A man wakes with a bloody axe in his hands. He doesn't remember who he is or the horror that haunts him. Armed only with a Polaroid camera, he's being hunted by IT, which only shows itself in a flash of light.
A teenager, Achi, who is in the forest with his friend, suddenly finds himself alone. While searching for his friend, he gradually loses his sense of spatial orientation and ends up in an environment that becomes increasingly unfamiliar and uncertain. The forest slowly ceases to be merely a physical location and transforms into a space of inner experience, where reality, time, and perception begin to blur and intertwine.
After graduating from university, Jiawei’s relationship fell into crisis. He chose to stay in Hong Kong, while his girlfriend insisted on returning to her home country to prepare for the civil service exam. Their long-distance relationship gradually wore down their feelings and patience, yet neither was willing to compromise for the other, and so things dragged on. Then one day, Jiawei heard the girl next door—a Hong Kong local—learning to play a guitar song, which happened to be his favorite. The sound of the guitar drifted through the thin wall of their subdivided flats into his empty room.
A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new ambient intelligence promises security, rapid response, predictive analysis, microgeneration, efficiency. Here it delivers funwashing messages from the cloud for users in a performative essay on domotics. Talk back from the data harvest and Orwell’s “never sleeping ear.” To challenge them is to “fight the future.”
An elderly man has always perceived reality as tilted. Gradually, however, everything seems to turn upside down—even the image of Green Tara, to whom he makes daily offerings. His youngest son, a monk at a temple, is summoned home; he finds himself navigating the boundary between reality and illusion as he tries to understand what is happening to his father. The most conceptual film in the competition reinterprets themes and figures from Tibetan Buddhism, transporting them into a realm suspended between spirituality, paradox, and irony.
A woman finds a coconut on her daily commute path every day. The recurring discovery leads her to investigate the source, unraveling a mysterious secret tied to her past
An arrogant vlogger disturbs what should not be disturbed.
Evelyn and Ben are being blackmailed by a coworker, which forces them to find a way to keep their secret safe before they're exposed to the company's president; Evelyn's husband.
“An Akoon” means “To be”. An Akoon is a poetic, experimental, and intuitive film that confronts the weight of existence, a yearning to return to a state before becoming, before the weight of consciousness. In the depths of inner turmoil, the film dives into war, grief, anger, fear, and remorse, rooted in the profound bond between mother and child.
Cora must choose between seeking help from the real world or an oddly comforting, perfectly-perfect 1950s show, 'The Fix It Family'.
In a changing village steeped in old lore, a young girl steps into a forbidden grove and uncovers a long-silenced red bloom; she awakens memories buried by power and time. Her quiet act stirs forgotten histories and resistance, blending folklore and reality to reflect on loss, memory and survival.
Part seven of cycle "The Requiem Films". “I imagine that almost everyone who has come across this piece is familiar with the phrase ‘in illo tempore’. In illo tempore—in that time. […] Let’s pause for a moment on ‘tempore’. Let’s consider, as laypeople might, what part of the original phrase this is. Of course, it is technically ‘time.’ [..] When an extra letter ‘a’ appeared in my mind—which has a tendency to complicate all sorts of concepts to the limit—it completely changed the perspective of everything. ‘aTempore’ was born. What did that mean to me? If ‘tempore’ is, theoretically, ‘(at) that time,’ then ‘aTempore’ would mean ‘non-time.’ Now we have ‘That Non-Time.’ Does this mean we should think of time that has stopped? Or perhaps of different spaces, sensations? […]” - as the introductionary note to the movie says.
Blue ceases to be merely a color and becomes a persistent presence—an everyday reality that takes hold each day; it carries a weight, a meaning, and a past that still dwells within it.
The Lumières’ classic was shot in three takes. Statistically, over a working life, each worker leaves the factory some 9,000 times.
We follow Linda and Matilda through their day as each grapples with the consequences of death and mourning. Matilda follows a more depressive take on mourning, locking out the world and allowing the grief to overcome her. Linda follows an optimistic look at life, trying to continue on with life as if nothing happened, but small things keep reminding her of the dead.
Pray for Radric Davis
Inspired by real events, this video tells the story of a Welsh computer engineer who, twelve years ago, accidentally threw away a hard drive containing the private key to 8 000 Bitcoins (worth nearly a billion dollars today). Since then, he has been trying by all possible means to recover it. The video takes the form of a wandering journey through Newport between the depths of a landfill and the depths of the internet, where thoughts and trash overlap.
