Neonorma

A people-pleasing waiter sabotages his own evening trying to impress his boss; a self-conscious friend competes for attention at someone else’s birthday dinner; and two sisters turn a simple meal into a battlefield. Through quiet frustrations and misplaced priorities, the night unravels into an elegant mess of misunderstandings. No wonder this restaurant’s online reviews are so confusing.

Mia, an obedient daughter of a piano teacher, challenges her mother’s patience as she grows up and learns more about the life outside her room together with a boy next door. This coming-of-age story, entirely shot from a fixed top-down perspective of Mia’s room, depicts short snippets spanning 16 years of a girl’s life. What begins as a simple daily life of a child slowly turns into a dramatic teen experience, culminating in a decision that took all these years to come to.

The film takes place at a time when global catastrophes (climate change, global pandemics, warfare, etc.) have become commonplace and normalized. Art student Dafne is trying to create a painting, but she is disturbed by the noise made by her roommates. Seeking refuge, Dafne enters the world of her painting and creates her own personal oasis there. However, soon she must face a mysterious force there as well – a masked creature named Rēgs.

Schwamme Jr., a perfectionist inventor, lives in sterile isolation, haunted by his father’s legacy as the creator of the sponge. When a construction crew arrives to relocate his house, his obsessive order collides with outside chaos, triggering a surreal chain of events that forces him to confront the futility of control.