BÉTON AMER

Chloé Simonin, Margot Lançon

Switzerland, Greece / 2019, 16 min

At dawn, a group of friends meet on the rooftop of a school in Athens. It's their ritual. As it overlooks the city, this place is symbolic and it will be theirs until the next morning.
The film tells the story of a group of teenagers wandering on the peripheries. They will cross a place kept under surveillance: Hellinikon. For six decades, Hellinikon was the only airport in Athens and it also hosted the Olympic Games infrastructure. Since then, weeds have invaded the ruins of sports facilities. As if sedimented, all the marks of its past are still inscribed in Hellinikon. Before the site is razed and transformed, before its memory disappears, the youths decide to get in it.

CONCRETE FORMS OF RESISTANCE

Nick Jordan

Lebanon, UK / 2019, 27 min

Filmed in Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon the city’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The film presents layered themes of progress and crisis, material and memory, contrasting the Utopian vision of the original plans with the realities of religious conflict, regional instability and rising inequalities.

A PASSAGE

Felix Kalmenson, Rouzbeh Akhbari

Armenia / 2019, 17 min

‘A Passage’ is a film which tackles the political economy and social ecology of border infrastructures in Southern Armenia. By focusing on two significant events that illustrate the dominant political shifts in the region, ‘A Passage’ looks at how processes of rapid militarization and neoliberalization have restructured these borders. These two events include the recent erasure of the historic Yerevan-Baku Railway; and the upcoming construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone (FEZ) planned precisely where the removed train infrastructure was housed. The film stitches together various contested sites of the region including Meghri’s abandoned airport, a functioning Soviet-era Copper and Molybdenum mine, a 16th century church the abandoned Karchivan and Meghri train stations and an abandoned rail tunnel that bridges the geopolitical boundary of Nakhchivan and Armenia.

WE WAITED UNTIL NIGHTFALL

Wendy V. Muñiz, Guillermo Zouain

Dominican Republic / 2019, 18 min

We waited until nightfall revisits repurposed cinemas through hunting images and sounds that trace the practices of belonging still embodied in the theaters’ remains.

CONCRETE AND UNCLEAR

Lera Malchenko, Oleksandr Hants

Ukraine / 2019, 31 min

In the center of city Dnipro, Ukraine, during the 50 years abandoned hotel ‘PARUS’ (SAIL) is existing. It had to become the symbol of the grandiosity of Dnipropetrovsk as the homeland of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. However, it has never been opened — the construction stopped on the eve of collapse of the Soviet Union.

From the 2000 the PARUS is being depicted like a finished building on calendars, in memes, in art-projects and visualizations. For a lot of people in Dnipro it is already the symbol of the city, although it is unfinished.

SH_T HAPPENS

Michaela Mihalyi, David Štumpf

Czech Republic / 2019, 13 min

An apartment building full of self-centred inhabitants: an utterly exhausted caretaker and his sexually frustrated wife, a widowed deer drowning his sorrows in loads of alcohol... While trying to cope with their problems, they find themselves in a hard-to-resolve triangle, seeking absurd and…

ELI

Nate Milton

USA / 2019, 11 min

A true story from the realms of high strangeness, magical thinking, and manic delusion.

AND THEN THE BEAR

Agnès Patron

France / 2019, 14 min

That very night, houses will burn. Men and women will tremble. Hordes of children will come together and howl as they dance alone on the ashes like wild bears. It only takes one shout to wake them all from their slumber!

STORY

Jolanta Bankowska

Poland / 2019, 4 min

Story' is a reflection about modern man in the age of omnipresent technology. Looking through stories - a popular function in many social media platforms - we see people who are lonely, lost or already indifferent about reality surrounding them. Action takes place during one day and it's told by short, often (auto)ironic scenes, where virtual world sinks to reality.

ANIMALS

Tue Sanggaard

Denmark / 2019, 6 min

Losing all sense of rationality, they go wild in order to ensure their own survival.

APFELMUS

Alexander Gratzer

Austria / 2019, 7 min

While two uniformed guards divulge themselves as spineless beings, animals carry on philosophical dialogues about important existential issues. At the same time the solution to one of the most essential problems is apparent: you just have to wash, peel, cut, and mash it. The apple.

WOOD CHILD AND HIDDEN FOREST MOTHER

Stephen Irwin

UK / 2019, 9 min

Deep in the forest, a hunter encounters a strange creature he cannot kill. In a deceptively colourful and childish graphic style, Irwin evokes a bleak universe. A forest provides the backdrop for a surreal rite of passage: the male hunter becomes female, and he sacrifices his own body as food for the forest children.

CHICKEN OF THE DEAD

Julien David

France / 2019, 10 min

Bernard Lepique is the head of Quasi, a firm specializing in manufacturing chickens that are half-organic, half-antibiotic. During the launch of his new chicken range, nothing goes as planned.

THE LONELY ORBIT

Benjamin Morard, Frederic Siegel

Switzerland / 2019, 10 min

Leaving for his dream job, a satellite technician keeps solitude at bay by constantly texting with his old friends. After neglecting his duties a satellite leaves its orbit which causes the worlds network to collapse.

BLIND VAYSHA

Theodore Ushev

Canada / 2016, 8 min

The tale of a girl who could see the past and the future simultaneously and respectively with each eye, but never the present.

TOWER BAWHER

Theodore Ushev

Canada / 2006, 3 min

A salute to Russian constructivist art.

TZARITZA

Theodore Ushev

Canada / 2007, 7 min

This animated short by Theodore Ushev combines warmth, humour and magic in a story about a young girl who misses her grandmother. When Lili finds a tzaritza (magic shell) along the seashore, she hatches a plan to bring her Grandma from Bulgaria to Montreal to make her father happy.

GLORIA VICTORIA

Theodore Ushev

Canada / 2013, 7 min

Recycling elements of surrealism and cubism, this animated short by Theodore Ushev focuses on the relationship between art and war. Propelled by the exalting "invasion" theme from Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony (No. 7), the film presents imagery of combat fronts and massacres, leading us from Dresden to Guernica, from the Spanish Civil War to Star Wars. It is at once a symphony that serves the war machine, that stirs the masses, and art that mourns the dead, voices its outrage and calls for peace.

BLOOD MANIFESTO

Theodore Ushev

Canada / 2016, 2 min

Director Theodore Ushev uses his own blood to animate struggles with injustice in the world.

LIPSETT DIARIES

Theodore Ushev

Canada / 2010, 14 min

A descent into the maelstrom of anguish that tormented Arthur Lipsett, a famed Canadian experimental filmmaker who died at 49.

THE PHYSICS OF SORROW

Theodore Ushev

Canada / 2019, 27 min

A saga of childhood reveries and adult regrets that is also the first-ever fully animated film using encaustic painting.