Oblivion(2024)

Heimat Is a Space in Time(de)

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

Blush: An Extraordinary Voyage(fi)

For 18-year-old Finnish–Kosovan Fatu, a simple visit to the grocery store feels as nerve-racking as a lunar expedition: for the first time in his life, he’s wearing makeup in public. Luckily his best friend Rai, a young woman on the spectrum of autism, is there to ferociously support him through the voyage.

A Scavenger Hunt For People Loneliest In Their Own Homes(en)

An eighteen-step scavenger hunt for people loneliest in their own homes. This animated video collage serves as a survival guide and an ode to the imaginations that protect us. Statement from Daniel Lobb, the Director: Our performance is first and foremost a resource for people who are isolated in unsupportive homes. It presents self-preservation strategies to those who rely on media and imagination to withstand in potentially abusive environments. The composition is based on the writer, Lexie Bean, growing up as queer, trans, and a survivor of incest in Michigan and Ohio, which we’ve all processed through our respective art forms. These iterations of inspiration and reformation ultimately led us to a video collage and sound-score that seek to buoy the main text: an ode to imagination, a scavenger hunt, a survival guide. Our hope is to bolster the viewer’s capacity for imaginative resilience.

Abstronic(en)

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”

Drizzle in Johnson(en)

A scientist obsessively seeking the answers of the universe is thrust into a mind-bending odyssey of grotesqueries and genitalia.

Dieci Cadute(it)

An underground fight is taking place in a painter's studio between the artist and the ten tyrants.

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.

Kasap(tr)

While tracking down a serial killer, the detective discovers that the killer is also a painter. The murderer creates horrific paintings using the blood of his victims. While trying to solve the murders, the detective tries to understand the motives behind the murderer and the way the murderer expresses himself.

Zoetrope(en)

An animator grapples with the loss of his brother as he struggles to finish a short animation.

Ferrum(sv)

Unconventional portrayal of mining in the Swedish Lapland ore fields, a powerful image and sound symphony that can be experienced both as a documentary and symbolic work.

Black Fish(ja)

Darkness and light, as seen by VIFF’s favourite Buddhist erotist. Part of the TOKYO LOOP animation anthology produced by ImageForum Japan.

Grata(es)

Float Away(en)

When a balloon gets separated from its bunch, it must go on an adventure to get back to its friends, learning to accept its imperfections along the way.

Somnambulists(pl)

In 1958, graduates of the Film School in Łódź – director Mieczysław Waśkowski and camera operator Adam Nurzyński – produced in cooperation with Tadeusz Kantor the short film Somnambulists. The colourful, painting-like moving image was an attempt at transferring the informel onto film stock.

Boop-Beep(en)

A strange night in a small town, illuminated by the town's lighthouse.

Amour et Pissenlit(fr)

Window Horses(en)

Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a Poetry Festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather be in Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians, all who tell her stories that force her to confront her past; the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of Poetry itself. It’s about building bridges between cultural and generational divides. It’s about being curious. Staying open. And finding your own voice through the magic of poetry. Rosie goes on an unwitting journey of forgiveness, reconciliation, and perhaps above all, understanding, through learning about her father’s past, her own cultural identity, and her responsibility to it.

LAVOMATRIX(fr)

Boogie-Doodle(en)

An animation film, made without the use of a camera, in which "boogie" played by Albert Ammons and "doodle" drawn by Norman McLaren combine to make a rhythmic, brightly colored film experiment. The main title is in eight languages.

Corner(pt)

The corner of a street is matched and mixed with the chant of a bird recorded on that same street. A symbiotic relationship is triggered: the rapid and successively repetitive montage cuts between the image of the street and the corners of the video frame itself produce new textures and shapes in our brain, whilst the sound follows the same rhythmic movements by emphasizing different “corners” (frequencies) from the bird’s singing. The energetic potency stemming from the junction of these elements creates a new image that is almost tactitle, maleable and rippling. The result is a somewhat humorous operation of the portuguese word "corner" throughout the different stages of making the piece, finally unveiling a piercing physical and kinetic experience for all the corners of our eyes and ears.