<3 / Less Than Three

This minimalist six-minute film looks at the creation of animal life through time-lapse footage of an embryo’s development – a process universal to all animals, including people. The film follows, in microscopic detail, the development of an alpine newt in its translucent egg all the way from first cell division to moment of hatching.

For the past several months, the infamous refugee camp in Calais has been home for a young Afghani. His daily experiences and his feelings about life in the Jungle are reflected in his letters to his parents, which paint a picture of the inescapable situation of hopelessness. The young man keeps on repeating his mantra: “Soon I will be in England.”

Urbanism versus social entropy – working with this contrast, the film attempts to create an extreme portrait of one city district and one era. This experimental video full of unsettling mental and visual noise uses editing techniques based on computer algorithms to create a suggestive demonstration of the decline of the modernist idea.

The camera enters an office. The receptionist answers the telephone, her co-workers drink coffee during their break and talk about their plans. Later, there is a meeting. The stiffness of the situation reveals a hidden story. What exactly took place from June 2015 to September 2016 in the government building in Amsterdam?

The filmmaker tracks one aspect of life in a diverse Muslim community: prayer. This standard daily activity may take place even in the hustle and bustle of a busy street. This single-take short documentary focuses on people as they walk in front of the camera and uses details to classify them into different castes.

The confusion surrounding the situation on the evening of November 29, 2012 forces the public to examine it in detail. This documentary looks back at the events that culminated in the fatal shooting of Melissa Williams and Timothy Russell. Irrationally induced mass hysteria led to their vehicle being following by over 100 policemen.

Lucyna and Krzysztof are a long-time married couple who operate a salvage yard in a socially excluded area of Łódź, Poland. Patrycja Polkowska’s observational documentary captures how the couple transforms the salvage yard every day into an eccentric microcosm where all those who are offended or humiliated can find help.

They are happy together, but she gets a job offer in another country and he doesn’t want to go. He tries to sway her decision in his favour by offering to marry her… In its format, the film perhaps most closely resembles a music video, but besides music it also uses poetry and dance to tell its story. Shot on an iPhone 7 Plus. 

In the Western Sahara desert, large cars disintegrate into the sand, surrounded by a refugee camp. Against a yellow backdrop of sand, two small boys play in one of the wrecks. A static shot like a moving photograph of time, which flows slowly in the refugee camp.DETAIL:Hamdi and Ali are playing in a rusty car wreck. They take turns in singing songs that sound almost as if they were sang by grown men and not by two kids from a refugee camp.

An open conflict plays out in the Kosacks’ backyard between the pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian soldiers. This short documentary follows the life of the couple, who have refused to leave their home, and their new neighbors on the front line. Only Anatoly’s bees can fly freely from one side to the other.

An immobile camera monitors a path winding through the fields. The movements of the crowd are a harbinger of the interruption of the static image. The procession of refugees, under the watchful eye of military forces, winds in an orderly fashion through the Slovenian countryside. They march on, uninterested in the camera’s eye or in the revelation of their existence.

The film assembles images from the daily work of livestock breeders in the unhospitable Hungarian steppe, where the universal laws of time have ceased to apply. The interplay between the panoramic shots of the landscape combined with details of daily farm life create a gloomy vision of a place that dooms all who live there, human and animal alike, to decay.