All Films in Competition

Rule No. 5: Shadow Your Man Closely assembles a film loop collage out of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. train scene. One shot becomes the base for specific editing procedures through which the film narrative is reconstructed and a new plot is created.

What is Sound?
What is Music?
…what is Rain?

A young woman’s inner voice unfolds.
Successively erased, covered over, she recounts intimate moments of her life.
As the story emerges, and through the unspoken, a portrait of her relationship with a little too close friend takes shape.

A photograph is a window into the past, but sometimes the border between the past and the present is not entirely clear. This stop-motion animation invites us to think about our relationship to time by portraying one woman caught in the middle.

A short digital film portrait of dance artist and art model Sawami Fukuoka. Referencing a traditional Japanese folk tale, it meditates on the ways one navigates the difference between interior and exterior worlds. The film employs visually layered stylistic perspectives to illuminate the tension between being and being seen.

How do we relate to the concept of climate catastrophe on a personal level? The filmmaker draws a parallel between various threats of climate change and her own visceral and emotional experience of grieving after an immense and sudden loss, questioning her capacity to care about humanity yet nonetheless showing a glimmer of hope for the future.

Four stories about shocked pigeons, stolen underpants, judgemental robots and thrown marbles are interwoven in a world view that enables the narrator to confront her date with unexpected abilities.

40-year old Irma goes on a vacation to an all-inclusive resort. Soon after her arrival she realizes the place is meant for young families. Irma has to find her own place in this holiday paradise.

A sensorial experience of men in nature.

The One Close to the Sea shows the immersion of a filmmaker in a Scottish landscape. Not a narrative representation of what happens on the surface of this landscape, but the search for a simple rhythm, that lies underneath this landscape and makes up its essence. This is not a search for any landscape, but for that mode of being, that is essential to “all” landscape. A search for what transforms mere place, into landscape. The rhythm of the land; light, movement, sound. The action of warm colours gives way to a deeper molecular game, that precedes all surface action. Not the violence of lightning, but the silent force of a charged cloud. Not a hymn of praise for nature, but an icy breath that is the direct expression of this nature. Not the chaos of a forest in bloom, but the simplicity of a bare landscape. The camera seeks to move at this level, at this rhythm, a rhythm that is not only the essence of nature, but also the essence of cinema. Light, movement, sound. The film shows how the earth breaths. Perhaps, this is the breath of cinema.

On the 24th of June, 1958 the philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Günther Anders was flying to Japan to take part in the Fourth World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and for Disarmament. He recollected this experience in his book “The Man on the Bridge: Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.