Astigmatismo (2013)

Astigmatismo (2013)

Director: Nicolaï Troshinsky
Country: Spain
Runtime: 4 min

“Astigmatismo” is a short-film about the feeling of being lost. This feeling is created thanks to an extreme blur effect, leaving only a very tiny space in focus. The focus shifts and moves rhythmically, synchronized with the sounds and the music, revealing a constantly changing landscape.

The optical effect of blur is at the core of the film, so to make this effect as beautiful and authentic as possible "Astigmatismo" is shot in a 5-level multiplane using a special lens. The animation involves cut-out marionettes and paint on glass. Everything is entirely made by hand and there are no post production effects.

It is, however, computer-assisted. The camera and the lens were entirely controlled by computer making it possible to adjust the focus and the depth of field with extreme precision, allowing for a variety of focus effects that wouldn't have been possible to create otherwise. In this way, the film combines old school animation techniques with recent advances in camera technology.

Hidden Colors (2011)

Hidden Colors (2011)

Director: Tariq Nasheed
Country: USA
Runtime: 110 min



Hidden Colors is a documentary about the real and untold history of people of color around the globe. This film discusses some of the reasons the contributions of African and aboriginal people have been left out of the pages of history. Traveling around the country, the film features scholars, historians, and social commentators who uncovered such amazing facts about things such as: The original image of Christ; The true story about the Moors; The original people of Asia; The great west African empires; The presence of Africans in America before Columbus; The real reason slavery was ended And much more.

Fishing Without Nets (2012)

Fishing Without Nets (2012)

Director: Cutter Hodierne
Country: Somalia
Runtime: 15 min 

In Somalia, principled, young husband and father Abdi turns to piracy to support his family. While his wife and child wait for him in Yemen, an outdated and fragile satellite phone is his only connection to all he truly values. Abdi and his fellow pirates hit the high seas and capture a French oil tanker, demanding a hefty ransom. During the long, tedious wait for the cash to arrive, Abdi forges a tentative friendship with one of the hostages. When some of the pirates resort to violence, Abdi must make dramatic choices to determine his course. Shot in East Africa using Somali nonactors, Fishing Without Nets tells the mesmerizing and sobering story of the bandits from the Somali point of view. First-time feature filmmaker Cutter Hodierne, whose short film of the same name won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, combines the epic cinematic vision of a glorious action thriller with the intimate, textured qualities of an art film, humanizing the pirates ...

Drew: The Man Behind the Poster (2013)

Drew: The Man Behind the Poster (2013)

Director: Erik Sharkey
Country: USA
Runtime: 97 min







Filmmaker Erik Sharkey pays tribute to prolific movie poster artist Drew Struzan in this documentary featuring interviews with such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Frank Darabont, and Guillermo del Toro, each of whom has previously commissioned the artist to immortalize their films in poster form.

Redemption (2013)

Redemption (2013)

Director: Miguel Gomes
Country: Portugal
Runtime: 26 min

On January 21, 1975, in a village in the north of Portugal, a child writes to his parents who are in Angola to tell them how sad Portugal is. On July 13, 2011, in Milan, an old man remembers his first love. On May 6, 2012, in Paris, a man tells his baby daughter that he will never be a real father. During a wedding ceremony on September 3, 1977 in Leipzig, the bride battles against a Wagner opera that she can’t get out of her head.
But where and when have these four poor devils begun searching for redemption?

 Miguel Gomes (Tabu) muses with characteristic humour and melancholia upon small-scale, perversely prescient moments of human fallibility in this witty and affecting found-footage film.
Redemption features Rodrigues' confrere and countryman Miguel Gomes musing with characteristic humour and melancholia upon small-scale, perversely prescient moments of human fallibility. A witty and affecting montage of colour Super 8 and black-and-white 16mm found footage is accompanied by four epistolary monologues (in Portuguese, Italian, French and German), each of which betrays a sense of haunting guilt or deep-seated regret. Whose redemption is this?

Heli (2013)

Heli (2013)

Director: Amat Escalante
Country: Mexico
Runtime: 105 min

Heli (Armando Espitia), the protagonist of Amat Escalante's 2013 Palme d'Or nominee of the same name, is a young Mexican who lives with his father, his son, his young wife (Linda Gonzalez) and 12-year-old sister, Estella (Andrea Vergara). He's prone to bad luck, keen on his naps and, when a census taker comes to the house, hesitates about how many people live there with him. However, when 17-year-old army cadet Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios) falls in love with Estella and makes plans for the two of them to run away together, Heli's cataclysmic knee-jerk reaction will plunge the family into pitiless and brutal violence.

Narrative films concerned with roving drug gangs, political corruption and barbaric acts of extreme and horrendous violence are depressingly common nowadays and have formed the backdrop for several high profile Hollywood movies in recent years, including Oliver Stone's Savages (2012) and Mexico's own Miss Bala (2011). However, Escalante's Heli - the director of Sangre, Los Bastardos and a close friend of fellow countryman Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light, Post Tenebras Lux) - provides us with an uncompromisingly dark look at his nation's plight, showing clearly how some families live in impossible situations with no hope of escape, short of keeping their heads down and fingers crossed.

The details are telling: the American advisor who implements the most disgusting and degrading humiliations on his cadet students; the doctors who refuse abortions to rape victims; the politicians who will burn drugs as a photo opportunity but will do nothing to address the real problem. The brutality on display in Heli is at times almost impossible to watch, as it should be. A horrific torture scene takes place - made worse by the fact that it is interrupting a computer game - and there's a disapproving mother who occasionally peeks from the kitchen to see what the young lads are up to. There's also a subplot about Heli and his wife's sex life, as they attempt some normality in the midst of the madness.

Escalante avoids numerous well-worn social realist clichés and creates (at times) genuine beauty, evoking the place with a an eye for atmosphere. Yet ultimately, it's the pain and madness of the foreground - a country in a state of pitiless war with itself and in which there is very little place for ordinary life - which will dominate. By simply avoiding complete despair Heli hints at hope, but remains an intense and disturbing experience nonetheless.

Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013)

Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013)

Director: Gustav Deutsch
Country: Austria
Runtime: 92 min

13 of Edward Hopper’s paintings are brought alive by the film, telling the story of a woman, whose thoughts, emotions and contemplations lets us observe an era in American history.

Directors statement

As the starting point for this film, which has at its heart the staging of reality and the dialogue of painting and film, I selected Edward Hopper’s picturesque oeuvre, which on the one hand was influenced by film noir – in his choice of lighting, subject and framing as seen in paintings such as Night Windows (1938), Office at Night (1940), Room in New York (1932) and his irect references to cinema such as in New York Movie (1939) and Intermission (1963) – and on the other hand influenced filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders.

Based on my conviction that history is made up of personal stories and influenced by my reading of John Dos Pasos’ USA novel trilogy[1] in which the life stories and destinies of a few are representative of the wider public and social and cultural history of America, I have chosen an actress as the film’s protagonist – Shirley – through whose reflective and contemplative inner monologues we experience America from the beginning of the 1930’s through to the mid-1960’s.

Conversation Piece (2013)

Conversation Piece (2013)

Director: Gabriela Golder
Country: Argentina
Runtime: 18 min


Two girls read the Communist Manifesto with her grandmother. Girls ask for understanding. There are many concepts they don't understand, words. A familiar scene, a conversation piece

A.C.A.B. All Cats Are Brilliant (2012)

A.C.A.B. All Cats Are Brilliant (2012)

Director: Constantina Voulgaris
Country: Greece
Runtime: 88 min  

Helectra is a young woman in her early 30’s living in contemporary Athens. She is an artist but makes her money as a babysitter. She lives with her dog in the dirty, crowded centre of Athens. She is an activist and she lives her life in a non -conformist way. She looks much more confident and strong than she really is. She is lonely, scared and struggles to find her place in the world. Although she is 30, she still lives as a student. She doesn’t mind, but sometimes she feels the pressure to “grow up” and be “like everybody”. She has a relationship with Manousos, a working class 37 year old man, an idealist, a hardcore anarchist who is in prison, facing the antiterrorist law.
Her best friend is Petros, the 8 year old boy she abysits. They discuss politics, art, relationships, their need to be loved, their need to feel wanted by their families. Her parents are middle class leftists, intellectuals who have lived in the great period of the 60’s and who still think of themselves as rebels. Although they speak highly of the “revolution” they still want their daughter to “get a real job”, to find “a good husband”, all the clichés that every parents what for their kids. The only person she opens herself to, is Argyris. A 55 year old man who walks his dog in the same park she walks hers.
Argyris is an architect, married with a teenage daughter who always gets into trouble. She feels free to speak to him about all her worries, all the uncertainties that she has. She invites him to the big event she is planning. With a group of activists and neighbors they occupy an abandonded parking lot and they make it a community park. They plant trees and they put playground toys. The whole neighborhood is out there. Helectra is with them, she tries to dance but she is shy. She tries a bit harder and at the end she finds her rhythm!

The Sun Against My Eyes (2013)

The Sun Against My Eyes (2013)

Directors: Flora Dias, Juruna Mallon
Country: Brazil
Runtime: 65 min

A man comes to his home after a day of work and finds her wife dead. Without saying a word, but broken inside, he puts the body in a suitcase, loads it in the back seat of his car, and drives out to the road heading for the ocean –he never left Brasilia, the city where he was born. She was very different from him –a traveller, always seeking new experiences– and will survive in the man’s memory for the duration of the man’s trip from the Brazilian interior to the hills in Rio de Janeiro state. Fueled by the silent emotional breakdown of its lead, Dias and Mallon’s sensitive road movie moves forward through impressive landscapes and spontaneous encounters with characters that might help the man in his aim of personal reconstruction, or at least keep him safe from pain.