© 2026 The Couch Critic
A man gets reunited unwillingly with his high school tormenter, but this reunion doesn’t end well.
Gerd Pohlmann offers a timely doc tribute to politician Jim Anderton as a long-haul fighter for Labour’s welfare-based values, against a wave of neoliberal deregulation that fundamentally changed New Zealand politics.
After a scandalous affair costs him both his girlfriend and his family, a former comedian hits rock bottom. Desperate to turn his ruined life into laughter, he reunites with his ex-comedy partner to take the stage one last time.
Between match notifications and bombing alerts in Israel, a young documanterist is trying to find love.
When a struggling student discovers his late father left him a locked pendrive containing a massive fortune in Bitcoin, he and his friends must crack a highly secure password with only one attempt remaining—unknowingly holding the key to a long-buried family secret.
Both a cynical riposte to the hypocrisies of how teaching is presented at recruitment versus the realities of working within modern education, as well as being a sensitive ode to the teachers that care most. "An incredibly strong, wry and moving work" - Mark Lyken, filmmaker and artist
I was cooking the chicken and the steak before you were ever born.
A young woman struggles to find the right words to come out to her mom.
Some versions of ourselves never truly leave us. When the past and present converge, a young woman discovers that growing up also means learning to look back at the person she once was.
A boy discovers a diary he wrote as a child, filled with dreams he once believed he would achieve. As he reflects on how far he is from that life, he breaks the fourth wall to share his regrets, hopes, and one simple truth: he's still trying.
Examstress is a short student film created for college, year 2/2. This film is about the stress of exams and typical student mental health during this time. It follows Penn, a procrastinating student, as they work towards their final major project.
A young man pursues through strange dreams and visions to get to the girl of his dreams
When a high school teacher is packing up for winter break, a mysterious elf appears in the classroom. No one knows where this elf came from or where it went...
A look at the work of FC Barcelona in the Putumayo region of Colombia and their controversial links with Gran Tierra Energy.
Many of my films evolve from a single shot, and quite often that shot is an immediate response to a situation unfolding in front of me. This is about the closest I get to improvising, a musical form I sometimes aspire to, but is difficult to attain as a filmmaker. That was how I shot the majority of films in this programme, using the convenience of the mobile phone in my pocket. I often sense immediately that something might be made from the situation I find myself in, but only after studying the shots on my computer do I discover the direction they might take. The third film Pause clearly involved some planning, but again, after the initial recording, I had to work with the fragments of sound and image to see where they might lead, in a lengthy process of trial and error. In Interior Music I am using the camera in direct response to music emanating from the Trinity Conservatoire in Greenwich. (EXiS — Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, 2026)
On a deserted beach, a young woman sits on a small capsized boat. Looking out into the off-screen space, she takes out a sketchbook to capture the immense expanse of the sea: a landscape visible only to her eyes. Fascinated by the view, she attempts to enclose this boundless nature within the borders of her paper, only to quickly confront the exhausting, impossible task of portraying the unrepresentable.
Vova and Misha are participants in a charity project where any adult can become a mentor for a child from an orphanage. They've been friends for over six months and have a great time together. Vova teaches Misha to drive and is concerned about his college admissions. Everything changes when Misha gets another mentor – Irina, a woman who wants to adopt him.
In the near-future where "wokeness" is outlawed, seven strangers attend a workshop led by a disembodied leader but as his absurd lessons turn violent, they must choose between obedience and humanity.
Bas invites his friend Flor on a boys’ weekend in the French Ardennes to explore vulnerability. To facilitate this experiment, they adopt ‘Cowboy’ alter egos, in the hope that this role-play will help them get closer to themselves and to each other.
