Last Day of December (2008)

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come." Written by

Short animated film featuring the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You" by His Name Is Alive.

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

Stop-motion animated short film with a white ball, a rabbit, and a girl, and a voice singing "Are We Still Married".

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.

The magical tale of a mouse who sets foot on a woodland adventure in search of a nut. Encountering predators who all wish to eat him - Fox, Owl and Snake - the brave mouse creates a terrifying, imaginary monster to frighten them away. But what will the mouse do when he meets this frightful monster for real?

Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities.

"I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or writing, and looked at the sea. I decided to place my Bolex exactly at the angle of light as what Signac saw from his studio which was just behind where I was staying, and film the view from morning till after sunset, frame by frame. One day of the Cassis port filmed in one shot." -JM

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens, each held by a hand. The calligrapher moves all the hands and pens in unison, drawing an elaborate feathered wing, which comes to live, peeling off the page, and, now a quill pen, slips in to his hand. He tucks it behind his left ear.

The Pollard family is calmly discussing their impending death by atom bomb when Mrs. Pollard recounts a dream in which she sensually bathes herself in the “Tears of Neglected Children”.

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.

'Amy, is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who’s painfully uncomfortable with her own body and “old woman’s” face. Astonishing closing image is a tightly composed telephoto shot on the start of a marathon race among young schoolgirls, dashing toward and then across the screen in ultra-slo-mo, and accompanied by a girls’ chorus hauntingly singing Brian Wilson’s God Only Knows. Widely eclectic lensing and looks in various media and in color and black-and-white flow nicely from one section to the next, aided by gifted editor Mark Karbusicky.' ~ Robert Koehler, Variety

An experimental short film from Toshio Matsumoto featuring Mona Lisa.

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

This short film documents the daily life of the goings-on on Orchard Street, a commercial street in the Lower East Side New York City.

“When he shot Une seconde (4 min., 20 sec.), a video animation without computer graphics, Richard Angers tried to adapt Norman McLaren’s animation techniques to video shooting and editing. A long-term solitary task, in which images are moved by hand, centimetre by centimetre, in which one plays with the number of images per second, and in which the ± pure quest for effects is more important than the message”. BLANCHARD, Louise. “Les vidéastes sont au ‘rendez-vous’”, Le Journal de Montréal, Montreal (9 February 1992), p. 38.

Pierre is a very shy man in his sixties, with no family or friends and who just retired. What will he do now?

A day in the life of a shoe shine boy, an international economist and a sex worker. It is about women. The ones out there, or lack of. The ones inside us, or lack of. In this world of men, we are still awaiting her.

Two friends, Lou and Lena... An agreement for this all night walk.

Alone in his kitchen in Bucharest, Dorel prepares for what seems to be a party. Actually, it’s his son’s wedding which takes place in the United States. Dorel is going to watch the wedding through a webcam, together with two of his son’s friends. On a small screen, they are about to meet the bride and her father, and witness the ceremony.

Jesus buys and sells little girls and hates himself for it. Frank abuses little boys even though they are his family, and the Judge tries to stop it all. We know them all, they are our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters ans friends, and yet it all remains such a big secret known by us all.

Mrs. Anthoula, an elderly lady with hearing problems, is in danger of being evicted out of her flat. Mrs. Dafni, a social-worker, will try to help her.

An older woman sits before a telephone in an empty house. Her daughters have flown the nest. As she prepares to phone them, their memory is brought back to life

A look through a hipster photographers lens as he embarks on a project to capture the faces of desperate souls discovering planted treasures in the city's foraging hot spots. The photographs captured make up a trendy exhibition, where the gallery goers gorge themselves on hors d'oeuvre and champagne. This is a story of the photographers success until we are gently reminded of the stars of the show and their exploitation

The coming of age of a young student, through a series of events and erotic-emotional regressions, the same time that his mother is pregnant, without a father, while his boss falls in 'old age. "

Feeling entitled to more than she truly deserves, Claudia Davis decides to take on a new persona and begin robbing convenience stores.

During a strange night, a prostitute, an opera singer, a fortune teller, a travel agent, a police chief and an insomniac meet by chance.

Shabbat Dinner is boring as usual for William Shore. His mother has invited two crazy hippies and their son and is doing her best to show off, his father is drunk and berating their oddball guests, and he doesn't have much in common with their son Virgo. That is, until Virgo tells him that he has just come out as gay.

An animation short film looking at mans relationship with the natural world

Set during the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flamingos tells the story of Alice, a nine year old girl who spends one last day in the park with her father. The story develops around the delicate and uneasy relationship between a lost father and a daughter on the verge of understanding the difficult dynamics of her family. Flamingos is a story about the loss of innocence and the moment when we realize we are fundamentally alone on our journey through life.

A doctor mysteriously discovers that he is required urgently at the village to offer his services. He arrives there after a long and difficult journey, only to discover that the village is empty.

In the prosperous and chic apartment of the Christiansson family there are odd things going on. While Niclas is in the kitchen preparing dinner, in the bathroom an adultery is being committed through new technologies. Maja is exchanging kinky messages on her mobile phone from the bathtub while her husband and daughter are impatiently waiting for her to have a family dinner. Even when her phone is out of battery, she cannot bring herself to stop.

Journey to the future of Rani and Keren, a young couple moving in together for the first time. Without control they are drawn to the race of marriage, children and work, while desperately trying to keep up with the race and stay together.

Three troubleshooters are sent into a remote field to fix a broken cable. The cold, too much ardour and a little bit of vodka will make their work useless.

Marios invites his children to the village to celebrate his fifty-three years. It seems filled but his happiness is more fragile than it seems ...

While teenagers John and Tom, who live in a refugee camp in Guinea Conakry, go from housebreaking to robbery in order to survive, Satou, similarly to many other destitute young women, turns to the streets. Things go from bad to worse and Tom - soon followed by John - gets stuck in a downward spiral of extreme violence. Will Mémé their grandmother and also a refugee, be able to save them?