Gender identity, freedom and grief all become entwined in Life After a Lifetime and Endless Rebirths, Leart Rama’s propulsive and emotive short about a young woman clinging to the memory of her disappeared boyfriend.
Apocalyptic foreboding permeates the gripping short, Living Grounds, told through a series of long takes, as a fatal accident becomes all too personal for someone attending the scene.
Dear Orchid is a poetic and diaristic documentary, using the perspective of a child to ruminate on fleeing the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.
Marjolaine Perreten’s expressive animation, Singularity, combines a goofy and loveable protagonist with a sombre depiction of nature’s red teeth and claws in twilight of the Ice Age.
An elderly man in Beirut wrestles with grief and his own mortality in All This Death, Fadi Syriani’s poignant and accomplished stop-motion animation.
A mother anxiously awaits news of her son in the tense short chamber piece, No Land in Sight, about the ways in which we cling on to hope in the dark.
Hind Hamed is excellent as a widowed mother trying to give her daughter a start in life in Passport Wedding, Abdallah Al-Ziyadi’s intimate and expressive drama.
China’s one-child policy provides the inspiration for Dean Wei and Shiyu Liu’s The Apple Doesn’t Fall…, a meticulous and theatrical apartment-bound family drama told through expressive dance.
The collaboration between three filmmakers to re-enact sexual assaults suffered by Russian women, Second Skin, is a staggering and imperative act of bearing witness.
Harrowing memories of domestic abuse are recounted over striking images of the natural world in Rahhala: Hayya ala Hayya, Lujain Jo’s beautiful and brutal reckoning with trauma.
Lasse Linder’s equine documentary, Air Horse One, is a quiet portrait of a champion thoroughbred – a behind the scenes peek that is meditative though never profound.
Mattie Do’s The Sleeping Beauty is a beguiling fairy tale of accursed love that blends fantasy and horror, born of traditional Laotian folklore.
Labour and mythology come crashing together in The Boy with White Skin, a disquieting short set in the pitch darkness of a Senegalese gold mine.
The short experimental documentary ‘perfectly a strangeness’ pairs the mundane with the majestic in an equine odyssey to the stars.
Mortality is on the mind in Charlie Kaufman’s contemplative and illusory short, How to Shoot a Ghost – an enveloping, chimeric memento mori.
Antoine Chapon repurposes eerie architectural animations in ‘The Orchards,’ a paean to a lost Damascus community that attempts to resist its eradication by a vindictive regime.
The documentary vignette ‘I Believe the Portrait Saved Me’ uses a deeply personal story to explore the power of creativity and evoke the teetering knife edge of survival.
Mirjana Balogh’s affirming animation, Wish You Were Ear, finds solace in a dystopian future where ending a relationship requires the physical swapping of a body part.
Tying together disparate locations in Northern England and Jamaica, Hope Strickland’s evocative boat ride, ‘a river holds a perfect memory,’ explores the interrelations between labour, memory and rivers.
Ostensibly about the preservation of an ancient language, Eva Giolo’s essay film ‘Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths’ combines linguistics with landscape and myth to captivating effect.
Traditional fruit cultivation becomes a source of archival fascination in Common Pear, a sci-fi documentary hybrid set amidst environmental collapse.
The third work in Lawrence Lek’s trilogy on disobedient driverless cars, Empty Rider explores autonomy and responsibility through a futuristic AI show trial.
A mother and her young son’s relationship is pushed to the limit in Teta, an unnerving psychological horror with disquieting, supernatural overtones.
How we consume images and what it means to be a distant onlooker lie at the heart of Miranda Pennell’s sobering, analytical short, Man Number 4.
Malena Szlam uses in-camera editing to craft Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya, an evocative 16mm exploration of Australia’s vast central eastern ranges and their deep geological time.
Peter Ghesquiere channels Wes Anderson in Manual for a Divorce, a mannered short comedy about a couple who are separated when their children get a divorce.
A checkpoint stop en route to Tehran leads to a young boy being held for drug possession. A moral quandary ensues in the emotive short, Alone Together.
Two young children are left to find their own way when their father commits suicide in Diego Gaxiola’s poignant magical realist short, Nostalgia of a (Still) Alive Heart.
Coming of age is tough in Almost Certainly False, a deft exploration of identity and duty in the life of a young Syrian immigrant dreaming of leaving Istanbul for Europe.
Three Keenings is a darkly comic character portrait depicts an actor presenting a facsimile of grief that is a thin veneer over the real thing waiting to erupt.
A closed, patriarchal community begins to transform as the cries of a legendary forest beast foreshadow social revolution in the spirited short, The Poison Cat.
The surrealism of images created by artificial intelligence evokes the unreliability of memory and elusive nature of a dystopian plague in the sci-fi short, ‘The Eggregores Theory’.
A father and son heading home from football practice face the realities of bureaucracy and the lure of migration in Samir Karahoda’s finely tuned short, On the Way.
A passenger train witnesses an act of ethnic cleansing in ‘The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent’, a well-drawn portrait of the wary silence of complicity that allows evil to triumph. Winner of the Palme D’Or – Short Film at Cannes.
Like a Sick Yellow is a fragmentary portrait of place that blurs fact with fiction to create an elusive and unnerving meditation on memory and the Kosovan war.
A young woman acclimatises to the rhythms of a new city while reflecting on those of her lifestyle in looking she said I forget, the heady short from Naomi Pacifique.
Kevin Jerome Everson’s latest short – Practice, Practice, Practice – is yet another perfectly calibrated examination of the aspects of African-American labour that packs a powerful punch.
The historical documentary Pirates of the Mediterranean combines an operation to uncover a 16th century shipwreck with re-enactment and talking heads to explore an overlooked element of Europe’s past.
A father attempts to create some kind of life and legacy for his blind son in this tender but bittersweet Maltese drama, Beautiful Lie.
In the slantwise ethnographic documentary ‘Empathfridges’, Rakel Jonsdottir explores the concept of shared fridges in Iceland to create microcosmic portraits of place and community.
The experimental short If I die, will I go home? unnervingly explores the psyche of a young man wrestling with how to survive as an adult when bound by the long grip of childhood trauma.
Crypto-currencies and cryogenics become intertwined in Gala Hernandez Lopez’s illusory dual-screen collage which ruminates on humanity’s speculative relationship with the future, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world.
A filmmaker explores her struggles with motherhood and artistic stimulus through a correspondence and a short film about birdwatching in That’s All from Me, a deft epistolary short.
A man has his heart removed in an attempt to lessen his existential anguish in Fanny Sorgo and Eva Pedroza’s expressive, lingering animation, Tako Tsubo.
The outmoded bleach sellers of Tangier offer a window to a simpler time and a resistance against rampant growth in Hicham Gardaf’s tranquil documentary, In Praise of Slowness.
An elderly couple retreats from the outside world in preparation for the launch of three artificial moons in the strange and meditative experimental documentary, The Moon Also Rises.
Santiago, Chile is both brought into focus and dreamily abstracted in Towards the Sun, Far from the Centre, a languid city symphony featuring a queer couple looking for a space in which they can express themselves.
A wonderfully observed sketch of a family lunch in late-1990s China, Remains of the Hot Day not only captures period mood but is compiled from glimpses of myriad miniature dramas.
A young girl avoiding her home and a woman returning to hers after a long absence form a brief but profound bond in Selin Oksuzoglu sparkling short, Bye Bye Turtle.
Ilir Hasanaj’s deeply empathetic documentary ‘Workers’ Wings’, is centred on manual labourers who have suffered workplace injuries, is a tender and intimate marvel.
In the spritely and tactile essayistic ode to a heroine of Greek myth Daphne was a torso ending in leaves, Catriona Gallagher reflects on the legacy of an ancient arboreal transformation.
‘History Is Written at Night’ is an unusual portrait of the blackouts that have plagued Cuba over the past few years and an exquisite exercise in atmosphere.
Just over a dozen artworks are observed in situ in 14 Paintings, a patient but cumulatively fascinating cross-section portrait of contemporary China.
Sirin Bahar Demirel’s stimulating bricolage short, Between Delicate and Violent, combines archival imagery with animation to examine how pictures tell stories and whether they can be mined for truth.
Chloe Galibert-Laine’s latest video essay, I Would Like to Rage, reflects on the place of rage online and through this lens explores the blurred lines between authenticity and performativity
Mass wig exportation becomes the lens through which the fascinating, spectral doc An Asian Ghost Story explores Hong Kong’s late 20th-century modernisation and position between East and West.
One of the traditional fables of Sang Kancil, the wily mouse-deer, is brought exquisitely to life in Zhang Xu Zhan’s electrifying, otherworldly animation, Compound Eyes of Tropical
In the complex and thought-provoking essay film, Lumene: Privatisation, David Shongo reflects on the commodification of cultural memory and the lasting impacts of insidious colonial impositions.
An ostensibly simplistic documentary about a flat in Kyiv, Three Windows on South West uses incidental memories to paint a fleeting collective portrait of another time.
Rati Oneli’s phlegmatic drama, We Are the Hollow Men, depicts the difficult relationship between an estranged father and son when the latter returns home after his mother’s death.
History, folklore, and contemporary realities intertwine in Amma ki Katha, Nehal Vyas’ essayistic meditation on national aspiration and how stories become enmeshed in state oppression.
A young woman must deal with the physical and psychological bruises of a sexual assault in Shaylee Atary’s powerful dramatic short, Single Light.
Godard reaches from beyond with one final film, a coarse and compelling act of montage, an expressive audiovisual treatment for a never-to-be-made made feature, Phony Wars.
A mother and father are confronted with an agonising dilemma as they attempt to prepare the body of their young transgender child for burial in Ahmad Alyaseer’s ‘Our Males and Females’.
A man uses virtual reality to experience and retouch the memory of his deceased daughter in this poignant, thought-provoking Iranian sci-fi, Dream Maker.
The miniature beings that starred in an 80s television show slowly unravel in Wander to Wonder, a surreal animation that riffs on an enchanting children’s story trope.
Silent film footage is repurposed in We Should All Be Futurists, a deliciously comic reimagining of Marinetti’s man-machine hybrid as a novel – intimate – cure for female hysteria.
A largely deserted port plays host to subtle drama unraveling at a glacially pace in Xandra Popescu’s strangely beguiling study in stasis, Sentimental Stories.
Unspoken traumas are made manifest in Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi’s beautifully drawn and profoundly moving animated allegory, In the Shadow of the Cypress.
Wes Anderson’s second Roald Dahl adaptation packs a feature’s worth of deadpan humor and aggressive visual style into just 37 minutes.
The long fingers of the Kosovo War reach into the present in Sovran Nrecaj’s patient and stark documentary about Fran and Verka’s isolated life in an abandoned village.
Domonkos Erhardt’s student short ‘From the Corner of My Eyes’ uses the malleability of the animated image to great effect to capture a miniature moment of connection.
With ‘Lost Children’ Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier have created an aching, poignant and keenly observed depiction of a dislocated father-daughter relationship, premiered in Sarajevo International Film Festival,
The personal and the political entangle in Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, Anna Dziapshipa’s excellent essay doc about Georgian-Abkhazian relations through the lens of her own family history. It is competing in Sarajevo International Film Festival
Mátalos a todos de Sebastian Molina Ruiz combina la estética grunge en video con elementos epistolares para explorar el sentimiento adolescente de aislamiento .
A tentative friendship blossoms through video correspondence in ‘Kill ‘Em All’, a deftly observed docudrama filled with youthful uncertainty and poignant loneliness.
A man learns of his own imminent death in iNTELLIGENCE, a strikingly graphic meditation on a curtailed life and the allure of immortality.
The beguiling Night Shift follows two individuals as they meander around venerated institutions after dark, crafting an entrancing portrait of liminal existences.
A factory worker wrestles with a dispiriting future in this short about a fortune-telling tortoise and a desire for self-determination.
From heart-breaking performances to queasy satire, from Pedro Costa to Christopher Lee, there was something for everyone in this year’s KVIFF shorts.
Upending the online practice of blurring sensitive content, Narges Kalhor’s short documentary celebrates those bravely sharing uncensored images of Iran’s recent protests.
This documentary about astronauts and the doctor that administers to them finds quiet profundity within the mechanics of interplanetary bodies.
Alice Brygo’s arresting film is an experiential recreation of the crowds massing around the burning Notre-Dame in 2019 and myriad responses to the catastrophic events.
Sachiko and Ming share an apartment and predilection for role-play in Cheng Yu’s enigmatic and intriguing exploration of one relationship through the prism of many.
Two Levantine immigrants working in a Lyon café bond in this meditation on friendship and the long fingers of history which claimed the Berlinale Shorts top prize.
This deeply personal documentary follows an Australian Aboriginal man as he escapes the chokehold of the big city to reconnect with Country.
This strange and engrossing short blends a surreal and slippery story about a bizarre online relationship with Stephen Vuillemin’s glorious animation.
Set amidst a landscape of mountainous detritus, Kantarama Gahigiri’s short is an abstract but strikingly powerful rejoinder against the exploitation of Africa.
This tenderly moving documentary observes a group of Ukrainian children adapting to their new lives, after having been re-homed in former military barracks in Germany.
This thoughtful compilation film draws our gaze to something unregistered across decades of British cinema and television – the face of a particular extra, Jill Goldston.
The nature and potential of non-human evolution are explored to disquieting effect in Deborah Stratman’s essayistic blend of science fact and science fiction.
A couple reflect on a failed pregnancy in the midst of the pandemic in Monica Lima’s tactile and delicate drama about the desire to nurture and propagate.
An ageing footballer reflects on his career in this layered rumination on the nature of the beautiful game adapted from the filmmaker’s own short story.
Sound and images captured during several years of documentary making form the basis for this haunting essayistic meditation on fear and its effects.
As we stand on the edge of increasing digital frontiers, Katharina Pethke’s thought-provoking film explores the mechanics and implications of creating a virtual doppelganger.
Ana Bravo-Perez searches for the demons released by the extraction of fossil fuels from her native Colombia in this disquieting hybrid documentary.
Simon Liu utilises his familiar febrile aesthetic as a way to explore and represent Hong Kong’s tumultuous recent history, to deeply disquieting effect.
This observational documentary follows the travails of a female driver who is part a grass-roots public transit system connecting the villages of northern Colombia.
Gala Hernandez Lopez’s essay film addresses the incel phenomena from a position of fascination and empathy, seeking to understand the pain of isolation in a connected world.International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film
This atmospheric animated documentary uses collage and fleeting rotoscoped drawings to convey the brutality and dislocating effect of state care in the GDR.
The life and work of German palaeontologist Johannes Weigelt is itself placed under the microscope in this inventive and unexpectedly charged miniature portrait.
Lucid dreaming and entangled destinies give an otherworldly aspect to Kalani Gacon’s intoxicating and bittersweet tale of romantic longing in Kathmandu.
A silly joke on a quiet weekend away becomes a painful indicator of impending doom in this low-key Norwegian break-up drama.
Javier Bardem and Chris Rock star in this febrile melodrama, directed by Sally Potter, about an explosive moment in a relationship.
Inspired by Schubert’s song cycle Die schone Mullerin, Christopher at Sea is a dizzying animated odyssey into solitude and obsessive, unrequited desire.
A harmless ruse to enable some teenage fumbling upsets the equilibrium of a relationship in Kawthar Younis’ pointed chamber piece.
A teenage boy’s worldview is unsettled by a confusing encounter with an older woman in this riveting Mongolian coming-of-age drama.
This deft and low-key drama uses fires raging in the Amazon to explore how a young woman is drawn to religion in search of some form of stability.
A teenage girl’s sense of isolation is writ large across the screen in this frosty Macedonian coming-of-age short that is warmed by a compelling lead performance.
A 1963 BBC interview with James Baldwin, and conducted by Peter Duval Smith, is recreated in this polished and energising narrative short.
Two men share in intimate and intense moment on a deserted shoreline in this short drama about violence, emancipation, and the fine lines between the two.
Story Chen’s Palme D’Or-winning short is a mesmerising journey through memory and melancholia as a woman takes a farewell tour of her hometown.
Atmosphere is everything in this ambiguous, slightly absurd short that leaves a great deal left unsaid, but perfects a lingering sense of melancholy.
This deceptively simple documentary explores the nature of creation by juxtaposing the work of Ukrainian sculptors who’ve turned their hands to the war effort.
The celebration of a forthcoming marriage is depicted with poignancy and subtlety in Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier’s intimate short.
The women’s toilet in a nightclub becomes the site of miniature disasters and minor catastrophes in Angelika Abramovitch’s multi-stranded and surprisingly affecting short.
Jonathan Glazer’s lockdown short embraces the urge to dance, re-framing a 16th century madness into an infectious ode to perseverance in the pandemic era.
A father and son make daily parachute jumps from their cliffside home to sell ice in João Gonzalez’s gripping and poignant animation.
A teenager cares for her younger siblings in this delicate portrait of familial love and the desire to hold on to a semblance of childhood.
María Silvia Esteve’s new short is a bombastic and overwhelming voyage of colour and sound that conveys the psychological sensation of spiraling hypochondria.
An offbeat comedy about family dysfunction ultimately becomes a touching examination of how we deal with scars left on us by our histories.
The outlawing of physical contact creates a cauldron of unexpressed sensuality for the burnished and browbeaten shipyard workers of Evi Kalogiropoulou’s eerie dystopian short.
Shuli Huang’s intensely personal and moving diary film is like a heart-wrenching exploration of – and possibly coda to – his relationship with his mother.
Éric Baudelaire riffs on the music and musical sensibility of Alvin Curran in this absorbing archival documentary about the revolutionary fervour of mid-century Rome.
In this collaborative rumination on the nature and limits of political protest, Bassem Saad weaves together performance, found footage, and on-screen text with playful results.
Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges explore the decolonising power of education in this tale of rebellious scholarship in the tangle of Guinea-Bissau’s mangrove swamps.
A simple premise yields increasingly complex results in Marie Suul Brobakke’s dissection of a romantic relationship between two actors rehearsing a scene.
Apocalypse anxiety, discomfort in the childhood home, and the effects of enforced isolation make for a heady brew in Maria Estela Paiso’s multimedia fever dream.
A new documentary from Lucrecia Martel explores communal creativity and expressive performance by bringing together marginalised artists in the north of Argentina.
This grainy, tender, and contemplative film by Sofia Georgovassili approaches a potentially traumatic coming-of-age drama through a fable-like, quotidian lens.
The truth lies in the spaces between recorded history in Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânc?’s austere and through-provoking silent documentary.
Through colourful, chemically contaminated found footage, Rafael Castanheira Parrode evocatively excavates the trauma of the 1987 radioactivity disaster in Goiânia, Brazil.
Super 8 footage of an idyllic holiday destination provides the serene surface for Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg’s probe into the darker elements of history both political and personal.
Gerard Ortín Castellví’s film about the mechanised standardisation of plant products in an industrial greenhouse is both hypnotic and unsettling; meticulous documentary and dreamlike fantasy.
Ágata de Pinho impresses both in front of and behind the camera in this visceral drama about a woman who believes she will disappear on her 28th birthday.
Our prehistoric relationship to the forest is atmospherically invoked in this documentary about a small Indian village and the tales its inhabitants tell of the whispering trees.
Yan Wai Yin’s diaristic documentary uses the interplay of posters and graffiti on a local footbridge to explore and evoke intense social unrest in Hong Kong.
A captivating, shapeshifting excavation of the vampirism of Christopher Columbus and the colonial project filtered through the weed-fuelled mythology of artist and singer, Oba.
Korakrit Arunanondchai’s deeply moving film combines elements of mysticism, ecology, and politics to form some kind of understanding in the face of painful personal loss.
Hsu Che-yu’s examination of a political assassination combines digital and physical reconstruction techniques to understand the life of a mobster, assassin, and film producer.
Pedro Neves Marques follows 2019’s The Bite with another sci-fi-infused relationship story in this thought-provoking meditation on traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
Olive Nwosu’s delicate drama explores the difficulty of confronting complex notions of identity while also traversing a tender story of first love lost.
Siblings Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste mine the archive to visualise the transformation of 1960s French Guiana by a new space centre in this poetic documentary.
A young woman navigates the Cordilleran highlands to seek fame in the big city in Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan’s mysterious, Western-tinged drama.
Ilinca H?rnu? gives a captivating performance in Carina Gabriela Da?oveanu’s restrained but perceptive drama about a taxi driver longing for romance amidst a faltering marriage.
