In a world of enchantment and mystery, Coraline Dale uncovers supernatural phenomena within her majestic castle. Overhearing a plot to capture her oldest friend, she embarks on a quest with her faithful feline companion, Shadow, venturing through a hidden passage into a mechanical domain.
Rabbit and Duck are best friends. They’re playing together in the park and having a great time. Along comes Cat with a gaming console. Rabbit immediately pricks up his ears. He's keen to give it a go! Cat and Rabbit play together, but what about Duck, who's left on his own?
"How can we cancel this displacement?" Impossible questions are posed to refugees, queries that form the springboard for an associative collage with an ironic slant. With a surprising combination of archive material and video game footage, filmmaker Malaz Usta portrays the absurd reality and consequences of displacement. As viewers, we get a taste of the confusion, insecurity and loneliness that are part of this experience.
In this animated miniature a drawing gradually comes to life before our eyes, telling a story not only of a wild boar on the run, but also of the ways in which people occupy the places that used to belong to nature. Artist-animator Nicolas Piret has an incredible eye for detail and uses only a single sheet of paper to tell this story. With this impressively meticulous approach, he deploys a playful form of storytelling.
Sophie and Jessica are anthropomorphic beings that wander through different worlds – searching for themselves and for one another. Their bizarre and battered appearances are modelled with so much detail you can almost touch them.
Repurposing techniques such as spoken word, ASCII art and coding, the protagonist in this film navigates his own conflicted, chaotic memories. While he lets his imagination roam freely, the film unfolds through a series of vignettes. With Line of Sight, Ali Eslami manages to find a new way to articulate our inner realm and explore a displaced and fragmented sense of self. The result is as playful as it is frightening.
A fluid blend of digital and analog forms, Flux is a visual poem musing on all things water: from the swelling waves, to the rigid ice, to the gaseous forms of our galaxy. Changing states, mutable forms and flowing associations invite the viewer to relieve their mind and let their spirits float along for the ride.
Alguén me chamou Serpe Negra explores the tortuous path that memories and dreams take in our mind. Thanks to the texture of analogue hand-painted animation, the film is an invitation to an oneiric universe made of loose connections and revised spatial dimensions. Filmmaker Borja Santomé Rodríguez takes us with him on a journey made of images that play with love and adventure, childhood curiosities and adult desires, and in which the ultimate reward is to get lost.
Seven Fragments of Her Life is a hand-drawn animation from pianist Bárbara Varassi Pega, illustrator Mauricio Martínez and Omar Martínez Gianoli. In the film, we follow a solitary woman as she explores and makes sketches in Rotterdam, the city in which she lives. When her sketchbook lands on the train tracks, she’s impelled to see the many colours of the city through the people around her.
Pushed to their limit, the Manta Rays rise up against Man to take control of the Earth; it is the dawning of a new Manta Ray Era and the “flattening” of Mankind.
The opening of an annual flower show sets the stage for this elusive, hand-drawn animation that explores the underlying fabric of our society. While little girls are dressed up for the occasion, the older women are dealing with a completely different set of expectations. Seemingly stuck between sensual plays and discomforting gazes, will any of these girls ever find an escape from this yearly ritual?
A seemingly idyllic lovers’ encounter reveals itself to be the start of a genderless figure’s surreal odyssey. A dystopian universe unfolds piece by piece as the character learns who they really are.
In the realm of Mountland, Ms. Isla maintains control through a labyrinthine parcel service system. It’s the only form of order in this chaotic world. As the Atqaba religious festival nears, Ms. Isla is entrusted with the delivery of an unconventional package from an important figure, and its destination is anything but usual. It’s a mission even she feels unsettled by, but her reputation is everything, so she sets off on the perilous journey.
A world premiere, DUCK is a classic spy thriller turned on its head. With an all-star cast including a deep-fake Sean Connery and a deep-fake Marilyn Monroe (all played by Maclean), DUCK deconstructs this well-loved genre into something that is at once a satisfying slice of pop-culture bingo and a look at our age of fake news, virtual realities and alternative facts. But you know what they say: if it looks like a duck…
In Kohlberger’s second film that could be considered narrative driven, the artist fashions a dystopian fiction from the remnants of cinema’s past. Drawing on excerpts from obscure sci-fi films, The Electric Kiss imagines a world not unlike our own, in which people plug their brains into a kind of neuro-network that connects the whole of human consciousness. As cyberpunk imagery draped in VHS textures alternates with passages of prismatic visual noise (achieved, in trademark style, by feeding footage through self trained machine learning algorithms), a quasi-plot emerges: a man in a VR headset, literally and figuratively lost in space, subjects himself to a mysterious procedure to alleviate the ill effects of this new technology on the mind.
A woman with weird superpowers, a turtle with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a cloud with rain incontinence on an unusual journey to the depths of the ocean.
An attempt to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic to a broken home.
At an exhibition, graphic designer Stefanie is thrilled by the work of John Heartfield, the inventor of political photomontage 100 years ago. While trying to understand his life on the run, she suddenly finds herself in Heartfield's studio.