Mama
Vladimir Kott
Estonia.  2018.  19 min

Two young social workers are taking a runaway child back to his mother by ferry.  But in the middle of the icy Baltic Sea, something goes wrong.

VLADIMIR KOTT

Vladimir Kott is a director and writer, known for Gromozeka (2011), Mukha (2008) and Na dne (2014).

Born in 1973. He graduated from the Director’s Faculty of GITIS (State Theatre Institute) in 1996. From 1996 to 2000 he worked as a theatre director in a number of regional theatres in Tver, Novgorod and other cities.

In 1999 worked as Assistant Director for the film Yekhali dva shofyora /Two Drivers (dir. by Alexander Kott). In 2004 graduated from the Director’s Faculty of Graduate School of Scriptwriters and Film directors (Master Vladimir Khotinenko).

His graduation project Dver/Door (19 minutes) won numerous awards at international and Russian festivals. His first full-length feature film MUKHA, which followed a number of successful TV productions, was recognized locally and internationally and is also a winner of a number of awards.

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CONTACT

Cine Promo :    cinepromo@yandex.ru

 

 

She Runs
Qiu Yang
China.  2019.  20 min

In an ordinary Chinese winter, a small city junior high student, YU, tries to quit her school aerobic dancing team.

QIU  YANG

QIU Yang was born and raised in Changzhou,  China. He studied film directing at the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia.

His latest short film “SHE RUNS” won Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for best short film at the 58th Cannes Critics’ Week.  “A Gentle Night” was awarded the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 70th Festival de Cannes.  He is the first Chinese director to receive these awards. In 2015, “Under the Sun” was selected for the 68th Festival de Cannes Cinéfondation Competition.  Aside from his fiction work, Qiu also created a VR project – “O”, that’s chosen for the 76th Venice International Film Festival VR Competition.

He is currently developing his first feature project, which was selected to CineMart and Cinéfondation Residence and was awarded the CNC Screenwriting Grant during the 70th Festival de Cannes.

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CONTACT

Wouter Jansen :    info@someshorts.com

Precious
Irfan Avdic
Bosnia Herzegovina.  2018.  27 min

Seventeen-year-old Alem desperately wants to go on a school trip to Italy, but he doesn’t have the money.  An orphan, he lives with his grandmother and has no cash for extra expenses.  If he could find the necessary funds, he’d no longer be the pitiful kid who’s always the worst off; instead, he’d be on a par with his richer classmates. And so Alem – whose coarse exterior hides a young man suffering from a sense of inferiority – decides to solve his eternal poverty through one dangerous act. In Precious, director Irfan Avdić demonstrates a knack for capturing minor situations that, although unimportant for some, are cruel and painful for others.

IRFAN  AVDIC

Irfan Avdić (1991, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yugoslavia). Filmography: I Only Came to Use the Phone (2013, short), Brainless (2013, short), Making Movie (2014, short doc.), Fuck You (2015, short), Today I Died (2016, short), Precious (Majkino zlato, 2018, short).

CONTACT

Association of Filmmakers of Bosnia :    udruzenje@bhfilm.ba

Toll Bridge
Daniel Knight
Australia.  2019.  25 min

Cohen the Barbarian was angry.  Angry that he never died in battle, angry that the world had forgotten him, and angry that his knees were starting to play up in the cold.

He was also angry that his faithful mount had been gifted the ability of magical speech. The horse was insisting that they had made a wrong turn back at Slice.

He was also angry that the horse was probably right.

This was not how it was supposed to end for the barbarian.  This was not how the Discworld’s greatest hero imagined it at all.

DANIEL KNIGHT

Daniel has been directing for film and theatre for over twenty years and has won awards in both. In 2003 he commenced work on TROLL BRIDGE a fifteen-year odyssey which has served as the spine of his filmmaker training. He has also written and directed a clutter of music videos and other short films including THE MORNING AFTER, UNDEAD TED, GOLDILOCKED, and BLOOD ON THE GAME DICE.

No stranger to Pratchett’s work, Daniel has also directed WYRD SISTERS and SOURCERY for stage (the later he also adapted) and performed in another three.  Daniel’s personal work is bent towards character-driven, fantasy comedy, so is naturally attracted to Terry’s material.

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CONTACT

Snowgum Films :    daniel@snowgumfilms.com

 

The Diver
Michael Leonard,  Jamie Helmer
Australia.  2019.  12 min

Rage, chaos and confusion consume Callan’s mind,  creating a destructive environment for all those around him. Only the solitude of the underwater world is capable of soothing his volatility.  But when his base instincts are left unchecked, the violence he is capable of displays its full potential.

JAMIE HELMER – MICHAEL LEONARD

Michael Leonard started experimenting with cinema in 2008, creating his own DIY films and screening them throughout the city of Melbourne with other artists and musicians under the banner Beg, Scream and Shout. These events were committed to screening DIY film with live music and ran from 2009 – 2014.

In 2013 Michael took his DIY epic, Tears In the Cock, to America where it was an Official Selection at the Orlando Film Festival, and received an Honourable Mention at the Santa Monica Independent Film Festival.

Jamie Helmer’s first foray into filmmaking was during his undergraduate study at Murdoch University in Perth.  A series of experimental shorts preceded the dream-like short drama, Yesterday. Then, as his post graduate thesis began to take shape, the more ambitious featurette Fugue came to fruition. Fugue is the story of a grieving man who spirals into an increasing obsession with a string of local murders – the film examines western society’s paradoxical relationship towards death.  Fugue went on to screen at various film festivals including Perth’s Revelation Film Festival and the Denver Underground Film Festival (where it was runner-up for best narrative short).

DIRECTOR,S  STATEMENT

In creating The Diver,  we intended to investigate the relationship between human culture and its primal impulses towards violence. Our aim is not to provide answers,  but to open up the myriad of questions this concept provokes.  Through this, we hope to better understand the root of this seemingly inherent violent nature and the possible ways to quell these desires.

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CONTACT

Golden Moss Films :    goldenmossfilms@gmail.com

Isaac
Jurgis Matulevicius
Lithuania.  2019.  104 min

Courageous and stylish film-noir examines the dangers of life under surveillance in Lithuania during Nazi invasion and darkest times of the Soviet occupation. Infamous Operation Barbarossa expanded to Kaunas in June of 1941. 40-60 Jews were tortured and brutally killed in the most horrible incident, known as the Lietūkis Garage Massacre.  A simple neighbour Isaac was among unlucky victims.

Tragic event triggers a chain of fateful coincidences, suspicions, passions, false accusations and cold-hearted betrayals. Wounds of guilt remain unhealed for some witnesses and participants even 25 years later.  Experienced film director Gediminas returns back home from the USA with rather good intentions to produce a historical drama on a screenplay with too accurate facts about bloody killings, which are still being investigated by fierce KGB agents.  His crucial encounters with photographer Andrius will have unavoidable changes to the paths of their destinies.  While searching for truth two men fall in love for mutual friend Elena.

JURGIS MATULEVICIUS

Jurgis Matulevičius (b. 1989) is a director, screenwriter and editor form Vilnius, Lithuania.  He graduated from the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy with a degree in film directing.  Jurgis has worked with well-known Lithuanian film directors Šarūnas Bartas, Algimantas Puipa and others.  He recently made 4 short films: “Absurd People” (2011), “Anima Animus” (2012), “Victim” (2013), “Interrogator” (2015) that were seen and evaluated well by critics, festivals and audiences in Lithuania and abroad. “Isaac” is his first feature.  Currently he is working on a short documentary “The Golden Flask” where he is a Director of Photography as well.

READ INTERVIEW TO JURGIS MATULEVICIUS

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CONTACT

Stasys Baltakis :    baltakis@gmail.com

My Mexican Bretzel
Nuria Giménez Lorang
Spain.  2019.  72 min

My Mexican Bretzel opens with black-and-white clips of pilots during World War II in Switzerland, subtitled with excerpts from – so we are told – the diary of Vivian Barrett. She talks about herself and her husband Léon, who partly lost his hearing in an accident with his plane and could no longer fly.  The couple’s glamourous life then unfolds in diary excerpts and footage shot by Léon, about whom we also learn that he developed a successful anti-depressant, and had an obsession with many different forms of transportation.

The painstakingly edited home movies accompany Vivian’s thoughts and observations, and more abstract visual material represents her fears, secret desires and tormenting dreams.  She frequently quotes the Indian guru Kharjappalli, who keeps her going in times of uncertainty and emotional turbulence.  Sound is used cleverly and with restraint, reinforcing the images or underscoring the emotions.  We realise that the viewer is being manipulated, but to what extent only becomes clear at the end.

NURIA GIMÉNEZ LORANG

Nuria Giménez Lorang (1976, Spain) studied Journalism, International Relations and Documentary Film.  After her studies, she improved her knowledge of filmmaking by attending masterclasses and seminars of filmmakers such as Virginia García del Pino, Wang Bing and Stephen Frears.  She directed her first documentary short, Kafeneio, in 2017.  It screened at DocumentaMadrid and Bogota Documentary International Film Festival. My Mexican Bretzel (2019) is her first feature.

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CONTACT

Nuria Giménez Lorang :    bretzelandtequila@gmail.com

Chronicle of Space
Akshay Indikar
India.  2020.  86 min

First the raging sea, then the pouring rain, and finally the burbling river: water is one of few constants in eight-year-old Dighu’s life. He is finding it hard to adjust to life in his grandparents’ village in Konkan, a rural region on the Indian coast.  Along with his mother and older sister, he recently moved here from the city.  Above all he misses his father, who has disappeared seemingly without a trace. Dighu‘s sister does not know what happened to him either, and has given up asking the grown-ups about it. It is only in his diary and through his imagination that Dighu finds solace from loneliness and grief. Slow-paced and full of wistful beauty,  Akshay Indikar’s film tells a tender tale of coping with change and loss.

AKSHAY  INDIKAR

The Indian filmmaker comes from a nomadic family and studied at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. His directing debut Trijya premiered at the 2019 Shanghai International Film Festival where it was nominated in the categories of Best Film, Best Director and Best Cinematographer in the Asian New Talent Award. The film went on to screen at numerous international festivals.

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Akshay Indikar :    akshayindikar1@gmail.com

Joyride
Fardeen Khan
India.  2018.  20 min

On a particular deserted road, a girl asks a passerby driver for a lift. Whoever stops and picks her up is never to be found.  So goes the legend. A group of friends dares one of their own mates, Raunak, who don’t believe in the supernatural, to drive through that road at night. What follows is a dangerous journey that gets as twisted as it can.

FARDEEN  KHAN

Born in Jamshedpur (Jharkhand). Theatre background as an actor, assisted directors in few projects.

Joyride is his debut film as a writer and director. Currently working on a couple of scripts for the upcoming projects.

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Bandita Shome :    bandita.shome@viacom18.com

Aun
T S Prasanna
India.  2017.  12 min

Though humankind has the same sort of sense they can be differentiated by their lack of external experience.  This story details about the problem faced by the Protagonist against a Tribe who is in lack of wisdom due to the dearth of external experience.

 T S PRASANNA

TS Prasanna is an Indian Cinematographer born in 1995 in Tamil Nadu, a state in south India. In 2017 TS Prasanna enrolled in the BOFTA Film and Television Institute in Chennai and graduated in 2017 with a diploma in Cinematography. TS Prasanna is also a Director, Editor and Colorist. He made a short called A(U)N and which is awarded for Best film by Bofta.

A(U)N is his directorial debut.

Films:

1. A(U)N (Short)
2. Grey (Short)
3. Meippi (Short)
4. Pillayarpuram Inshallah (Feature)

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CONTACT

Bandita Shome :    bandita.shome@viacom18.com