Somber Tides   

Chantal Caron | Canada

Run time: 12:00 min.

Synopsis:
SOMBER TIDES a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction.

Bio:
Choreographer and filmmaker Chantal Caron's visual signature has always been inspired by the St. Lawrence River and the natural elements that make up its ecosystem. Her works are inspired by the living and embodied in contemporary dance. A member of the Order of Canada and recipient of CALQ's "Artist of the Year" award in 2023, her short films have been selected and awarded around the world since 2015 for their unique aesthetics.

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Mnemonic Fields

Michael Betancourt | United States

Run time: 2:00 min.

Synopsis:
Mnemonic Fields is an animation of generative glitches made by AI (LoRA) models interacting to cancel each other's work. Each individual aimaglitch serves as a keyframe in an animorph that flows across the screen. This transformative process evokes the continuity of time, organized into discrete moments that begin with the inchoate experiences of childhood. The hallucinatory imagery emergent throughout this movie reflect the viewer’s own desires for coherence and comprehension as they confront the world.

Bio:
Michael Betancourt (b. 1971, United States) began working with digital errors and breakdowns, what is now called “Glitch Art,” in 1990 when the NewTek Video Toaster he was using to color shift a video malfunctioned and output a series of flickering and shifting patterns instead of what he was expecting. He welcomed this discovery; he had looked for ways to induce the kinds of generative imagery these glitches created since writing his first computer animation programs on an Apple II in 1979. His experimental photographs, created purely in the darkroom during the 1980s, provided a foundation for handling the uncontrolled aspects of both moving and static digital glitches during the 1990s; however, the aesthetic embrace of visual glitches lagged several years behind their use in electronic music, leading him to conceive of glitched footage as simply one more category of material to manipulate and combine with more traditional imagery. His pioneering work with glitching digital video at the end of the twentieth century anticipated contemporary processes and techniques, such as “datamoshing” and “pixelsorting,” before these methods became codified and familiar. Inducing errors and exploiting systemic faults has remained a source of imagery throughout his movies and statics, which deploy glitches as a critique of contemporary media culture. He has consistently invented ways to exploit the inherent instabilities in all digital systems, compositing visually seductive challenges to their normative operations. His recent movies exploit the dynamic range of contemporary digital cameras that far exceed what traditional film can detect, integrating those results with glitch processes. The fusion of the glitched and unglitched has remained a feature of his work throughout his career, guided by his publications as a critical theorist addressing digital capitalism and media semiotics.

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The Girl with the occupied eyes

Andre Carrilho | Portugal

Run time: 7:55 min.

Synopsis:
A girl wanders through the city, countryside, beach, always clutching a phone from which she never takes her eyes off. Along the way, she comes across a group of characters that include a bear, dolphins, pirates, an alien. Everyone tries to captivate her and draw her attention, but she is indifferent to everything around her. After a series of adventures that include a brief space trip, the girl lands in a circus and climbs up a roller coaster. What no one expected was that, during the dizzying journey, the phone would slip out of her hands, only to fall apart on the ground.

Bio:
With a professional career spanning more than 30 years, ANDRÉ CARRILHO has received more than 100 honours and awards as an illustrator, cartoonist, animator, director and caricaturist, and has seen his work exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, France, Czech Republic, China and the USA. His work has been published in an extensive list of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Independent on Sunday, Diário de Notícias and Expresso. Dinner in Lisbon (2007) is the title of his first animated film. The Girl with the Occupied Eyes and Dear Sea are the names of his two best-selling children’s books.

wish you were here

Shaun Clark | United Kingdom

Run time: 7:14 min.

Synopsis:
A journey through a characters imagination as he digs in the sand discovering objects left by others who he can only imagine.

Bio:
Born in Beverley, United Kingdom. Independent filmmaker Shaun Clark has worked as a director and animator since 2005. His work has been BAFTA nominated and won prizes at Clermont Ferrand Film Festival, London short film festival, Imagine Film Festival and the British Animation Awards. Shaun has held retrospective screenings of his work both in Greece and South Korea and has created films for the BBC, Discovery Times USA and Arts Council England. He currently resides in London where he works as a director at www.flickermill.com

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love sucks

Conrad Faraj | United States

Run time: 8:00 min.

Synopsis:
After a devastating breakup, a determined young man navigates the comically chaotic world of speed dating, encountering a whimsical array of characters on a quest to find genuine love and unexpected self-discovery.

Bio:
Conrad Faraj is a Honduran/American filmmaker based out of Cleveland, OH whose past credits include the NBC/Universal competition winning film "Wedding Runner" and the YouTube series "Mudblood" which went viral on TikTok surpassing 60 million views. His passion for filmmaking started during his early teens, with his first short film "The Artist" being hand-selected by Robert Duvall and James Caan as a Spotlight film for their short-lived filmmaking website "OpenFilm" since then Faraj has worked diligently to create his own unique voice in cinema, with his works having won and been selected in multiple festivals including Burbank International, Cleveland International, the Orlando Film Festival, Dayton Independent, Filmapalooza, and many more. He was named one of the best directors under 30 by the Los Angeles Film Awards.

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