1. Colossal (Colossal)
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
It has an average vote of 7.3 on TMDB.
2. BARE BONES
BARE BONES is an experimental short film written, directed and scored by DEBBY FRIDAY. Conceived during the Covid-19 lockdown and shot in Vancouver, BC on 16mm, the film tells the story of a young woman who swallows a bee and begins to undergo a hallucinatory and transformative experience. Abstract visual sequences depict time and space fracturing around her as she succumbs to wave after wave of pure feeling.
3. Taglish
At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.
4. Todo Todo Teros
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
It has an average vote of 5.2 on TMDB.
5. Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (Ang Ninanais)
Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”
It has an average vote of 6.5 on TMDB.
6. Mapang-Akit (Mapang-Akit)
"Mapang-akit" is an offshoot of a documentary project made with an Icelandic filmmaker and uses the outtakes from the Hudas Hudas festival in Antique, where a community bonds over a large effigy of Judas Iscariot during Holy Week. Amidst it is a found story of a man who returns home to his death after pursuing a woman in a neighboring village.
7. Normality (Normaliteten)
Normality is a human state of good intentions, empathy, caring and wanting to do the best for those we love and the world at large.
It has an average vote of 8 on TMDB.
8. Runner's High
Grappling with the burden of loss, a drifter becomes engulfed in the reckless lifestyle of a group of bohemians. Through a series of events, he is forced to confront his trauma as his haunted past and unconventional present collide.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
9. Bullet in the Head (Tiro en la cabeza)
Ion is a seemingly normal guy whose life goes by without a hitch. A phone call; a meeting with a friend; small, unimportant everyday situations. One day he gets into a car with two other people. They cross the border between Spain and France. The next morning, their lives will change forever.
It has an average vote of 4.5 on TMDB.
10. Children of Our Time (Kinder unserer Zeit)
Three kids are trying to stand strong. In a world where you don’t know for what you want to stay strong. Full of sexuality and the need to define their identity. “We are the children with no obligations, the most possibilities, with the most liberated freedom. We are children who build words. Children who give birth to children. We are children of our time, free from guilt.”
It has an average vote of 1 on TMDB.
11. Bruja (Bruja)
A story of diaspora. The film criticises the myth of Swiss neutrality, which violently masks structural, systemic, and social passivity.
12. Dyketactics
Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.
It has an average vote of 5.3 on TMDB.
13. Wind
In 1983, yacht sailor Will Parker leads an American crew financed by millionaire Morgan Weld to defeat during the America's Cup race against an Australian crew. Determined to get the prize back, Will convinces Morgan to finance an experimental boat designed by his ex-girlfriend Kate's new beau, Joe Heisler. When the boat is completed, the Americans head to Australia to reclaim the cup.
It has an average vote of 6.3 on TMDB.
14. The Lady, or the Tiger?
A visually experimental adaptation of the classic Frank Stockton short story.
15. Marital Rape Is Real
Marital Rape Is Real is a short film adapted from several published essays on marital rape by Shanon Lee.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
16. Antiporno (アンチポルノ)
Young artist Kyoko wreaks havoc on everyone that she encounters when Japan's oldest major movie studio asks a batch of venerable filmmakers to revive its high-brow soft-core Roman Porno series.
It has an average vote of 6.733 on TMDB.
17. Dreams That Money Can Buy
An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.
It has an average vote of 6.4 on TMDB.
18. Harbinger
A Los Angeles detective discovers the unbelievable while searching for a missing child and in the aftermath his life begins to unravel.
19. The Illiac Passion
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound , finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
It has an average vote of 3.5 on TMDB.
20. Brincando el Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican
Contemplates the notion of "identity" through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US. In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, the film tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned, lesbian Puerto Rican photographer / videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, this experimental narrative becomes a meditation on class, race, and sexuality as shifting differences.