The film is inspired by the costumes of folk art performers at Taiwan's ceremonial festivals. Adapted from the Southeast Asian folktale The Mousedeer Crosses River, it integrates similar folktale narratives from different countries to create animated puppet dancers.
A Bird spies the pain of the world, silenced by the sphere in which it confines itself. Fruit of freedom's essence, but without possession of it, the pair of wings takes comfort in the shadows that dance between the cycle of life. After a tempting debate with his own reflection, the bird conquers the skies, judging himself free at last. But would that freedom be free? Or an even bigger cage?
Niloya and her closest friends always strive to be superheroes. That's why they often play their favorite game, superhero. That day, they had once again made simple costumes and makeup for themselves and were running around the village playing this game. All day long, they looked at everything they saw around them and in nature through the eyes of heroes and tried to save them.
Suzume, 17, lost her mother as a little girl. On her way to school, she meets a mysterious young man. But her curiosity unleashes a calamity that endangers the entire population of Japan, and so Suzume embarks on a journey to set things right.
Three continuous zooms towards a landscape are deconstructed into a discontinuous appearance of single frames. The panoramic view is obstructed, the organic movement of the hand dissolved into structural variation of the basic units of film. Indexical content is inevitably present on the physical film strip and yet lost in the structure of the film. The closer you get to what is out there, the more it disappears.
Duy Em asks her father why he chose not to defend himself against racist remarks. His response transports both of them into his past life among the boat people of Vietnam.
Over budget and out of money to finish an animated film, an eccentric, cannoli-deprived film producer must salvage what footage he can and pawn it off as a condom commercial in hopes of recouping his losses and saving his film company from going bankrupt.
The woman died and became a skeleton. The man caught her by fishing. He was so scared that he ran away, but the hook was hooking each other, no one could get rid of anyone. This film is adapted from an Inuit fable. It is a metaphor of breakthrough the difficulty of love. True love begins when you are willing to face the skeleton.
Building walls along lines on the map is the perfect way to do politics by managing fears. That is why the fairy tale about the Great Defensive Wall On The Border is still told and still eagerly listened to. This film is an expression of anxiety about living in a restricted space. High walls with musty air inside - it is easy to suffocate in an airtight container. The more the wall protects me, the more I feel trapped. Surrounded from the inside.
‘Cinegraffic Score’ is a 6 meter collage of orphaned and found celluloid film. This is reconfigured into a graphic musical score, with obscure narratives emerging as the film is reanimated. The soundtrack emerges from magnetic tape loops, field recordings, audio fragments and a DIY visual synthesiser.
“Our family is special”, says filmmaker Lei Lei’s father Lei Jiaqi. On the audio track of this inventive, poignant essay film he starts to talk about the struggles of his family, amid China’s troubled times of the 1960s. When his own father, Lei Ting, is sent to the countryside, he stays behind with his sister and his ill mother. When Mum passes away, and the system forbids Ting to come back to live with his children, the kids are kept in an orphanage.
A short animated film about two friends who watch together as acid rain washes over the city. The stormy weather outside reflects the feelings of Ariel, who realizes that this is her last chance to confess her feelings to Sophie. Before Sophie leaves the apartment, Ariel plucks up courage and the two kiss against the background of the brightening view outside the window.
The early 20th century fable “The Fox and the Otter,” from the Historia y Conocimiento Oral Mapuche: Sobrevivientes de la campaña del desierto y ocupación de la Araucanía (1899–1926), tells the story of a homoerotic relationship between two animals – a fox and an otter, both males – where anal penetration is seen as an offense to masculinity. This 3D animated video proposes a new version of the fable, where its protagonist is a transgender vixen who, by means of its charms, achieves to attract the otter, unsettling colonial constructions about desire and heterosexuality and allowing to break these paradigms and create new cosmologies.