In My Country Men Have Breasts

Akbari was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 and she lost her breasts due to the cancer. After she directed, wrote and acted 10+4 which showed her struggle with the cancer, the depiction of the artists body became central in her works. In the same year, Akbari photographed her own naked body for the photo project titled Devastation. Although it was pretty risky, put herself in danger and prohibited to exhibit Devastation in Iran due to the naked images of her own body, Akbari continued to depict her own body as a new medium and new material so that she provided a video secretly as well. In 2012, after Akbari left Iran due to the barred situation of filmmaking and arresting film makers, she uses the video that shoot secretly from her own body in 2007 and juxtaposed with new images and the song of Ahangaran, who was a singer for the war time between Iran and Iraq. As a result of her action and performance, the video project titled In my country, Men Do Have Breasts happened.

A Paw Over Dark

A washed up actor performs night after night in a grimy theater to a nearly empty audience. However, everything changes when a clueless dog jumps on stage.

Killer Girl, Odyssee III

In 1989, Jun-Jieh Wang enrolled in Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, a year when the Berlin Wall was pulled down and the fall of Communism in the communist states of Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. He was astonished by these dramatic events. Several issues concerning politics, ideologies, aesthetics as well as the forms, market and power of art had been preying on his mind for so long that he lost the ability to make artworks and even questioned the value of the existence of art. His passively reactionary state of mind in this period was clearly reflected in the works simulating low-quality B-movies or TV programs, such as Killer Girl, Odyssey III (1990), Love, Die, Daredevil, Odyssey IV (1991).

Toll of a bell

Chen Cheng-Tsai works primarily in video art, photography, and mixed media installations. This work was created during his postgraduate studies in Germany. The trees rotate 360 degrees, and the artit's face reflected in the water, distorted by the ripples, iss overlapped by the trees. The sound of a bell also plays a continuous rythm.

Das Glas II

A ritual about"memory". The words and phrases written on the paper are easy to understand but difficult to define, substituting the usual " incantations to gods". The spat out red matter suggests kind of "refusal". This kind of "nauseous" mixture combined with these moods represents a space : a space for painting.

Smash Cuts! Super Sci-Fi Shorts Fest

Host Scott Forrest presents a curated compilation of eight independent short films in this rapid-fire science-fiction feature. Genres collide, narratives twist, aesthetics clash, and even humor, both campy and dystopian, showcase the vast creative possibilities of each story's individual world, offering the viewer a brief glimpse into the lives of every character's attempt to survive the otherworldly chaos around them. Released in 2001, the selected shorts span original creation dates of 1997 to 2001; most of the featured filmmakers also appear as themselves in short video interviews to talk about their inspirations, creative process and motivations while working on their individual shorts.

Admissions of Desire

A man and a woman talk on the phone and express their feelings and desires for each other for the first time. We watch as they listen to the other's admissions.

Entre tu et vous

A chronicle of the lives of a couple and the gradual dissolution of their relationship.

En La Profundidad de la Superficie

Artificial

Innocent nature walk leads to a discovery of the morbid nature of humans.

Astronomical Echoes

Made by film students, the short film is a tribute and authorial reinterpretation inspired by old Pink Floyd music videos as a psychedelic trip. Using overhead projectors to capture a liquid light show, the narrative is stitched together from a retro photograph, bringing a bit of 60s psychedelia with an air of nostalgia. With the combination of two of the band's songs ("Echoes" and "Astronomy Domine"), the music video brings the concept of the realism and ludic, of the present moment and insanity. Composed of characters who are part of a fictional band and travel through the delight of a mind that lives in the past while resting in reality.

PRÓXIMO!

モル

Yukari Nishihara, 25, earns her living as an art model and aspires to become an actress. One day, while she was out, she saw “a man's face about to jump off the roof of a building”, and since then she has been suffering from a peculiar constitution: she sees a suicide while on her period, faints, and develops a fever. The goddess of love does not smile on Yukari, who is unable to become a sweet girl with a nice boyfriend. The only things that can save Yukari now are her best friend Hana, who has a keen intuition, and a suppository that can break a fever in one shot. On the day of an important audition, Yukari has decided that this is her last chance. However, Yukari realizes that she has forgotten her antipyretic suppositories, and her eyes meet those of another soon-to-be suicide victim. She is in a desperate situation. What does Yukari do?

White Homeland Commando

White Homeland Commando takes the familiar terrain of network action drama and tilts the playing field. Reminiscent of today's popular reality-based cop shows, White Homeland Commando offers a straightforward story: four members of a special police unit investigate and infiltrate a New York-based white supremacist organization. But that is where the commonplace ends. The teleplay is shot and edited in a highly textured visual style, the colors are subdued yet somehow garish, and the sound is deliberately just out of sync with the speaker's lips. Occasional static combines with jumps in the plot — the editing is reminiscent of a television viewer flipping channels.

Preface to a History

A couple, Vlad and Sophy, navigate their relationship as well as their own struggles with mental health in the context of a highly connected, politically uncertain modern world while on a trip to a remote Canadian island in this avant-garde feature film. PREFACE TO A HISTORY, created with a tiny crew of four people, represents an experiment in using minimalist tools to create an overwhelming aesthetic experience in service of a simple, but specifically contemporary, story about two people attempting to navigate a fraying relationship amid all the anxieties and external pressures of modern adulthood in a technologically-interconnected and politically unstable era.

Déšť

Reverie

An experimental portrayal of being adrift in a daydream.

ASTRAKAN

Al-Nasr Al Tair

Dizzy

Dealing with his pill addiction, Jinn suffers from vivid nightmares, featuring a monster that plagues his everyday life.