Sorrowful Shadow (2004)

A father and son rescue the sole survivor of a train crash.

While an opera singers sings in a snowy and cold street, we are allowed to witness a meeting between a man and a woman through blowing net curtains. The music is touched by sadness and the emotions of the characters are no different. Nearer they become while the singer sinks deeper into the melancholy.

Sailors in repose on an island paradise seemingly have no worries of war or danger — until a playful gesture is interpreted as an act of wilful aggression. Soon, the innocent act of slight slapping becomes a relentless and unforgiving orgy of open-palmed face-smacking.

An abstract animation by Norman McLaren, who was born in Scotland in 1914. His interest in filmmaking began early in life after he became acquainted with works by the great Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Pudovkin and the German animator Oskar Fischinger.

A story told with few words. We see a solitary man and a solitary woman, each alone with their thoughts. She is in the country, staring out a window. Nature is quiet, waiting for spring, trees are bare. He is in the city, walking from the docks, watching, somewhat aimless. She walks a country lane. Both are alone. She writes him a letter, offering an opportunity. Will he take it?

Three fellows dream of prize money and a chance for a real Hollywood contract by winning the Liberty-Pete Smith amateur movie contest. They work on a script, as their wastebasket and ashtrays fill. They head outside to shoot: down a manhole, up a telephone pole, through a keyhole, and at night using binoculars. Next they must edit their film, then it's time for a first screening of their product, "The Afternoon of a Rubberband." It's a montage of experimental images, including a razor blade cutting various objects, a baby in a cooking pot, and a snail in the path of a steamroller. After the screening, the boys wonder if that was their only shot at Hollywood fame.

Nadja is a guest student, who stays at Cité Universitaire and visits the Sorbonne, while preparing a thesis on Proust; she also likes to stroll about Paris.

A man, apparently on the run, takes shelter in a dilapidated house. Every day, he drills a hole through a wall and looks into one of the rooms, each time seeing a different surreal vision...

Mannequin hands hold a pair of dice. A castle is perched on a hilltop. Below it, a posh, modern villa. Meanwhile, far from Paris, two men with masked faces play dice in a bar. They decide to drive to Paris. Country roads, hills, fences. The posh "chateau" appears again: meticulous garden, fancy interior, odd sculptures. And at home? "No one, NO ONE." For the next two days, masked figures play dice, frolic by the pool, perform exercises with a ball. Two new figures arrive. Masked. They search and find the dice. They dance. Mannequin hands hold a pair of dice.

A group of elementary school boys goes for a walk on the outskirts of a big city. The ominous atmosphere of fun begins when they pull in a man they met by chance.

Synchromy No. 2, synchronized to the "Evening Star" aria from Wagner's Tannhäuser, uses a statue of Venus to represent the star.

Animated drawings inspired by Leonardo da Vinci are intercut with seemingly unrelated (but in fact strangely similar) live-action scenes.

In a European seaside village, a maiden takes clean sheets down from the clothesline. Carrying her basket of linens home, she stops to consult a fortune teller. The cartomancienne sees love in the cards. The young woman pauses to reflect. We then see water, swirling, and into view swims a man, as if just appearing on earth. He arrives on shore - is he just in her mind's eye, or is he real? She weaves a garland for her hair. Will they meet?

When he takes his girlfriend to a seedy abortion clinic in the back room of a combination hair salon / bordello, Guy Maddin meets the madam’s daughter and falls in love. But she won’t let any man touch her until her father’s murder has been avenged.

Parabola is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creating juxtapositions between light/shadow, stasis/motion, and form/music, this black-and-white short invites us to see the parabolic curve, or “nature’s poetry,” as both invigorating and beguiling.

A tense vignette about the fate of an unlucky man in poverty-stricken Weimar-era Germany.

Carousel - Animal Opera (c.1938), a visual symphony by artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell.

In the 1936 short Allegretto, diamond and oval shapes in primary colors perform a sensual, upbeat ballet to the music of composer Ralph Rainger. The geometric dance is set against a background of expanding circles that suggest radio waves.

One of the first color films in Europe, made with the Gaspar Color process.

An impressionistic series of images inspired by "Tales From the Gimli Hospital".