<3 / Less Than Three

What happens to women who mysteriously disappear? Are they ever seen again? Do state authorities investigate as they should, or are the only ones truly searching for the women the ones they left behind? A compilation film that reveals several periods in history during which scores of women disappeared without a trace under various circumstances.

During the day, Oxana paints frames as a man; at night, she puts on her female skin. Oxana is a transsexual living in Moldova, where even expressions of tolerance towards sexual minorities can be dangerous. This short film is an intimate look at gender and at the social isolation of people denied to right to their own identity.

This film is the video diary of a Ukrainian mother from Mariupol, a city close to the turbulent Donetsk Region. A series of several-minute long records of commonplace views from a window, following tracks in the snow, and strolls in the surroundings form a loving visual message for her daughter in Kyiv.

This film about the life of Cubans without a roof over their heads shows how they go about their everyday activities: preparing food, discussing politics, singing songs, reading old texts by Fidel Castro, and sleeping off a hangover. Fourteen minutes of detailed observation of people overlooked by others. 

A look at the Balkans migration route in December 2015. Throngs of refugees make their way to Dobova, Slovenia. They get on the waiting buses in an orderly fashion and enter the system. The Slovenian government has had the journey under control for a month. Confined to a single file line, the migrants go through checks, inspections, and wait for the next step.

"She was defending her son like a tigress," is how the protagonist of the experimental film describes his traumatizing encounter with death. The circumstances of the incident are somewhat unclear but what is essential is the way its eyewitnesses reacted and the feelings it provoked in the narrator which are portrayed by the film through a powerful montage of black-and-white shots.

The story of a young girl looks into the issues surrounding the self-harm phenomenon. It seems that physical pain relieves inner anxiety and loneliness. Teenagers perceive their own bodies as the only thing they can influence and control; pain and blood can induce a sense of independence and true existence. Despite the scars all over her body, our heroine finally manages to find a way to come to terms with herself and her life.

The film is a skit on the parallels between a caretaker and a security guard embodied by the character of a young man who keeps watching over everything all the time. Repetitive and automated everyday tasks are accentuated by monotonous aesthetics of the camera and a slow-moving pace, introducing the audience into the world of Korean pragmatic mentality and sense of responsibility. 

Saudi Arabian cinema only recently emerged from thirty-five years of being an underground phenomenon. Before it was legalized, Bentley Brown used his childhood home movie camera to record filmmakers working in the town of Jeddah. The film’s melancholy mood is underscored by the voiceover of the women who form most of the film crew.

This silent portrait of a multipurpose compound that serves as a storage site, maximum security space, and luxury showroom slowly turns into a bizarre black-and-white science-fiction movie with the building as the main character. Despite its abstract nature, the meticulously composed rhythmic combination of austere, carefully framed shots lacking any other context is a fitting architectural commentary on the spirit of our era.

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.

“Have you ever stepped on an anthill and not given it a second thought?” asked a military drone pilot. Intimate stories of professionals about their routine everyday job: monitoring the movement of targets on the ground. Accompanied by almost meditative images from a drone’s perspective, the film poses an ethical dilemma regarding the consequences of pressing a single button.