Marrying documentary and musical, Neon Phantom looks at the lives and struggles of delivery workers in Brazil. The film combines a lot of different styles, there are scripted drama skits, first hand narratives of real experiences, song and dance numbers about their frustrations. It’s an interesting choice. It gives a number of different ways for…
Horrific animated short film from Chile, which makes more sense if you know who Ingrid Olderock was. Be warned there are some deeply disturbing images in this, all the worse now I know they are based on a true story. Bestia starts by showing us the mundane life of a pudgy middle-aged woman. She bakes…
In My Network asks the question, what the fuck even is work anymore? We open and close with a janny coming in to clean. He narrates his own view on social media, one common among the older generation, that he has little to do with it, that he has a Facebook profile to keep in…
One Hundred Steps is a short film set inside two stately homes, Bantry House in Ireland and Musée Grobet-Labadié in France. Within the walls celebrating the great and the good, people play folk music, dance and sing, representing the voices and the cultures of the people who built these houses, worked in these houses, but…
In an empty city, at what feels like the end of time, an ancient woman recalls the world past, the world it was promised to be, and what came to be. Filmmaker Marta Pajek draws on Escher’s impossible objects and marries them to the socio-political ideas that seemed so plausible but were impossible to realise…
This comic-tragic short film opens with a shot of the Euromaidan protestors toppling the statue of Lenin in Ukraine’s capital. In tinging metal or rumbling granite, the remaining statues of Lenin lament to one another, their language of stone and steel translated for us in subtitles. “Another fallen comrade!” they sigh. To honour him, they…
Displaced is a short film about two ping-pong coaches who try to keep the sport alive in post-war Kosovo. Ermegan Kazazi and Jeton Mazreku effectively play themselves, depicting their real life struggles only a few years past. The result is a blend of drama and documentary. As Kosovo struggles to rebuild, its people struggle to…