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?

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.

Wasabi

Narrator is a man in his early 30s who is cooking pasta while enjoying a seemingly normal morning. Suddenly, the phone rings: a mysterious voice is telling him things that don't make much sense. Something is not right but not wrong either, and it seems that some memory from the past might have triggered all this...

The Third Rule