15. October 20:00 | Theatersaal Puschkinhaus
International Short Films
Online availability 15 - 30 October
At her father’s request, Coline returns to her childhood bedroom to sort through her things. The various objects she finds there allow her to immerse herself in the memories of her childhood. Among them, the ones that still characterise her today stand out.
A pandemic and two different people under one same roof. The trigger for everything is a sneeze. Anna and Vicent are forced to live with the new reality exceeding the limit of the absurd.
A cowboy movie-obsessed grocery clerk named Wayne is assigned to round up the shopping carts in the store parking lot. To stave off the boredom, he instead imagines himself as a hero of the Old West. He wrangles cattle, herds hens, and even faces off against a ferocious Bull Cart! One fierce showdown later, he may have totally bungled his job, but he tames the wild beast like the hero he always knew he was.
The story of a girl who studies animation and has spent four years without a single day off. An animated short film about a film student working on her graduation film.
An expressionist fairy tale about the last breath of life. An ode to emptiness and fulfilment.
An ambitious thief wants to steal a valuable diamond from a heavily guarded vault. On his way there, he unexpectedly encounters competition – a femme fatale who has appeared for the same purpose. The rivalry over the diamond slowly turns into a mutual fascination that leads the couple into a world between dream and reality. Their game balances between danger and sensual flirtation. The film is a mixture of crime and love story, with a dash of humour.
A nuclear power plant worker obsessed with counting has set himself an upper limit for electricity consumption that he wants to keep to. But the energy that was supposed to last him for the rest of his life is slowly running out, forcing him to decide on its final use. 3 MWh is a film poem about degrowth and shows what it would look like if humans stopped placing themselves at the centre of nature. An analogue 16mm film footage, damaged by digitally recorded electrical discharges and based on the voice of the protagonist, demonstrates the relationship between man and material reality.
The short animated film ‘Ouch!’ shows abstract and metaphorical scenes depicting the ‘lack of professional respect’ in eight different professions. The four-minute film is intended to illustrate the conflicts and contradictions that exist between the individual professions and the general public. Through the flowing images and their interweaving, the animation emphasises an intangible structure that people cannot escape and that establishes a set of rules. The problem of ‘lack of professional respect’ is not only due to a hierarchical relationship between superiors and subordinates, but can also be attributed to broader societal structural problems.
Film genre examples displayed with a few animated matchsticks for taking serious theoretical approaches by exploring the narrative implications of the cinema and develop skills and knowledge of in-depth analysis of film texts. Or just for fun.
At the end of his life, Victor Hugo abandons his pen to take one last look at the ocean and confront his ghosts. The film is based on the poem collection “Les Contemplations”, in which the poet addresses, among other things, the loss of his daughter Léopoldine and man’s relationship with nature.