Manila Madness

Escargots(fr)

An adaptation of a children's poem called Chanson des escargots qui vont à l'enterrement by Jacques Prévert, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Filmed in Paris, France and Los Angeles, California.

Kids(es)

Winter Portrait(en)

A misty afternoon returns a Mapuche couple to their wedding video. In their civil ceremony, they are noted as one of only two couples married in the indigenous language of Mapudungun.

Rift(es)

Daniela (24) is a ghost in pain. Her life ended suddenly and painfully, leaving her friend and roommate, Mónica (22) alone in their shared apartment in Santiago, Chile. Daniela feels her frustration grow within her, as she fears that her time in limbo will never end.

The Grass Dwellers(es)

Juan Méndez Bernal leaves his house on the 9th of april of 1936 to fight in the imminent Spanish Civil War. 83 years later, his body is still one of the Grass Dwellers. The only thing that he leaves from those years on the front is a collection of 28 letters in his own writing.

Il Piantone(it)

An electoral campaign is underway in an imaginary country. Two leaders fight over the voters, who cry in exasperation. The first leader is fat and whiny, the second smiling and aloof. A man with a laptop computer and a teenager with a stony face and muscular body look on as the political battle unfolds. An aggressive woman removes herself from the melancholy scene. After the victory of democratic optimism, the two observers kill the leader, who dies with a smile on his lips. Civil war breaks out.

(NULL)(xx)

An unknown girl breaks out of her daily grind by undergoing an intense audio-visual trip.

Bramayugam(ml)

Thevan, a folk singer of the Paanan caste, has a fateful encounter when escaping slavery, leading to discover an ancient tradition altering his destiny.

The Abyss of shadows(hi)

Ayush suffers from sleep paralysis and dark hallucinations, haunted by shadowy figures that represent his repressed fears. Trapped between dream and reality, he confronts these manifestations of his inner turmoil.

Between You and You All(fr)

A chronicle of the lives of a couple and the gradual dissolution of their relationship.

Reconstruction(xx)

Reconstruction tells about a certain night in 1982, reconstructed in 2020 by the people who lived it through together. The film combines dance, drama and documentary, but most of all is a story of a friendship of a boy and a girl, and how jolly situations can turn sour and how, even though close, friends do not share same experiences – and that can have an effect on their friendship.

Matei Meu Pai(pt)

Guaret(ca)

Pedro is Mallorcan, born to a mother from Burgos and a father from Mallorca. Due to his distant relationship with his father, Pedro doesn't fully master Mallorcan as a language. He turns to the works of Damià Huguet to remember his father, as only his poems can fill the void left by his death. The poet's words transport Pedro to his childhood and his roots, even though many of the words are unknown to him, despite them belonging to his language. This becomes the driving force behind the protagonist's search for his own identity, his origins, what it means to be a man, father-son relationships, collective identity, and "mallorquinness". Pedro constantly questions the emotions stirred by Huguet's poetry, and, most importantly, who he is and where he belongs.

Flesh in Turmoil(pt)

The process of depersonalization maintains a dialogue with the objectification of the body, a sort of thingified flesh, clothed in animosity. In an epiphanic act, the sutures reveal themselves as the reflection of this gaze upon its own spilled fluids and transcend into an internal soup. It is the stream of consciousness in its purest form. It is the raw and the bare. It is the visceral nature of facts. It is the merging of worlds. It is the flesh in turmoil.

Reya's World(en)

Reya’s World delves into the raw and poignant struggle of a young woman navigating the depths of depression. Feeling trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of isolation, Reya finds solace and gradual healing through small moments of self-connection and genuine friendships, gradually lifting the heavy burden that envelops her.

Seven(en)

A dreamy lo-fi pseudo-intellectual experimental short contemplating the role of the number 7 historically as a symbol across cultures filtered through the lens of 8th graders

Cheers,(en)

A bartender takes on the physical form of her imagined alter egos.

A Tapestry of a Legendary Land(zh)

As a modern artifact researcher prepares for the exhibition of "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains," he unexpectedly travels back nine hundred years to the Northern Song dynasty, entering the heart of young painter Xi Meng. There, he witnesses Xu Meng's passionate journey and the collaboration with dedicated laborers as they overcome great challenges to create a timeless masterpiece.

I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I'd forgotten you. I was dreaming.(en)

What appears at first glance to be a patterned floor of traditional Islamic tiles is in fact an intricate installation of hand dyed sand. In a light-filled room in an abandoned house, the artist steps into frame to sweep it away, breaking the illusion and destroying the image of traditional heritage.

Remastered Brutality(tr)

Alinur, a student filmmaker, tries to make a film about the apocalypse for his capstone project. The movie itself happens to be about a mercenary named M who inadvertently causes an apocalypse. As he tries to “create” the destruction of this supposed apocalypse through utilizing technical gimmicks that he has enforced onto the production of the film, this supposed effort also creeps in as a force that starts to “destroy” him, piece by piece. The outcome of it tests the sincerity of not only the film itself but also of the performative efforts that Alinur has made as a filmmaker—even this test might not be as sincere as it seems.