Spectrum Shorts

Similar to cells absorbing energy from the environment to sustain themselves, the pixels in #43 feed on beautiful noise to stay alive.

A sublime landscape, but something goes wrong. #47 is part of a series researching the relationship between landscape representation, perception and the unconscious.

A naked woman draws the outline of her body. The process and the unexpected result show her brave and playful approach to bodily changes.

Yesterday's film technique applied to today's space. NYC's Times Square turned into a red, green and blue light show.

Thoughtful man decides to stop participating in reality and its rules, and picks a date for his death. Does life really mean nothing to him?

In Ethiopia music is of a different calibre and overcomes the deepest traumas, even deafness. Rhythmic drama.

Enter the world of glitter, glamour, fashion and decadence. Here dreams and wishes become reality. Close your eyes, you'll see.

Fun, rhythmic animated series of animal photos. Gradually it becomes apparent that these are not innocent shots.

An American artist's female alter ego gains supernatural powers. His ambition rises to unparalleled heights.

A stranger seems to threaten the peace of the animals at an untidy farm; however, he has different, unexpected plans.

Breathtaking nature documentary about bees which reveals the filming process, but not the secrets of the beehive.

The space the artist makes his work in becomes the subject. The camera draws the outside world and colours objects.

Unexpected twist in daring love story about polygamy in colourful, musical Senegal, as the ageing Madeleine meets her husband's second wife.

Tipping urban images become a setting and pulsing mandala. Made with a Bolex robot that smoothly rotates around its axes.

Video in which a rabbit fight is re-choreographed into a bizarre, abstract motion capture variation on the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Unexpected visitor breaks the safe routine of the Jewish retiree Aaron in a notorious suburb of Johannesburg.

Lonely traveller's harsh memories resurface in the shape of scenes with female protagonists from cinema's history.

A video-photo-text portrait of the escape journey made by Vera Frenkel's mother at the outbreak of World War II.

Ode to the unique blue of the discontinued Kodak Ektachrome. A clear blue California sky made of clouds of film grain.

She seems stoic, the young maid Boonrerm, but one day her demanding mistress will discover where her patience ends.

Will this Parisian actress land one last, big role? Intriguing portrait of an aging star.

Suzanne is a liberated young woman who lives alone on the edge of the village. Not everyone is happy with the way she leads her life.

There’s no sentiment as bold as the one in a duel shot in cinemascope, no emotional drop as high as the one in a vertical movie.

A collage of YouTube videos with amateur footage of hunting that documents the tension felt before and after the hunt.

Globalisation, progress or its lack from a West-African perspective: the complexity and beauty of a post-colonial crisis zone.

A magical omnibus of posturing and illusion from a dysfunctional band of Soviet émigrés. Their hatred is democratic, their hatred is universal.

A racing driver crashes in a picturesque Italian village. The accident has an unexpectedly positive effect in this smaller work by the great Wes Anderson.

A career in Cairo calls for bassist Adham while he tries to breathe new life into old friendships.

There's a first time for everything, even celery. Unexpected end to a sensual story.

Chrome is inspired by the Autochrome process, a colouring technique for black-and-white photographs invented by the Lumière brothers in 1903.

Colterrain is a colourful landscape, a terrain described by mapping sound. What you hear is what you see - literally.

Ximena Cuevas is the artist about to meet a curator and we are about to meet her anxieties while she prepares herself for the event.

Two men plan their parents' murder under the watchful eye of witnesses. Exceptional use of plot, editing, image and text.

Dynamic cut-ups of found footage from dated educational and scientific films. What is now and what is time?

Eight young people seem trapped in time and space in a metropolitan apartment. Subtle, mysterious work.

Basically the title says it all. A young woman makes the final preparations while the film stays light, almost breezy.

A running man, exhausted and near collapse, is teased onward by the disembodied red lips of a woman. Will the man meet his deadline?

War on the kitchen table. Helicopters shred a newspaper, a drone fires on the broccoli. The absurd relationship between our daily lives and the news.

An observation mission with a mind of its own - a journey from outer space to the celluloid grain.

The simple process of dividing and reassembling a piece of paper by hand creates a complex and intriguing animation that defies what seems impossible.

Dizzying expanded cinema consists of a 16mm projection of double the number of dot patterns and a deafening noise caused by those same dots.

New film from former Prix de Rome winner provides a deadpan lesson in social psychology on an American campus.

House dust and clips of insects and plants meld into an engrossing meditation on the beauty of surplus materials. High-energy soundtrack.

Animated musical documentary examines the rise and fall of a nearly-defunct poster and postcard wholesale business. Cine-performance with live singing.

A new life for Goethe's poem Another One (Ein Gleiches), originally written in 1780. For this film, Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten) was the composer.

Enchanting trip mixes Marcel Duchamp images, a Henry Purcell opera and text by Alain Badiou. Superior glamour.

Maximum effect using minimal means. Thirty-six photos edited into a dazzling display of spatial perception. What's inside, and what's outside?

Lush, concentrated work in which the corners of a shiny cloth are folded together. Hands explore space determining the dimensions.

Two reluctant gangsters manage to survive in their poverty-stricken Cleveland neighbourhood by cleverly circumventing the rules.

Director’s cut of a short film that was part of a horror trilogy. More atmosphere than horror. Girls with long black hair and wafting net curtains.

Flowing, abstract high contrast, black-and-white images pull viewers into an interior process of change and awareness.

Museum on Timor gave a young filmmaker the freedom to provide his vision on the eventful history of this divided, half-Indonesian island.

Ingenious live performance in which Bünger uses found footage to reanimate lost voices and create unexpected links.

RGB bling-bling. A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting resound, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts.

Airy parody of everything airy in films, commercials and games. Boy-meets-girl with coffee. Hilarious, clever and consciously a little silly.

Peter Burr channels the Zone, tearing the sky open with a startling exploration of endless sidewalks, primordial colour and joyously shape-shifting decay.

A lonely, elderly man takes radical steps to be closer to the love of his life.

The daylight noir dream-weaver returns with an exquisitely pop slice of paradise lost and heart-breaking intoxication.

Fabulous document from the perspective of a Somali goat herd passing from girlhood to womanhood, and who has to make a great sacrifice.

Stalker Max observes Alina, who lives opposite, with his camera. An alien invasion in Nairobi finally allows him to express his feelings.

Edwin received his master's in film in the Netherlands for this experimental, pornographic short film. He was already a master, but now it's official.

A guerrilla manual for becoming untraceable in the digital surveillance society, with humour and media technology as weapons.

Legendary Italian film collective canecapovolto immerses itself in gender diversity to study sex, religion, homophobia and self-hatred.

Original recording of an audio letter in which a mother presents a great dilemma to a soldier. Intimate animation about families separated by war.

Trashy film about a motorbike racer who sweats milk and does his best to ignore this bizarre fact. He sets up a training camp in the Dutch dunes.

A video essay on levitation, UFOs and ancient Asian dreams. One long shot filmed at a Smithsonian Museum of Art warehouse.

A nurse steals corpses and eats their brains. The hospital's staff condemn her cannibal practice and take immediate action to stop her malevolent deeds.

We are under threat, but by what exactly? Generalised paranoia and the obsession with security in the U.S. countryside.

Schüpbach's latest film visualises how thoughts come about. With French author Joël-Claude Meffre's hand as the dynamic focus.

A film like a video game or vice versa? Cars flying all over the place, an alienating soundtrack and unexpected emotion in a cold environment.

A complex web of ideas and associations that bristle with dry humour to reflect on banality, the measuring of silence and our own implication in the life, death and value of objects.

The love between two people continues after death thanks to literature. Various styles of animation underline the narrative.

A group has been reading a book, word by word for 30 years. A snapshot of the third reading cycle, the ultimate form of close reading.

Around 1970, young filmmaker Karpo Godina took his camera on a trip around Vojvodina and made an unusual 'road movie', Imam jednu kucu (I Have a House). Only fragments have survived. Forty years later, another camera makes the same journey, piecing together and imagining the travels of the young Godina. Semi-feature: new presentation format that foregrounds the mid-length film.

Introverted zookeeper loses his job. With only his bedridden mother at home, one day he loses his cool.

Fictional re-enactment on home-brewed emulsion of a five-minute happening that took place during the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936.

Playful, funny found-footage film about the launch of Laika the dog into space by the Soviet Union in 1957.

Slightly uncomfortable meeting between cute caddy and weird air golfer (air golfer as in air guitar).

Cameraman crawls from lake and squirms through cinema screen. Experimental, yet fun. Burlesque essay on film and drowning yourself.

Photographer creates staged portraits in a Tibetan village. The backdrops of Disney figures and tropical islands are lowered using a squeaky pulley.

Upon his release, Abdel discusses whether he is a danger to society with his parole officer. Convincing acting inter-cut with the making-of.

Playing with anthropological film conventions. Priests on a Pacific island carry out rituals based on the prophecies of messiah John Frum.

Eye candy as a special treat. The ultimate photokinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. Requires prismatic glasses.

Tunisia, two years after the revolution. Besides disappointment, we see traces of revolutionary zeal about to ignite.

Self-deprecation and Weltschmerz in this road movie about an artist with a mid-life crisis searching for salvation in Latin America.

Bizarre interview with linguist Noam Chomsky on Israeli TV. Ironic commentary in the vein of Chomsky.

A row of blindfolded men can earn a lot of money during a mysterious ritual. Will this solve Bala’s poverty or are the risks too high?

Portrait of a space once inhabited by the filmmaker adheres to a precise, yet enigmatic sound-image construction that carries rare emotional weight.

A hypnotic mechanical dance of fluorescent light fittings slowly swaying into an abyss. Horizontal images against a vertical backdrop.

Vertical explorations of lunar maria, swarms of unstable lunar particles swirling in the ‘glowing dust fountains’ caused by solar radiation.

Allow yourself to be transported to a 3D paper world of new monuments, animals and myths. A great film about creating a story.

A Thai river along the border with Myanmar. A man was killed in his boat two years ago. Two women keep the boat as proof. But for how much longer?

In Morocco, the title means an arranged marriage between a Moroccan man and a European woman to obtain a residence permit and European citizenship.

A woman obsessively tries to get pregnant by her infertile boyfriend. Her funny, confrontational rant challenges politically correct moralism.

A journey from the ancient to the modern, with pop-cultural icon JD Samson where according to the film, ‘knowing means emptiness and the unthinkable opens out the world.’

An audio-visual premonition that channels the millennial time of geology and the seismic psyche of California, to evoke the fractures lying beneath it.

Girl playing marbles turns into a butterfly. Colourful puppet animation in expressive Colburn style turns the chaos of war into beauty.

Paper sample books discarded and dumpstered by long-gone businesses undergo a series of sequential experiments in pattern, rhythm, colour and text(ure).

Cunning image manipulation elicits questions about digital film's immateriality.

Beautifully shot, depressing portrait of a family in Split, whose financial stability is lost during a crisis.

Clear the rubble for a single-shot, Walter Benjamin- channelling bolt of street energy, choreography and explosive power.

A woman loves everyone and tells them so, in the street. She promotes total freedom, but is she understood?

Claustrophobic stop-motion animation about an officer's daughter who can't say goodbye to Argentina's ousted military dictatorship.

See drip painters at work, blobs flying around. A film that appears to be modelled out of digital clay, on the borderline between beauty and taboo.

Manipulated fragments from Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon (1950) create a new powerful and evocative scene.

Beautiful, sad story told from multiple perspectives. Slowly the elements slot into place. With Mathieu Amalric.

Associative film about light, catching its impression in images and processing it into an image on the retina.

Two sisters visit the family holiday home for the first time in years. Frustrations about family relations gradually make way for childhood memories.

Great filmmaker prepares for a historical masterpiece set in an inhospitable, black-and-white jungle. A taster.

A vertical film about the most enigmatic of man-made structures, and an exploration of basic cinematic mysteries: time, form and structure.

Life journey of a Bhutanese man during the various phases of his life. Minimal, yet meaningful tale.

Mondrian's Red Mill inspired Urlus to study colourful analogue printing techniques, with spectacular results.

A keen eye and precise editing beautifully capture the motion in Bart Lodewijk’s drawings as they inch their way through Ronse's gables, roofs and masonry.

Five seascapes shot on five eroded rolls of film turn into gold in John Price's hands.

Dr. Doyen performs surgical operation to separate the Siamese twins Radica and Doodica, taken from the Barnum Circus in London and brought to Paris.

A beautiful Frank Scheffer document about Dutch painter Robert Zandvliet's search for the essence of painting.

Bucharest during a heat wave. A priest is called to a woman's deathbed to perform last rites, but not everyone is glad to see him.

Colourful and light like a comedy yet provides social commentary on Tanzanian society. A shoeshine man against the world.

All sorts of highlights of the short film programme compiled. The best animations, short documentaries, short stories and video art of the 2014 festival in a seven hour non-stop presentation. Bring coffee and snacks.

Whilst casting at a school, the director encounters two exceptional youngsters who explain to him why they think their relationship failed.

Four cousins/friends spend a carefree holiday in Belgrade before spreading out across Europe. Fabulous Serb portrait of a generation.

Tourism on the Indonesian island of Sawai is bound to increase after this enchanting, sensual small feature film. Paradise on earth. A fairy tale is told realistically. A young woman seeks the truth behind a legend she heard from her grandmother. Semi-feature: new presentation format that foregrounds the mid-length film.

First documentary by Marker and a cooperation with Resnais. About the role of the West in the demise of African art.

Unscrupulous film about excessive lust and desire in online subcultures. Simultaneously wonderful and repellent.

Thatcher, the politics of anatomy and the implications of voice modulation and pitch are just some of the possible ruminations when training your voice.

Social drama about 13-year old cigarette seller Raffael against the background of scuffles between squatters and the police.

A car accident and a secret date cause Ryoichi (Kobayashi himself) and his wife to stop talking to each other. Intensely sad.

Glowing germs and flowers colour this alchemical 16mm miniature. Pryce spins gossamer golden threads in the silent darkness of the cinema.

A celebration and lamentation, bringing us close and embodying a community that found the music in their heads and the warmth to listen to it together.

Experience pure poetry on a silent bus journey from night into day in Durham, North Carolina.

Five blind guests arrive at a tea party. They walk across the room toward the tea table, but their simple movements turn the event into a nightmare.

After years of silence, it's finally time for Marcello and his father to settle their quarrel. Beautiful, understated acting.

A place within-a-place and a voice. A metaphor for the return home after time spent in a different place.

Filmmaker wishes to give personal meaning to the worn-out terms friendship, brotherhood and manliness. What do you keep to yourself; what do you share?

Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is shown around by an Ivorian painter. Exhausted by depression Basquiat seeks salvation in local rituals.

‘Can sounds, rhythms and light produce queer relations? Can they become revolutionary?’ (PB & RL)

A man lives among his collection of paintings, books and magazines telling brilliant stories. Humour enlivens the collection.

A literal stop-motion animation, a road movie, a kinetic sculpture brought into collision with an interbellum countryside, surrealised by Paul Nash.

Young couple in Singapore don't feel at home there anymore after their youth in great China. But why not? Much sentiment. Many questions.

A single, long shot through a park, a European forest and the Amazonian jungle. The visual counterpart to meditative music. Feel free to fall asleep.

A ruin proves to be more than piles of stone. The view out from the remains of a Byzantine church in Trissákia, Greece.

Street children try their luck at the Sunday fair in Maputo. As if Chaplin were still alive and in Mozambique.

The train slides out of the station and we're plunged into a nocturnal ballet of converging parallel rails, shimmering lights and endless tunnels.

A man in a mysterious, brightly lit shed with ferns all over and a camera that scans the space. Simple concept, clever film.

'Tie-dye' method famous in the psychedelic era of the late 1960s used in a film study into colours and patterns in materials.

Alchemised with wonder we’re ushered to wide-eyed transcendence with a hallucinatory tableau of clocks, domestic plastics and luridly soothing colour.

Geometric figures and lines come to life as an ancient creature forever creating and destroying itself. An organic geometry thriller.

A boat on a broad river takes you into the daily musings and actions of a man living alone in the jungle. Enchantingly filmed.

Video essay on poison, medicine men, possession and death. Four Indians including a toxicologist and a snake charmer explain how they read the signs.

Ten years after their dance duo split, two men at a beautiful country home celebrate the end of youth and the start of a new future. Bittersweet.

Animation made from mould-damaged juvenile hall ledgers. Full of Rorschach-like patterns that reveal detention's impact on young inmates.

What happens when you laser-bomb a WW2 anti-tank wall? An uncompromised barrage of light and sound explode in this 11-minute megaton film.

Lessons in representation, reflections on the art-heritage industry and freewheeling storytelling, all washed down with an obligatory cup of tea.

Beautiful, abstract images of a woman with a swarm of bees for a head and a dog with a pink front leg. Life and death on an empty lot.

The title is a line from a T.S. Eliot poem. Film as poetry. Images analogous to words.

Intimate, intense portraits of exceptional beauty. Keep your eyes open and keep watching, past your first impression, past outward appearances.

We know now that in the early years of the twenty-first century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man.