In the light of the moon, a young torero leaves his village to go and fight the “Toro”. An accomplice, dreamlike confrontation, where the interplay of shadows and silhouettes brings back the splendor of bullfighting mythology.
Category: Short
An old barber finds himself at a loss when called upon to shave an unusually jittery customer. When all attempts at idle everyday chatter fail to calm the man, the barber desperately falls back on his last resort: to tell the only secret he knows.
A flower vendor, Jack, brings his mentally challenged nephew, Joey, to the ten-lane Chicago Lakeshore roadway to help him sell flowers to motorists. In the course of their first day working together, Joey manages to prove himself in difficult and confusing circumstances and gains the loving respect of his uncle.
A year before his death in 1972, M.C. Escher’s process and essence was captured by fellow Dutch creative Han van Gelder for the 20-minute film Adventures in Perception. The documentary, while short, is a striking portrait of the artist, whose tessellations, perspective-shifting drawings, and studies garnered fans in both the art and scientific fields. The film was crafted for Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands’ program “Living Art The Netherlands.”
This hilarious film alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and a ludicrously overdetermined melodramatic story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen. The net result of its combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props.
Writer-director Ari Gold’s 21-minute short film, HELICOPTER, recounts in impressionistic detail the aftermath of his mother Melissa’s death in the helicopter crash that also killed her boyfriend, promoter Bill Graham. Employing a narrative pastiche that includes acted vignettes, a black-and-white animated re-creation of the crash itself, poignant answering-machine voice-over and personal photos, Gold deftly conveys the fractured nature of loss: how memory, despair, indignation and even elation surge and recede in the mourning mind.
Life for most young Vietnamese youth in the United States is a “life like dust.” This film goes inside the mind of Ricky Phan, once a gang leader in Southern California and now serving an 11-year sentence for armed robbery. Shot over a three-year period before Ricky’s arrest, BUI DOI… explores his memories of childhood in war-weary Saigon, his days in the U.S. as a “gangster,” and then his life in a state prison. Which is more violent: fleeing from a war-ravaged nation or trying to survive in an alien Western culture?
A charming butterfly still cannot comprehend that its flutter from one flower to another can cause serious incidents. Indeed, its outline on the radar screen causes an alarm at a military base. A general sends his missiles to fight against a presumed aggressor. It was, of course, a misunderstanding and everything soon returns to normal. However, a bird directs itself towards the radar antennas. Everything begins all over again. Until when?