It’s Sasha’s last day in the orphanage. He’s about to be adopted by a nice woman and taken to America. He’s meant to be acting like he’s won the jackpot but he’s not. The care workers are harassed with him, he hasn’t packed, he’s left his bed a mess, he hasn’t rehearsed the speech thanking…
Noir-soleil is animated short about an unforeseen family reunion. Everything in the film is about incongruous contrasts. The beautiful artwork, at times so gentle and soft, provides an unlikely medium for a story with such dark subjects. The volcano rumblings around Pompeii set off a minor earthquake, which causes it to release one of its…
As night descends on Rio de Janiero, the fireflies come out. Equally beautiful are the nocturnal inhabitants of Flamingo Park. There they pray, bathe, and make love beneath the moonlight. The nightlife of a city always represents its unseen self, the truth we deny in ourselves in the bright light of day, beneath the righteous…
One of my favourites of the festival. Breathtakingly honest to the point of being painfully vulnerable, Diana Nguyen confronts the heartbreak at the centre of her and her father’s relationship. She rediscovers a cache of letters her father sent her when she was a child. He was in prison when she was young, but they…
I . . . I have no idea. Basically visual ASMR around the theme of squish.
A depressed insomniac is driving in the rain at night when a tall, buxom woman in a glittering evening dress calls out, “Beware of the slippery road – it’s dangerous!” He comes off his moped, and so begins the start of tentative but nurturing friendship. Diana is the woman. Despite her flashy dress and her…
Evil Dead inspired Japanese short horror film. A bunch of pals go to check in on their friend who seems to be going full hikikomori. When they get there, the windows are covered with newspaper, the place stinks, there’s goo on the carpet, and bags of garbage everywhere. Because it isn’t Scotland, where the immediate…
The Nicky Nack nails its colours to the mast as English folk horror by opening in the quintessential British pub replete with toby jugs and hanging baskets. There our hero throws back a few, and like Tam O’Shanter, prepares to make the long and lonesome journey home through the black night. Doing the starboard-side shuffle…
Even the title gives you the wiggins. Such Small Hands is a horror short focusing on a newcomer to a orphanage who struggles to break into the collective. When they pull apart her doll, she institutes a secret nighttime game, where one girl at random will be picked to be ‘the doll’ and the rest…
The Dinner After is a horror short film about a lassie going for her weekly tea with her mum and dad. Their abject cheerfulness bounces off her hesitancy in what you could at first put down to the normal tension of adult children visiting their parents. However it soon proves that more is going on,…