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The seven short films making up GENIUS PARTY couldn’t be more diverse, linked only by a high standard of quality and inspiration. Atsuko Fukushima’s intro piece is a fantastic abstraction to soak up with the eyes. Masaaki Yuasa, of MIND GAME and CAT SOUP fame, brings his distinctive and deceptively simple graphic style and dream-state logic to the table with “Happy Machine,” his spin on a child’s earliest year. Shinji Kimura’s spookier “Deathtic 4,” meanwhile, seems to tap into the creepier corners of a child’s imagination and open up a toybox full of dark delights. Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle” conjures up a vision of virtual reality, while Yuji Fukuyama’s "Doorbell" and "Baby Blue" by Shinichiro Watanabe use understated realism for very surreal purposes. And Shoji Kawamori, with “Shanghai Dragon,” takes the tropes and conventions of traditional anime out for very fun joyride.
Edward James Olmos narrates this multi-fest winner about an immigrant who recalls a vivid and momentous memory where he discovered his boundaries.
During a game of hide and seek, a new bride hides in a chest and remains undiscovered until a strange visitation thirty years later.
A boy leaves a party and gets on a passenger tram. Aboard, he shyly watches a girl, who soon falls asleep.
A young boy gets caught stealing a sheep and is shaved of all his hair and branded with a mark on his forehead so that everyone will know that he is a thief and not to be trusted. Dumped in the desert, the thief covers his marking with a headscarf and goes to the nearest village where he is taken in by a trusting family in return for his work. However, has be actually changed or is he still the same thief at heart?
An exhortation to drivers to pay attention to road safety. In just 15 minutes, John Krish manages to give this road safety film something new and different by presenting events not from the point of view of the driver, but of his brain, memory and ego, who operate from a rather camp technology-driven command centre.
A young woman becomes the eighth wife of the wealthy Bluebeard, whose first seven wives have died under mysterious circumstances.
The film features two men who emerge from the sea carrying a large wardrobe, which they proceed to carry into a town.
A young man walks into a meticulously clean and sterile bathroom and proceeds to shave away hair, then skin, in an increasingly bloody and graphic bathroom scene.
The Killers is a 1956 student film by the Soviet and Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky and his fellow students Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. The film is based on the short story "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway, written in 1927. It was Tarkovsky's first film, produced when he was a student at the State Institute of Cinematography.
Bunny, an elderly rabbit who uses a walker, is in her kitchen one night baking a cake. A photograph from her wedding day is on her wall. A pesky and persistent moth bangs about the kitchen. She shoos it outside, turns off the porch light, and returns to her baking. The moth finds its way back into the kitchen, she bats it with a wooden spoon, and it falls into the mix. She stirs it up, pours the batter into a pan, and pops it into the oven. But the moth isn't done: it has a different mission, turning the oven into a portal, and inviting Bunny on a voyage of reunion.
Backstage before a performance, a French actor recalls his time in Madagascar during World War II, when he secretly ran a Resistance radio station under the watch of a collaborationist police chief. His story unfolds in flashback, revealing espionage, deception, and divided loyalties within the French ranks. Made for Britain’s Ministry of Information, this 1944 French-language propaganda short satirizes Vichy opportunism and wartime hypocrisy, and was shelved for decades before its release in 1993.
A middle-aged British man struggles to reconcile his homosexuality and his Catholic upbringing.
After escaping a Nazi POW camp, a young Scottish RAF gunner recounts his perilous journey through occupied France with the help of the Resistance. During his debriefing in London, French intelligence officers press him for details—especially about one companion whose true loyalties may not be what they seemed.
After his mom's funeral, a boy encounters the odd girl next door, who insists they journey through space to find a planet for departed souls.
Birger is old and retired from work, but he still goes back to work since he has nothing else to do. Back home he gets a rare visitor: a girl from Hare Krishna recruiting new members.
A young intellectual, Mati, engineers himself into a situation where he has to spend a weekend with his wife Helina and her lover Eduard. The trio goes to Eduard's summer house, surrounded by the majestic scenery of big forests and an empty beach. Mati, either out of jealousy or pride, has decided to win back his wife and will do anything his introverted and inert mind can come up with.
The King is Born is a video classic about the birth of Jesus based on the Bible. Beginning with Gabriel announcing God's blessed plan for Mary, this video brings all the elements of this timeless store to life. Journey with Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem and witness the humble birth of our Savior together with the shepherds.
A 16-year-old gay boy lives with his Catholic grandfather in the Bronx.
A road movie about three guys (two hitchhikers, one driver) and one woman.
The movie is a fictionalized account of a disgruntled cop who has been wrongly implicated in a torture video that went viral. It begins on his last night of duty, as he is about to leave for abroad for better job prospects.
Ahreum sits in a small café, typing on her laptop. Around her, customers enact various dramas from their lives. Is she writing what she hears or is she hearing what's been written?
In a small North German village a drama played out during and shortly after the Second World War about duty versus individual conscience and morality.
This intimate chamber drama, set in a maternity ward, follows the emotional crises of three women as they grapple with motherhood.
Russian provincial town in the middle of the 1930s Stalin's Great Purge. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the local police, does what he has to do. And he does it well.
A middle class young man rebels against his father’s brutish authority and seeks a rough romance with a woman of ethnic minority. Yuce’s moral tale draws from the example of today’s Turkish youth and the timeless shadow of fathers over sons.
Internationally released Director's Cut of "Loro 1" and "Loro 2", which were released separately as two movies in Italy. The film talks about the group of businessmen and politicians – the Loro (Them) from the title – who live and act near to media tycoon and politician Silvio Berlusconi in the years between 2006 and 2009.
Filmmaker Jafar Panahi and actor Behnaz Jafari travel to a tiny village after receiving a plea for help from a girl whose family has forbidden her from studying acting. Amusing encounters abound, but they soon discover that the local hospitality is rivaled by the desire to protect old traditions.
Raf and Julie, a couple on the verge of breaking up, find themselves in an emergency ward bordering on collapse on the evening of a Parisian Yellow Vest protest. Their encounter with Yann, an angry and injured demonstrator, will shatter each person's certainties and prejudices. Outside, the tension escalates.
Three different love stories, set in three consecutive decades, in two neighbouring Balkan villages burdened with a long history of inter-ethnic hatred: this is a film about the dangers – and the enduring strength – of forbidden love.
Matteo is a young successful businessman, audacious, charming and energetic. Ettore instead, is a calm, righteous, second grade teacher always living in the shadows, still in the small town from where both come from. They’re brothers but with two very different personalities. A dramatic event will force them to live together in Rome for a few months, bringing up the opportunity to face their differences with sympathy and tenderness, in a climax of fear and euphoria.
Zahira, 18, is close to her family until her parents ask her to follow Pakistani tradition to choose a husband. Torn between family customs and her western lifestyle, the young woman turns for help to her brother and confidant Amir.
The lives of a macho butcher, his wife, a lonely waitress, a sadist and a flophouse manager intersect in Recife, Brazil.
Michel is a young technician in the fledgling TV industry and is due for military service in two months at the time of the Algerian War. Juliette and Liliane are inseparable best friends, and aspiring actresses, who hang around outside the TV studio. Michel invites them in to watch, flirts with them both, and dates them separately and together. When Michel goes on a holiday to Corsica, just before he is drafted, the girls follow.
8mm work directed by Norihiko Morinaga.
A mosaic of several intertwined stories questioning the meaning of life, love and hope, set during the last six days in the life of Eluana Englaro, a young woman who spent 17 years in a vegetative state.
A young father and his two children struggle to find harmony after his wife leaves them for another man.
"Loro", in two parts, is a period movie that chronicles, as a fiction story, events likely happened in Italy (or even made up) between 2006 and 2010. "Loro" wants to suggest in portraits and glimps, through a composite constellation of characters, a moment in history, now definitively ended, which can be described in a very summary picture of the events as amoral, decadent but extraordinarily alive. Additionally, "Loro" wishes to tell the story of some Italians, fresh and ancient people at the same time: souls from a modern imaginary Purgatory who, moved by heterogeneous intents like ambition, admiration, affection, curiosity, personal interests, establish to try and orbit around the walking Paradise that is the man named Silvio Berlusconi.
A stagnant and gloomy village in the 1980s. Reyhan, Nurhan, and Havva, three sisters were sent to town as 'besleme' (foster child and maid). Since they fail their foster parents for different reasons, they are sent back to their father's house in their poor village. Deprived of their dreams of a better life, they try to hold on to each other.
Follows a couple, Marta and Antonio, who split up after what seems like an trivial argument.