time and love and I

Every corner of the world can have its taxi driver: A Chinese city, overgrown by a forest of skyscrapers, pulsating vibrantly and with unpredictable traffic – and a 100km-long beach in northern New Zealand where you’ll be hard-pressed to pass a car going in the other direction. Two different worlds brought together by a profession that can take on absurd forms. The sound of the ocean, whose high tide laps at tire tracks. This taxi driver doesn’t use the road. Cigar in hand, he hurtles towards the horizon, where the sky meets the land reflected in the wet sand. 

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.

This black and white film depicts the movement of flocks of birds, a sequence of shots captured during a mild winter when migratory birds stayed in the Netherlands. Every evening they swarmed over the plains, creating moving ornaments in the sky.DETAIL:More and more birds join the huge flock, pouring through the skies like water in a vacuum, a spectacular thing to see, one that the participants are utterly unaware of.

A humorous conceptual game based on a simple idea – filming amateur swimmers as they get ready to jump from a 10-meter platform. The short scenes are a mixture of slapstick, miniature psychological portraits, and aesthetic studies of physical and verbal expressions and courage.

Using simple animation with outline figures and objects against a dark background that evokes nightmares, an anonymous 16-year-old youth, a repeat offender at a correctional facility for juveniles, recounts his criminal past caused by traumatic experiences with domestic abuse within his family.

An older woman living in Latvia regularly Skypes with her sister and daughter, who are stranded in the war zone in Eastern Ukraine, helplessly listening to their woes. Close-ups of her troubled face alternating with photographs from her family archives testify to the impact of armed conflict on specific human fates.DETAIL:“In some neighbourhoods people have been hiding in basements since August 3rd. Without water. Without electricity. We had electricity for 24 hours. And then the Ukrainian army blew it up again.”

The director revises a TV report which a local TV station shot with him and his family on the Rosh hashanah holiday in 1974. In the footage which seemed as an expression of interest in the Jewish culture at the time it was created, the author discovers antisemitic and racist tendencies. The title refers to a zoo where domesticated and tame animals can be fed and petted by the visitors.

"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.

A political visual poem about the current situation on the island of Lampedusa. The sharp contrast between the wrecks of refugee boats and the “most beautiful beach in the world according to Tripadvisor.com” disappears in a foggy mist of associations, melancholy ironic narration, grainy lyrical images, and ambient music.

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.

Over the past fifty years, the Mange-Garri chemical plant has drained more than 30 million tons of toxic sludge into the Mediterranean Sea while producing aluminum oxide. The surrounding area has quickly become a major dump, now covered in dark red ooze. The film draws attention to the unstoppable process of human self-destruction through a series of carefully selected shots of the industrial environment and the eyewitness reports of local residents.     “Our project is different from an investigation or a documentary in the strict sense, staying both closer to and further away from its subject. Closer since it is based on the lived part of the story, which comes from the photos and accounts of the residents. Further away to the extent that the places marked by environmental aberrations are symptoms, pathological mirrors of our acts on a large scale.” A. Piqueras, T. Verneret     Watch Short Joy films for free on DAFilms now and decide who will win the Audience Award. Voting ends on 29 October.

A conceptual film, balancing between a documentary and science fiction, explores environmental devastation in Iowa, USA that remains largely overlooked. Through microscopic images of plants, footage from university greenhouses, karst sinkholes with primary flora and fauna, or a dilapidated granary, the director conjures up a dystopic vision, radically restructuring relationships between man, nature and technology.      “The film imagines a future in which the changing climate and environmental conditions are recast as an active resistance to nature’s own devastation. … Plants, earth’s first communicators, are now its last. Humanity is but a blip.” E. Drummer      Watch Short Joy films for free on DAFilms now and decide who will win the Audience Award. Voting ends on 29 October.