named the best youth film of the Motovun Film Festival and screened at all major youth film festivals. His short one-take film The Invisible Hand of Adam Smith screened at about fifty international film festivals and won eighteen international awards. He also directs utilitarian films and has directed several episodes of the popular TV series Pozabljeni, Mame and Primeri inspektorja Vrenka. The biggest success of his career to date is directing the film for children and youth titled Kapa from 2022, an international European production which became a big regional hit and won several awards at festivals in Sarajevo and Portorož.