short films

Obtaining official documents represents a coveted symbol of freedom and security for migrants. But how do you navigate the administrative labyrinth, where even a poorly cropped photo can mean your application is rejected? Set in Athens, the film explores the relationship between identity, race, and European bureaucracy. “I reason like you. I think like you.”

The Ukrainian town of Nikopol has been a prime target for Russian weapons for several reasons. A giant dam used to stand nearby. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is located just a short distance away. With the destruction of the reservoir, people lost their source of drinking water. And the power plant lost its cooling system. Yet, many people, like Father Bohdan, remain in this God-forsaken place …A report from a place that has been struck by blows of biblical proportions, yet one where people continue to live.“Through Bohdan's story, the film seeks answers to the question of why people remain in their homes even though every day could be their last.“ — TPS Remízek

The landscape of Eastern Australia, born of extinct volcanoes and solidified magma, both barren and lush, connects to the Pacific volcanic arc. Multiple exposures on 16mm film directly in the camera create visual overlaps and disrupt the gravitational logic of the image, while dynamic editing scrambles time and space – the present sinks into the depths of geological memory. This environmental visual poem is accompanied by field recordings and musical compositions by Lawrence English.“Filmed across the lands of the Turrbal, Yuggera, Jinibara, Gubbi Gubbi, Wakka Wakka, Jarowair, Barrumgum, Quandamooka, and Butchulla Peoples in Australia. We acknowledge them as the Traditional Custodians and Knowledge Keepers of the land. Sovereignty has never been ceded.”

The name Axomama refers to the Inca goddess of potatoes. In the mountainous regions of Peru, her place of origin, this food permeates various spheres of the lives of the local people. This anthropologically conceived documentary attempts to capture the inseparable connection between potatoes and Peru’s famous colonial history, culture, and traditional beliefs. “Central to her research are the questions; how can we better understand ownership and agency in space through the experience of the body? … How do we form identities in relation to places where we don’t have histories?” — Tracy Valcárcel’s website Source: Tracy Valcárcel’s website

Czech freediver, national record holder, and daughter of a synchronized swimmer and diver, Jindřiška Zajacová, attempts to tune into the water and let herself be drawn to the centre of the Earth, and perhaps even to the centre of herself. This contemplative portrait of the appeal of the soothing blue absolute touches on the physical limits of the human body, and seeks a way to float through the terrestrial world above the surface. “With every exhale you merge more and more with the water until you no longer recognize the boundaries. You’re everywhere and nowhere.”

Do the physical properties of rocks change in the presence of humans? Filmmakers follow the work of a scientist who listens to changes in sound frequencies in a vast wasteland after a volcanic eruption. Her geoacoustic research prompts reflections on the possibility of consciousness in inanimate objects, and their mutual communication. “The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone: only a prejudice could make us think the earth beneath our feet is not alive.” — Conrad Anker, mountaineer

A postcolonial voodoo ritual, cyclical in the hypnotic rhythm of time and pulsating fists, saturated with fire and water, interwoven with the East and West, is intended to win the favour of the Haitian goddess, Erzulie. It is also a prayer for the deceased ancestors who, along with other Haitian workers, were murdered in 1920 in the Cuban province of Holguín, in a sugar mill owned by a subsidiary of the American corporation, United Fruit Company.“You fought hard for your children. Now we are alone in this country.”

Young men in Georgia in the 1990s died en masse of heart attacks as a result of the war. They left behind a generation without fathers, including Elene. This autobiographical portrait looks into a darkroom where the author develops photographs and films left behind by her father, lending them her own narrative, and thereby finding herself. “Between the earth and the land of the dead, a darkroom becomes the only dimension where the paths of a father and a daughter can cross.”

The Russian occupiers came and took almost everything from Svitlana, but they could not rob her of her memories of places and moments from her previous life. This tragic portrait of war losses thereby becomes a meditation on values that are enduring, precisely because no brute force can tear them from individual consciousness, violate them, or bury them. “Focused on the details often overlooked, her films explore the quieter sides of life, giving space to what often remains unsaid.” Source: FilmFreeway.

In mid-2024, Chad experienced its worst drought in decades, most of the livestock died, people moved elsewhere, and the city disappeared. A chance encounter at a water well in the desolate Batha Prefecture opens a window into the situation of a Central African country affected by climate change. “The droughts and floods in Chad aren’t isolated – they reflect broader climate change driven largely by industrialized nations.” — Bentley Brown

A collage of excerpts from Czechoslovak television educational programmes from the 1970s and 1980s devoted to the artificial termination of pregnancy is accompanied by an urgent voice-over reflecting on what really shapes the history of abortion: is it the idea of self- ownership and freedom, the development of medical technologies, state reproductive policy, or market logic? The film paints a complex picture of the reproductive history of socialist Czechoslovakia, in which media representations of abortion—so different from the rhetoric surrounding the feminist pro-choice movement in the US—are transcribed into intimate bodily experience. “We control our bodies. We control bodies. What is ‘we’ when we say ‘ours’? Touch the skin. On my own skin, I discover that I am thousands of others, not my own skin.”

Kakadu Koki was the favourite parrot of Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito. He can talk, and his vocabulary is quite unrefined. But what is even more incredible is that he is still alive! He is shown as an animal curiosity to tourists visiting the Brijuni Islands, the site of Tito's former luxury residence. Koki's statements and sayings, which the director recorded over four years, form the basis of the film's soundtrack. Unknown or lesser-known visual material is inserted into the comic contrast, showing Koki and Tito meeting dignitaries and celebrities of bygone times – Khrushchev, Ceaușescu, and Sophia Loren. “I’ve had a lifelong fascination with stories told from the point of view of animals.” — Quenton Miller

Jerada is a Moroccan town with a rich history of coal mining. However, even after the mines were officially closed in 2001, the extraction of this black rock did not cease. Local residents venture underground on their own initiative to secure a livelihood for themselves and their families through illegal mining. This stylized documentary, featuring staged scenes with the residents of Jerada, offers an imaginary yet very concrete cross-section of the local landscape and society. In a long, dynamic shot, we descend into the mine, observe the self-proclaimed miners at work, facing danger, and then, with their precious cargo, return to the surface, where cars wait to transport the coal to dealers. “With L’Mina, I wanted to bear witness to a contemporary social reality: a working-class group takes action in the midst of our current crisis.” — Randa Maroufi

The parable, formed by evocative images of unveiled and veiled faces, traditional fabrics, and freely grazing animals, is wedged between the lines of a paragraph from Boccaccio's Decameron. This visual interlude in the story of a girl who, while asleep, drifted from the Aeolian Islands to the North African coast near the city of Sousse in present-day Tunisia, reflects Western ideas about the former Barbary Coast. “The maiden, hearing these Latin words, concluded that a contrary wind had driven her back to Lipari; and, getting up, she looked around her, and not recognizing the country, and seeing herself on the shore, she asked the good woman where she was.The good woman replied:‘My daughter, you are near Susa, in Barbary.’Hearing this, the maiden was grieved that God had not sent her death, fearing shame and injury; and, not knowing what to do, she sat down at the bottom of the boat and began to weep.” Source: Giovanni Boccaccio. Dekameron. 1886. Translated by John Payne.

When British colonizers first planted rubber trees in Malaysia, they paved the way for the future of the local economy, and the economic and cultural subjugation of the population. Accompanied by folk songs, an old man awakens in this poetic documentary, and begins to dance despite the deforested horizons of the present. “I’m interested in the juxtaposition of textures in music and tempo in film, while translating the synthesis of sound, music, text and narrative into a symphonic sky of stars on a cloudless dark night – an encompassing space that is sincere, complex and has power to heal.” — Wey Yinn Teo

The breathtaking panoramas of the Chilean deserts are the setting for a hidden battle for the survival of humanity. The local salt flats offer two highly sought-after commodities: lithium, used in the manufacture of batteries, and bacteria, essential in the fight against growing antibiotic resistance. It is these that the film’s protagonist is trying to discover. “The planet is currently experiencing a global antibiotic resistance crisis. This is contributing to the deaths of five million people a year.”

This film poem was created during Juhannus, the Finnish celebration of the longest day of the year, using cyanotype, a contact copying process that uses light-sensitive iron salts in contact with UV light to create typically blue prints of objects. The illuminated shapes of leaves, stems, twigs, and fluff wander across the film material with increasing intensity, occasionally interspersed with flashes of blossoming flowers and a girl. The visual composition is accompanied by a delicate soundtrack composed of insect voices, the rustling of grass, and occasional jingling.“Over its short runtime, Midsummer becomes increasingly cluttered with complex forms, some of which appear more photographically based than the initial rayographs. This prompts a slight confusion between figure and ground, such that we cannot tell what may have been photographically registered on the film in the first place.” — Michael Sicinski Source: In Rewiew Online.

A sixteen-year-old boy begins his studies at secondary school during the summer. However, as he is in China, everything is preceded by compulsory military training. Between drills and shouting ideological slogans, in this darkly lyrical documentary, summer gradually fades away, along with the young man’s conviction about the meaning of his current actions. “During the past summer I was thinking about departure and farewell, and my feelings of solitude.” — Yupeng He

In 2022, a Russian cyberattack cut off the Norwegian islands of Bjørnøya and Hopen from the world for two weeks. A group of Norwegian radio amateurs brought the voices of civilization back to the hypnotic icy wasteland. This compelling essay looks through the inquiring eyes of extraterrestrial anthropologists, who suggest that Morse code and radio signals may one day save our fragile digital world. “It may seem like the ham radio operators cleave to the past, but in today’s world, with threats of war, extreme weather, and solar storms, it could be that they are actually ensuring our future survival.” — Nordnorsk kunstnersenter

Against the backdrop of his hometown and momentous historical events, the director seeks the answer to a seemingly simple question: What is my very first memory? As the film progresses, the audiovisual topography of memory transforms into a labyrinth where trauma and disappointment may lurk around every corner, and yet we continue to navigate through it. “The director, who wants to return to the most interesting period of his childhood, wanders the streets of the city where he was born and raised, to find traces of those years. This trip brings him to the place of his first memory.”

In another of his portraits of everyday life in Ukraine during the Russian occupation, Sergei Loznitsa takes us on an excursion to the National Museum of Natural History in Kiev, one of the largest in the world. Together with a school class, we attend a lecture on palaeontology between two air raid sirens. The teacher talks enthusiastically about dinosaurs and spiny fish, and the children listen to him with curiosity and amusement. For a moment, the lively commentary transports us along with them to a world millions of years away, where Russian missiles have not crossed the sky, but in many ways was as ruthless as the current reality of war.

The incomprehensible clamour of loudspeakers, the honking of cars, the backs of boys gazing into the distance, fires, trash, deserted houses, and a group of soldiers inhabit a sensually saturated landscape dominated by functional chaos. The mosaic of micro-events with several visual planes is reminiscent of the paintings of Pieter Bruegel, with the difference that this is not a genre scene painted by the Dutch master. A single-shot testimony in real time, piece by piece, reveals the violent clash between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers on the West Bank. It depicts the mechanism of occupation, which cyclically closes in on itself and begins where it ends. “By reframing, invoking the off-screen or playing with cuts or the duration of shots, the artist seeks to create spaces that allow us to regain mobility and critical spirit.” Source: https://juliettelemonnyer.com/about

Several times a year, the sky above France turns red. These are grains of sand from the Sahara, and they can resemble a starry sky, or the graininess of a television screen. However, they contain radioactive cesium-137, which was created when the French tested nuclear weapons in Algeria. This testimony, which was never supposed to leave the military base, shows the impact of war on human society and the landscape. “With my films I want to make complex (invisible) social, political, and economical issues visible.” — Katja Verheul

The Sandia Mountains in New Mexico, located on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, combine steep snow-capped cliffs with the aridity of the desert at their base. This visual portrait of the landscape, in which the mountains come alive, pulsate, and transform, is accompanied by an audio mix of extreme temperatures and songs of the Pueblo tribes who have lived here since time immemorial. Techniques based on the tradition of experimental film, such as frame by frame copying, painting, collage, and engraving into the material, draw the digital image into a visual trance. “Mélissa Faivre’s work is immersive, hallucinatory or even vertigo-inducing, depending on your reception, or possibly your viewing experience. They are rich in colour, movement and associations. The films are based on camera images, and on photographs reproduced frame by frame and layered with video images via compositing and montage creating new imaginations. […] The montage reaches a level of multi-dispersion that seems to be pure fantasy; at the same time it has a potential to trigger your individual memories and associations.” — Walden Kunstausstellungen Source: http://www.galerie-walden.de/INFECTED%20REALITY-english.pdf

90% of everything we consume is shipped to us by boat. Seablindness explores the interstitial space of ports where land meets the sea and capital circulates. On a journey along the varied edges, we intercept a radio call from stranded seafarers. This documentary poem explores ecological anxiety. It is not, however, about those who feel it, but for them.

It took sixty-seven milliseconds for the bullet from a police gun to hit an Arab youth in the face. This surgically precise reconstruction of a real event in a Paris suburb uses security camera footage, digitally generated images, and the early cinematographic technique of chronophotography to stylistically decompose the trajectory of the bullet and the body. Time and space collide at the boundary between the modern world and algorithms, the old and the new, the cybernetic and the physical, merging into a meditation on the illegitimacy of racially motivated police violence directed against a marginalized group of people.“The theory of knowledge, allied to that of Capital, is expressed here through the metaphor of liquidity, a fantasy shared by teenagers, engineers and preachers of a world without losses and without borders that is constantly being regenerated.” — Harddiskmuseum

Giuseppe Polerà chose an excerpt from a poem by Italian lyricist Sandro Penna as the title for his short film. However, he transposed the verse from its lyrical context into the harsh material reality of the Cuban countryside, where Leonardo and Mercedes coexist with farm animals. The middle-aged couple lives in extreme poverty, but not in sadness. Their private world, in contrast to their unchanging work routine, is imbued with warmth and joyful sensuality. Although they have almost nothing, they never cease to desire. This intimate portrait does not shy away from even the most physical expressions of love, which are also the most authentic expressions of the self in otherwise bleak social conditions. “It's the time when sleepy children are kissed on warm knees. But I, on long roads, with my eyes uselessly. Me, a worthless monster.” — Sandro Penna

A dark fantasy inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, interwoven with Lovecraftian allusions, follows a lonely traveler who enters a forgotten realm where reality shatters. Visions of high mountain cliffs, glaciers, and monsters, created in collaboration with artificial intelligence, are accompanied by a voice-over narrating the events in an incomprehensible language. The black-and-white, high-contrast imagery builds an atmosphere of inexplicable horror that accompanies, in Lovecraft's words, “the defeat of those fixed laws of nature which are our only protection against the assaults of chaos and the demons of the unexplored universe.” “There is knowledge that defies words. And a tongue best left uncomprehended.”

Beneath the polished floors of a contemporary art gallery, a new form of life is awakening, gradually transforming the urban space into a living, symbiotic system connecting humans with the realm of plants and bacteria. This speculative docufiction, shot on 16 mm film in response to the We the Bacteria exhibition at the Milan Triennale, imagines an alternative future for architecture told from the perspective of non-human actors. It explores the thorny structure of experimental architect Rachel Armstrong's SPIKA installation, which functions both as a fortress and an ecosystem, and outlines the possibility of urban buildings transformed into metabolic nodes of a new community. SPIKA (Structural Protection for Interdependent Karyotype Assembly): A bacteriophage‐inspired structure housing microbial fuel cells and hydroponics transforms waste into energy and nutrients through electrogenic biofilms and bioreceptive plant systems, reimagining architecture as a regenerative ecological partner. Source: Armstrong Rachel: “Beyond the Petri Dish: Exhibitions as Catalysts for Microbial Literacy-Bridging Science, Culture and Society”. Microb Biotechnol. 2025 Aug.

During the 1980s, there were hundreds of abandoned houses in New York that their owners were unable to maintain. They were taken over by squatters, who used their own hands to build homes, but also a utopian community, based on anti-capitalist principles. Archival footage and testimonies map their story, until their forced eviction in the 1990s. “Survival without rent: This is a book to help people take back homes that have been taken away from them by government and business.”

The life of a small coastal community is changing beyond recognition. At least that’s how it seems to an old fisherman, as he watches the dire consequences of climate change on his long-standing source of livelihood. For the filmmaker, the disappearance of the seahorse – nature’s litmus test for clean water – becomes a symbol of humanity’s destructive activity. “Documentary-making is like shifting lenses for me, shaping both my craft and my humanity.” — Carmen Tofeni

Through its secret service, the Securitate, the Romanian communist regime built a monstrous system of spying and mutual surveillance of its own citizens. This stylized documentary, imitating the optics of hidden cameras, reveals in three short interviews the terrifying dimensions that the need for pervasive control can take on. “Film is to her a medium with a particular quality that implies a fundamentally concrete relationship with time.” — Lévana Schütz’s website

In this video essay, the polysemy of iron is mined like a rare ore and smelted into a wealth of unexpected synergies: the stellar origin of iron is linked to its presence in human veins and in the geological layers of the Earth. The moose's sense of magnetic north and south intertwines with images of the Arctic landscape, in which the rusty remains of military equipment lie scattered. Fungi and bacteria that feed on iron are absorbed into the motif of a hunting knife. Between the cosmos and the individual, nature and technology, life and civilization, an iron bond is formed, which is commented on in dialogue and occasional unison by a girl's and a woman's voice. “The word ‘raqs’ in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs [Media Collective] takes this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time.” Source: Raqs Media Collective

The Deers suggests an image of a gender-polarized society unevenly marked by history. Archival footage of ceremonies from the era of the Uruguayan dictatorship and harsh military exercises clash with intimate images of sleeping girls with intertwined hair, linguistic exploration of fragile bodies, and still-lifes of set tables frozen in time. The film oscillates between the collective memory of dictatorship and everyday intimacy, between power and vulnerability.“The military dictatorship in Uruguay remains in the memory of survivors and families. The wait for justice brings routine into a standstill. The faces come in diffused ways. The image still remains.” — Emiliano Grassi

A digitally animated glitch composition layers, abstracts, and mutates technological traces of remnants—Pompeian relics, torsos, X-ray images, shots of animals—into a rhythmic whole. The field alternately fills and empties, while the sound purrs and hums; the minimalist audiovisual composition achieves absolute, albeit elusive, precision. “Like a creation myth, [the film] represents the potential to create and release something new, like a pixel primordial soup. It emphasizes the act of watching, observing, perceiving, and receiving images. It shows the relationship between photographic technology, the apparatus itself, ‘the machine,’ and the complex distortions of perception and imagination. Made with a malfunctioning 1990s special effects device.” — accompanying material for the film

Authentic testimonies from women in sub-Saharan Africa reveal the suffering and violence that accompany their hopeful journey to Tunisia and southern Europe. Their faces remain hidden from the camera; we see only fragments of their bodies and destinies. A chilling portrait of people who would rather risk death at sea than life in their own country. “I told myself: live or die.”

This cinematic epiphany, shot on 16mm film with lightness and gentle humour, pierces the crust of everyday life to reveal the miracle of existence. A web of tactile images and slightly surreal scenes braided around a girl's body is interwoven with verses by the late Latvian poet Imants Ziedoņis. “Each day catches fire. If you have walked all day and not seen it, wait. Don’t blink; it might happen that instant. One morning there was dew on the grass. But no sunlight, and the dew was red-grey, the rose didn’t speak. The next day there was dew and sun, but the rose had shed its petals. There must be a triad. A flower and myself are not enough, there must be sun. A birch and myself are not enough; the birch needs wind, or a thrush, or frost.” — Imants Ziedoņis

When humans learned how to make fire, they began their journey toward inventions and industrial revolutions. The director of the film observes the constant presence of this primal spark in the work of Greek dockworkers, who unload tons of material from ships, material that is used to make objects we encounter in our everyday lives. “With a direct reference to the exact meaning of Tonnage, a word describing the weight in tons, especially of cargo or freight, the film traces the vexed semantics and archives of such a weight, historically and symbolically.” — Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival

Heavy words bounce off the images of silent walls like another screen. Black-and-white shots taken with a handheld 16 mm camera follow empty corridors, blind windows, and bars of the former Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp in Trieste. They are permeated by György Ligeti's fragmented and nervous electronic composition Artikulation. The memory of the motionless walls is framed by an excerpt from the Italian translation of Jean Baudrillard's book La trasparenza del male (The Transparency of Evil).“During the 16 mm film shooting and development workshop held by Labbash Film in Trieste, I visited the Risiera di San Sabba, a place I had only heard about until then… I thought about how complex and ambiguous history is, how one question can have ten different answers that contradict each other, and I concluded that whatever I did in the short time I had to make this film had to be as far removed as possible from a rhetorical idea of representing evil.” — Mario BlaconàSource: PerSo Film Festival.

Marion Guillard is an ornithologist and filmmaker who has been capturing wild nature since her youth. Images of nature also dominate her autobiographical essays. However, the author's voiceover tells a story that is different from the journey across the United States she once embarked on with her family—it tells of her complex relationship with her own body and sexuality. Parallels gradually emerge between seemingly unrelated topics. The bulimia Guillard suffered from as a teenager was not limited to fast food. Similarly, she did not limit herself in collecting footage of the landscape, which helped her divert her attention from her own physicality. With the passage of time, she realizes how much she was determined by culture and society in both cases – in her view of herself and the outside world. “A succession of sequences illustrating various forms of representation of nature, such as wildlife films, natural parks and zoos, are set in motion around my personal experience as a wildlife filmmaker, visual artist, ornithologist, woman and body.” — Marion Guillard

Anni Albers was a prominent member of the interwar Bauhaus art movement in Germany. After Hitler came to power, she left her native country and devoted herself to her work with unwavering passion in the USA. Weaving textile patterns was more than just an aesthetic activity for her; she saw the intertwining of threads as a tangible projection of the very fabric of reality. “Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.” — Dedar

A wife should obey her husband’s every word, and live only for him. This is how one could briefly summarize the attitude of some women who identify with the wedLOCK tradWIFE phenomenon. This film is based on their statements on social media, presented in a shocking concentration and painful collage, with period footage from the 1950s. “Tradwife refers to a woman who adheres to traditional gender roles, that is, caring for the household, rather than pursuing a career.” — Martin Šemelík, Department of Contemporary Lexicology and Lexicography, Institute of the Czech Language, Academy of Sciences

At first glance, what could be more inanimate – and therefore anti-cinematic – than the mineral kingdom? Nora Štrbová challenges this declaration, turning it on its head and making stones into a highly kinetic subject. In this humorous essay film shot in 35 mm, stones are finally given a voice as they observe us, judge us and, above all… put up with us.