Human rights are inviolable. However, children and young people face daily discrimination, limit access to education and social protection, harassment of their potential and even threats to their lives. Every year, millions of your peers fall victim to human trafficking, slavery and migration processes.

TEEN SPIRIT is a selection of six stories about children and adolescents from around the world that explain the importance of protecting children's rights as equal members of society, regardless of their origin, place of residence, race, language or religion.

Curated by Sasha Prokopenko

Suitable for people 12 years of age or older

Death, Kidnapping, Child Abuse, Human trafficking

AT HOME

Luisina Anderson

Argentina | 2019, 11 min

Two friends, Camila and Sofia, aged 12, are having breakfast one morning, dancing and playing throughout the house, while on tv a news program investigates a femicide.

IN THIS LAND WE'RE BRIEFLY GHOSTS

Chen-Wen Lo

Taiwan | 2019, 16 min

Myanmar, 2013. Based on actual events, this human tragedy follows a 12-year-old child soldier, Su Su Myat, and her mute brother, Tin Min, who are imprisoned after deserting their first combat mission. Punished with no food or water, Su Su Myat is forced to choose between killing her seriously ill brother for her own survival, or risk dying with him.

EXAM

Sonia K. Hadad

Iran | 2019, 15 min

A teenage girl gets involved in the process of delivering a pack of cocaine to its client, and gets stuck in a weird cycle of occurrences.

BROTHER

Beppe Tufarulo

Italy | 2019, 15 min

Two Brothers, One Dream, a Sea in Between.

COMRADES

Kanas Liu

Hong Kong | 2019, 15 min

The crisis caused by the “Extradition bill” has continued for more than one month since June 2019. As the HK government has not replied to the 5 major demands, citizens march and protest every weekend. The police continually escalates their force against protestors.
On 28th July, 2019, there was a clash between police and protestors in west Hong Kong Island. 49 protestors were arrested. Protesters helped each other to prevent anyone being caught alone.

GOOD NIGHT

Anthony Nti

Belgiu, Ghana | 2019, 20 min

A foreigner in Ghana gets an assignment from his gang to recruit kids for a risky job that will take place later that evening. He finds Prince and Matilda, two lively kids and good friends, and plans to hand them over to the gang. After spending the day with them, he starts to question his decision and how it will affect their future.

How to live if you were born with Donald Trump's face? How can masculinity be tested at the badminton tournament? How to behave if you want to avoid hurting everyone's feelings? How to fit into the team of millennials if you've never had coffee before? Answers to these and other questions will be found in this year's selection of comedy shorts that are connected by the light satire of Western society.

Curated by Olga Gusiatynska

Death, Blood

MARVIN’S NEVER HAD COFFEE BEFORE

Andrew Carter

USA | 2020, 8 min

Marvin Wexler tries coffee for the first time and desperately wants to talk to someone about it.

SHUTTLECOCK

Tommy Gillard

UK | 2020, 13 min

Carl is forced to question what it means to be a man when a new, mysterious member of the badminton club joins in with the charity tournament.

SWIMMER

Jonatan Etzler

Sweden | 2020, 13 min

There’s a man floating around in an indoor swimming pool. The police order him to get out, to be arrested, but the man refuses. Swimmer is a humorous short film about a dramatic arrest that turns into an anticlimax.

MISS FORTUNATE

Ella Jones

UK | 2020, 15 min

Scarlet’s mum has died, leaving her with two cats, a huge tax bill and a crush on a boy she can’t talk to. A comedy-drama about grief, in which a young woman loses her mother, and finds herself.

THE AFFECTED

Rikke Gregersen

Norway | 2020, 13 min

Minutes before takeoff, a situation occurs, preventing an airplane from departing. In an attempt to prevent the deportation of one passenger, another refuses to sit down forcing the pilot to take a political stand.

BOUND

Joe Carter

UK | 2020, 14 min

When a single mum from Leith and a middle-class Scottish geek wake up handcuffed together, the differences in their lifestyles are put to one side as they attempt to break free in this farcical dark comedy.

GRAB THEM

Morgane Dziurla-Petit

Sweden | 2020, 13 min

Sixty-year-old Sally longs for love and happiness. Lately, her search has been complicated by the fact that she resembles the current American president. One man's crazy assault on the world is a lonely woman's burden.

The topic of sexuality has long ceased to be a private matter. It's fun to talk about sex, and the Midnight Sexy Shorts program will show you it is possible in any form. Get ready to glimpse at the most remote corners of your consciousness, where the nature of your understanding of sexuality lies. Here, body language, unveiled human fantasies, and sensuality, fuse in real ecstasy.

No taboos or forbidden grounds. This is a case when ethical concerns and moral contemplations are better left behind the cinema doors.

Blood, Death

SQUEEGEE

Morgan Krantz

USA, Canada | 2020, 10 min

High-powered CEO meets high-rise window-washer for an erotic rendezvous on opposite sides of her skyscraper window.

FLEX

Matt Porter

USA | 2020, 16 min

Charles explores the gray areas of his own sexuality after going through an unexpected breakup.

ADALAMADRINA

Carlota Oms

Spain | 2018, 10 min

While she claims to be an expert in sex and love on YouTube, Ada can barely speak to her gym trainer, with whom she's madly in love with. When she sets her sights on him, everything changes.

HOLD ME TIGHT

Mélanie Robert-Tourneur

Belgium, France | 2021, 6 min

In the heart of a dark forest, two silhouettes meet, attract and repel each other in an explosive bridal
parade. Hold Me Tight is a bittersweet romance.

SUMMER HIT

Berthold Wahjudi

Germany | 2019, 19 min

Laia from Spain and Emil from Iceland are Erasmus students in Munich. After having sex for a couple of times, Emil professes his love to Laia - but she panics and runs away. Now the two have to figure out whether they are more than just a summer fling.

1-1

Naures Sager

Sweden | 2020, 7 min

Ayman's sex date with Jonas gets crashed by his friends Amirah and Samir which takes a positive turn.

HOT SPOT

Anaïs Couet-Lannes

France | 2021, 14 min

A “hot spot”, in genealogy, is a hypothetic zone of magma formation based within a planet’s coat. Nowadays, knowledge on hot spots is still very incomplete, as much as the ones about female orgasm. When Adèle has to deal with her parents’ funeral, she has an everlasting orgasm.

If you are bold and ready for mind games and absurd discussions on the most unexpected topics, your destination is SHORT ATTACK.

Verbal abuse

EAT THE RAINBOW

Brian Benson

USA | 2019, 20 min

EAT THE RAINBOW is a musical fable about an odd yet kind man named Bayani who moves into a conservative suburban neighborhood and disrupts the otherwise comfortable homogeny. He doesn’t look or act like anyone else which causes fear and panic and eventually a demand for him to leave the neighborhood. Cousin Wonderlette befriends Bayani and together they take on the opposition led by manipulative and unscrupulous realtor Lobelia Gerber.

HORRORSCOPE

Pol Diggler

Spain | 2019, 5 min

An ordinary schoolgirl's life unravels after an evil creature takes over her body. Only her mother, with the help of a strange doctor, will be able to save her.

WHITE GUYS SOLVE SEXISM

Christopher Guerrero

USA | 2019, 7 min

Plagued by nightmares of a broken world, Mike and Clark struggle to cope with their sorrow in a post-Weinstein culture. Revelations of the decades-long abuse by the infamous film executive has tainted every movie that has come to define them. These two cultural orphans begin to pick through Weinsteins films to uncover a pattern of sexism that has been all but clear to Mike’s beau, Veronica.

SEXY FURBY

Nicole Daddona, Adam Wilder

USA | 2020, 14 min

A suicidal girl's life changes when she encounters a man-sized Furby on a golf course.

BULLSHIT

Roxanne Stam

Netherlands | 2019, 5 min

BULLSHIT is a speechless tragicomedy about beautiful young Ella who works in a hip restaurant. When she has to poop she doesn't dare, there is only one toilet and she is the face of the joint. Moreover, she does not like to poop in public. When she has to go, her shit doesn't flush and someone is already knocking at the door... About embarrassing moments and keeping up appearances.

BROCCOLI

Eliott Fettweis

France | 2019, 19 min

Maurice and Julienne are expecting their first child. But the day of delivery, Julienne gives birth to a broccoli.

FLEX

David Strindberg, Josefin Malmén

Sweden | 2020, 4 min

He may be good enough, but is good enough? A slightly surreal comedic exploration of a bodybuilder’s self-loathing and self-loving.

MANEATER

Sandra Isacsson, Caroline Wallén

Sweden | 2019, 8 min

A group of men participates in a music video shoot. The female directors instruct them to eat bananas. But as simple as it may seem, the cast soon find themselves trying to fulfill the gradually more bizarre and challenging requests from the directors. How far are these men willing to stretch their boundaries? It's just bananas!

Do not look for the logic of what you are about to see — this is an unofficial slogan of our Animation Madness program. These are the cartoons that reload consciousness and open up new horizons of understanding animated films.

No more talking — true madness can not be described, it can only be seen and experienced.

And, as practice shows, it's best to do it in a friendly company of the same crazy like-minded people at KISFF.

The films contain several sequences with imagery and sustained flashing lights that may affect those who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy or have other photosensitivities.

AWKWARD

Nata Metlukh

USA | 2020, 4 min

A short film about awkward social moments.

MERCURY'S RETROGRADE

Zohar Dvir

UK | 2020, 6 min

A millennial is looking for her magic 8 ball inside her unconsciousness.

BYE LITTLE BLOCK! | PÁ KIS PANELOM!

Éva Darabos

Hungary | 2020, 9 min

A young woman learns that soon she will have to move from the blockhouse flat she lives in. After receiving the upsetting news from the owner of the flat she is overwhelmed with emotions. Her teardrop of farewell grows into a concrete monolith. When the drop hits the ground a surreal panorama of the blockhouse area - she used to call home - unfolds...

EASTER EGGS

Nicolas Keppens

Belgium, France, Netherlands | 2020, 15 min

The Chinese restaurant is empty. Mister Ping is gone. The exotic bird’s cage stands wide open. No one knows what happened. Two friends, Jason and Kevin, see this as a great opportunity to catch the birds and sell them for a great amount of money. But catching the birds ain’t as simple as it seems…

BABY ANGER | BÉBÉ COLÈRE

Jonathan Vinel, Caroline Poggi

France, Italy | 2021, 13 min

A lost baby, confronted with a contemporary world and its empty spaces, asks himself how to grow up.

FRIEND OF A FRIEND

Zachary Zezima

France | 2020, 14 min

A young man is sexually assaulted and subdues, punishes, then befriends his own attacker while confronting his past and the ambiguities of sexuality. Part fiction, part non-fiction, part autobiography and part dream, Friend of a Friend attempts to broaden the conversation around abuse and its motivations and implications, as well as the survivor vs. assailant dynamic and results of ostracism.

COCKPERA

Kata Gugić

Croatia | 2020, 4 min

A short opera inspired by Aesop's fable The Fighting Cocks and the Eagle.

MEGAMALL

Aline Schoch

Switzerland | 2020, 4 min

In a world of escalators, figures pursue their desire to consume in a given rhythm. One of the figures is sucked in at the end of an escalator and finds itself in a quiet, weightless room, where it joins the playing group. Meanwhile, the escalator world is thrown into confusion by a chips-mad dog. When the dog is also sucked in by an escalator, a power struggle between the two worlds begins.

GHOST DOGS

Joe Cappa

USA | 2020, 11 min

A home-alone rescue pup is visited by a host of deceased pups in this mind-bending short.