Catharsis

Pieces of memories restitute what remains from a lost love.

Returning home from a business trip to discover his wife missing, a man delves deeper and deeper into a surreal kaleidoscope of half-baked leads, seduction, deceit, and murder.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

With a heavy haul of 250 kilograms of gold bullion, the grizzled criminal mastermind, Rhino, and his ruthless gang of cutthroats, head to a ramshackle retreat somewhere in the Mediterranean to lay low on a scorching day of July. However, the unexpected and rather unwelcome arrival of the bohemian writer, Bernier, his muse, Luce, along with a pair of no-joke gendarmes further complicates things, as the frail allegiances will soon be put to the test.

When the mysterious woman in the room next door disappears, a debonair 70-year-old ex-spy living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d'Azur is confronted by the demons and darlings of a lurid past in which moviemaking, memories and madness collide.

Orgasm forms part of The ABCs of Death, a horror shorts anthology that unites a diverse collection of international directors in their ability to disgust, amuse, and – perhaps most importantly – provoke its audience. Orgasm certainly is provocative as the film documents a sadomasochistic sequence that includes the erotic asphyxiation of a woman that (perhaps) ends in her death.

The Giallo film reinvented as an experimental S&M-tinged fever dream, told through a combination of color-gelled cinematography and jump-cut photographs, infused with dark sensuality and perverse cruelty. The short films of the directors of Amer are technically rawer than that film, but they show what was to come in terms of themes based on giallo films and an abstract style, from the use of still frames like in Chris Marker's La Jetée to harsh coloured lighting. They are worth seeing by themselves as a refining of their ideas into a fantastic debut feature film.

A woman takes a shower when she suddenly hears something. What is causing the sound and what is it that we see?

Santos Palace is a coffee shop in Belgium. There, a waitress serves a strange client. Their eyes meet, minutes pass and we seem to witness a love story that hasn’t began or may have already started, with its potential jealousies and passions, or which may never happen at all; another type of romance. The feeling of seeing or being seen, the rhythmical editing, the use of cinemascope to make objects and spaces appear as abstract forms, the predominance of detailed shots: these are all obsessions, forms and audiovisual ideas that explode in this surprising film.

An ambitious anthology film featuring segments directed by over two dozen of the world's leading talents in contemporary genre film. Inspired by children's educational ABC books, the film comprises 26 individual chapters, each helmed by a different director assigned a letter of the alphabet. The directors were then given free reign in choosing a word to create a story involving death.

Hand-picked by Fantasia’s Mitch Davis, SMALL GAUGE TRAUMA is an extraordinary collection of 13 award-winning shorts from 8 countries. It represents some of the strongest and most eccentric highlights from the festival’s trailblazing history with the form and is a veritable must-have for lovers of the unusual, aficionados of the fantastic and anyone with an interest in world cinema.

New York, early '60s. Gloria, a young painter, lives in the underground artistic microcosm of the Big Apple. One night, she is attacked and raped by a mysterious character with white eyes. This aggression provokes an inner cataclysm that inexorably pushes her towards self-destruction. In order to put an end to the chaos her attacker has unleashed in her, Gloria decides to search for this man in the streets of New York.