- Honouring Louis Le Prince, the French-born inventor who shot the first ever moving images in Leeds in 1888, the International Short Film Competition celebrates the outstanding talent at work in the short film form around the world today. The film selection includes prize winners from other festivals as well as submissions to Short Film City, [...]Click to read more about this film »
- One of Japan’s few surviving pre-war horrors, a genre that was soon to be suppressed by the increasing state censorship. Japan’s first scream queen Sumiko Suzuki plays Mitsue, the possessive actress betrothed to apprentice shamisen player Seijiro. When his lost cat Kuro brings home a beautiful girl, dark jealous passions are invoked in Mitsue and [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Love is a deeply moving story of fractured family life under a repressive political regime, also a deft artistic reaction to political censorship. Janos has been imprisoned on a trumped-up charge and his wife Luca tends his bedridden mother, comforting her by pretending that Janos is away pursuing a career as a Hollywood director. The [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Ambitious and ambiguous, Benedict Fliegauf’s Forest is a singular film, weaving together a loosely connected, only partially explicated series of dramatic vignettes to create an unsettling, uncategorizable whole. Most of the scenes build towards some kind of uncomfortable confrontation, but the viewer is not always given enough information to interpret exactly what’s going on: two [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Challenging expectations on the borderlines of documentary, fiction and experimental cinema, José María de Orbe’s Father is a beautiful meditation on history, identity and a sense of place. It’s a ghostly story about the soul of a former Basque fortress from the 13th century unexpectedly incorporating silent projections of old Basque films against the walls [...]Click to read more about this film »
- After targeting the eccentric political power games of Berlusconi in The Caiman (2006), Italian director Nanni Moretti parodies the hermetic inner workings of the Vatican in We Have a Pope. Perfectly-cast veteran actor Michel Piccoli plays the newly-elected Il Papa who suffers a panic attack and pulls out of all his public and private commitments. [...]Click to read more about this film »
- In a gentle and deeply touching road movie, a poignant relationship slowly grows between a lonely truck driver, Rubén and a single mother, Jacinta who travels with her 8-month-old baby Anahí. Initially reluctant, Rubén gradually warms to his passengers on the long journey from Asunción del Paraguay to Buenos Aires and the skilfully restrained direction [...]Click to read more about this film »
- The best comedy yet from Japan’s exciting new talent and Leeds favourite Yûya Ishii. Stuck in a tiny flat in Tokyo, Mitsuko is unattached, friendless, broke and 9-months pregnant. Her inept parents thinks she is in California, happily settled with the baby’s GI father. One day she follows a cloud back to the run-down alley [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Heat Wave is a simmering drama of intersecting lives all taking place one sweltering afternoon somewhere on the edge of Marseilles, France. Following overlapping and repeating timelines like a subtler version of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the narrative is cleverly constructed to enlighten the differing perspectives of its characters. Two teenaged cousins Stéphane and Luigi, [...]Click to read more about this film »
