A Gift for a Centenarian (Sweden)
Director Yamil Rodriguez
World Premiere
Narrative Short
In Hungary, we encounter the filmmaker on a train as his grandmother, Gloria Almanza, is celebrating her 100th birthday in tropical Nicaragua, thousands miles away. The train ride becomes an inner journey as the filmmaker recollects the memories of a woman—and a century—wrapped in a film as a gift.
All the Things I Can Remember (Israel)
Director Ya-Chi Yang
World Premiere
Animated Short
An animated-documentary examining the mental state of a person who has Alzheimer’s. The film shows how the disease affects the patient through the eyes of the family.
Date: Saturday, May 26
Time: 10:30 pm
Location: Edison Service
Audition (USA)
Director Richard Van
Narrative Short
Shaquita Lopez, a single mother and an aspiring actress, is ready to nail her audition. Things fall apart, however, when her ex-boyfriend bails on watching their 3-year-old son, Nezih. Unable to find sitter, Shaquita is forced to drag Nezih to her audition where he proves to be even more rambunctious than usual.
Awesome Fun TV (Israel, Romania, USA)
Director Alex Kavutskiy
World Premiere
Narrative Short
A young filmmaker goes from making no-budget internet videos with his friends to getting paid for making sketch comedy for a soulless YouTube content aggregator.
Babies (Japan)
Directors Yuval Shapira
North American Premiere
Narrative Short
A young single mother leaves her crying infant at home in the middle of the night to go and buy baby formula.
Berliners (Germany, Spain)
Directors Paula Galimberti, Pedro Deltell, Gonzalo Piñán
North American Premiere
Narrative Short
Hyperrealistic comedy about two crises: the Spanish migration crisis and the love crisis in the Tinder era. To both laugh and cry at the same time.
Big Paradise
Directors JP Olsen, Kristen Nutile
Narrative Short
Robert Kidney has been a musical force since the 1970s. His group, The Numbers Band, have been praised by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke and Greil Marcus and called “the greatest band I’ve ever seen” by Pere Ubu’s David Thomas. Despite decades of praise by peers, the band remains obscure. BIG PARADISE reveals the powerful and complex person behind this band, living and working in the shadow of Midwestern decay.
Birthday (Italy, USA)
Director Luise Nes
World Premiere
Narrative Short
Oline has gathered her sisters to celebrate their fathers birthday, but pride, miscommunication and a little bit odd choice of venue gets in the way of the celebration.
Black Dog (USA)
Director Joshua Dean Tuthill
West Coast Premiere
Animated Short
A dark family drama set during the space race of the 1960's, utilizing stop-motion animation and archival
footage to elucidate a time of heated social and political tension.
Bonne nuit du fond des bois (USA)
Director Camille Demers-Lambert
American Premiere
Narrative Short
Among black spruces and electric pylons, Sylvain and his wolfdogs are getting ready for the winter.
Bonne nuit du fond des bois is an immersion in a boreal solitude.
Careful How You Go (USA)
Director Emerald Ferrell
Narrative Short
A darkly comic three part short film about malevolent women.
Clean Blood
Director Jordan Michael Blake
Narrative Short
Cocoon, Cocoon (Canada)
Director Ori Goldberg, Ilai Margulies
West Coast Premiere
Animated Short
A fat, smug caterpillar doesn't want to become a butterfly. In song and rhyme, the horrors of metamorphosis are revealed.
Coda (USA)
Director Gabe Jewell
Narrative Short
During a bachelorette weekend at a cabin in the woods, Wendy is forced to confront the one-sided relationship with her best friend Kristin.
Coyote (Switzerland)
Director Lorenz Wunderle
Animation Short - Kids
A coyote loses his wife and children from an attack of wolfs. Anguished from human emotions he‘s trying to process the experience. Besides grief and delusion, evil takes up more and more space.
David & the Kingdom
Directors Woodrow Travers, Brian Paccione
World Premiere
Narrative Short
After rehabilitating two abandoned baby moose, David Lawrence vows to never harm another living thing. When tragedy strikes, David is forced to confront a violent past that transforms a story of redemption into a meditation on human contradiction.
Do Not Pass Go (USA, Greece)
Director Cullen Hoback
Narrative Short
A shocking and highly informative David versus Goliath tale of a small community that battles monopolistic telcos for their town's right to build a locally owned high-speed fiber network.
Down Escalation (Switzerland)
Director Shunsaku Hayashi
West Coast Premiere
Animated Short
Falling down, it feels ecdysone is filling up its body. Delving into the deeper layers of itself the flesh is melted down in the shell until the form is no longer.
Fay Away (USA)
Director Rainer Lipski
World Premiere
Narrative Short
After 20 years, Fay is driving out to the desert to visit her estranged father in order to deliver an important message.
Flatbush Misdeameanors (Mexico)
Director Dan Perlman, Kevin Iso
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
Longtime friends Dan and Kevin adjust to their evolving surroundings in the unforgiving environment of Flatbush, Brooklyn. A raw comedy of city life.
Hallway (USA)
Director Rob Summons
Narrative Short
A curious janitor helps his anxious co-worker overcome his fear of love.
Hollywood (USA)
Director Jérémi Roy
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
Liliana is training for a dancing audition and Antoine is having his first major role in a stage play. Their mutual distaste for each other's work soon becomes apparent and it quickly becomes personal.
Holy Pink: Fragrant (Hungary)
Director Clementine Leger
Documentary Short
A meditative psych-soaked journey.
How to Reach God Through Proper Exercising
Director Gabriel Herrera Torres
United States Premiere
Narrative Short
In a local sports center, a man with a great need to talk but little to say, recounts a recent dream to a nearby colleague.
This seemingly harmless event will bring deeply unsettling consequences.
Icebergs (USA)
Director Eirini Vianelli
Narrative Short
Based on the book “Scenes” by award-winning screenwriter Efthymis Filippou (“Dogtooth”, “The Lobster”, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”), “Icebergs” is an existential, dark comedy consisting of 14 short vignettes, ranging from the mundane to the absurd.
In a Month (Scotland, United Kingdom)
Director Jonas Kærup Hjort
Narrative Short
In a factory in the middle of nowhere a group of workers is waiting, indefinitely. Every full moon a telephone rings. Always with the same message: Be patient. We are on our way. When the foreman chooses to end his life, the group is left alone with no authority other than the telephone. Gradually routines start to vanish and the group gets another view on life. Until it goes too far...
Lily and the Baby (Canada)
Directors Xstine Cook, Bum Family
United States Premiere
Narrative Short
Lilly, a 10-foot tall orange monster, babysits a human baby. The mom leaves a long list of what not to do. What could go wrong?
Little Wonder (USA)
Director Ryan Betschart
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
A visual prose poem on a missed encounter during a brief period of altered states of consciousness.
Looney Foodz (Italy)
Director Paolo Gaudio
Animated Short
What would happen if the food and drink in your refrigerator could come alive, move and speak? What would the dynamics be? This stop motion animated short film will tell you with humor and creativity!
Mammoth (USA)
Director Grant Slater
Narrative Short
In the remote Russian Arctic, an aging scientist and his son are trying to recreate the Ice Age. They call their experiment Pleistocene Park – a perfect home for woolly mammoths, resurrected by modern genetics. But the mammoths are only a means to a bigger end: defusing a carbon timebomb frozen in the permafrost to slow the effects of global warming.
Men Don't Whisper (USA)
Directors Elivia Genny Sha, Paloma Martinez
Documentary Short
For San Francisco's 911 dispatchers, the city is hard to escape. As dusk descends across the San Francisco Bay, the city’s 911 dispatchers prepare for the busiest time of day, the swing shift. Together, in a fluorescent call center, 25 civilians hold our lives in their hands while the city churns outside, unaware of the toll it inflicts on the people in charge of getting us through a crisis.
Mountain Castle Mountain Flower Plastic (USA)
Director Annapuma Kumar
Animated Short
Small pieces of information can be stored separately within a shared container. The most efficient containers can house multiple pieces of information in the same location, intersecting from different angles.
Nevada (USA)
Director Emily Ann Hoffman
Animated Short
A young couple's romantic weekend is interrupted by a birth control mishap in this stop-motion animated comedy.
Nowhere Yet (USA)
Director Gabriel Bagnaschi
North America Premiere
Documentary Short
A teenage boy living in a tough Edinburgh neighbourhood has to figure out how far he's willing to go to save his break-dancing crew when his best friend starts pushing for a street gang.
Onikuma
Director Alessia Cecchet
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
Onikuma is Japanese yokai, a demon bear known for chasing horses. Surrounded by a foreign landscape, two women will understand that demons can come in different forms.
Recharge (Taiwan, USA)
Director Christopher Meyer
Animated Documentary
Employees at a battery-testing facility are being regularly attacked whilte commuting across a hostile wasteland. When his car breaks down, Employee Number 235-4 is forced to confront his attackers face to face.
Shadow Animals
Director Josefina Mothander
Narrative Short
Shadow animals is a dance-based drama about the discovery of human behaviour.
Satellite Strangers
Director James Bascara
West Coat Premiere
Animated Short
A microscopic view of a cosmic dance, deep in the woods
The Golden People (USA)
Director Victoria Garza
World Premiere
Animated Short
Mockumentary about BJ Annie, the founder of the Golden People. A movement which claims that you can live without eating and reach a higher level as a human being.
The Man Who Forgot to Breathe
Director Saman Hosseinpuor
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
At odds with his wife and seeking autonomy, a man makes a life-changing decision.
The Shift (USA)
Directors Elivia Genny Shaw, Paloma Martinez
Narrative Short
For San Francisco's 911 dispatchers, the city is hard to escape.
This, My Favorite Mural (USA)
Director Michael Arcos
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
An amateur German filmmaker becomes infatuated with a tire shop's mural. She decides to embark on a search for the artist and in the process, makes her first documentary film. The more she investigates this mundane subject, the further she becomes entangled in a web of tire shop mysteries.
Towards the Experimental Control of Dreaming (USA)
Director Ryan Betschart
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
A visual prose poem on a missed encounter during a brief period of altered states of consciousness.
Travelogue Tel Aviv
Director Samuel Patthey
West Coast Premiere
Narrative Short
A young art student from Switzerland arrives for six months in Tel Aviv. Through drawing he will learn to analyse, understand and free himself to this contrasted environment.
Washed Away (USA)
Director Dana Nachman
North American Premiere
Narrative Short
There are many days that Brandon Anderton cannot get out of bed. But on the days he can, he creates sand mosaic masterpieces only to see them enveloped by the tides hours later. Washed Away chronicles the transformation of a person who goes from one of the darkest places a human can go to a place of hope and inspiration. The driving force behind his change is art.
Weekend
Director Vahid Bemani
North American Premiere
Narrative Short
A little boy pases his weekends with his father, the weekends are not very satisfactory.
Zula the Infinite (USA)
Director Jillian Dudley
Narrative Short
A small town girl discovers a letter from her father's post office that lures her into a friendship with a troublesome passer-through.