Animated / Brief Encounters · Bristol
168 films from 20 countries are recorded in the archive for this edition, with 6 award winners.
Brief Encounters celebrated its tenth birthday with Anthony Minghella CBE delivering the Brief Lecture on the festival's opening day. Andrea Arnold, Shane Meadows, Nik Powell and Damien O'Donnell all returned as guests. A dedicated School of Sound explored the craft of audio in filmmaking through seminars and masterclasses. The competition received a then-record 1,400 entries, half from the UK, leading to an expanded three-programme British selection. The festival also introduced speed-matching networking sessions organised by the UK Film Council, alongside the established market surgeries run by South West Screen.
Read the 2004 Brief Encounters programme on the Internet Archive
Ten minutes inside a man's intoxicated imagination.
When all is said and done, conclusions are not so important after all.
A mugger and his victim have a strangely companionable afternoon.
Growing up in the world's most oppressive nanny state can be bad for your mental health. *15* developed from the award-winning short of the same name which won the International Jury Award at Brief Encounters 2003.
One sleepless night Ishmael, a young spacey urban nomad, starts counting back through all of the beds he has ever slept in.
Aeroplane Man follows Jonzi, after an encounter with a racist in London, on a quest to find a place to belong. He visits Grenada, Jamaica, the US and Africa. In each place he finds he does not really fit in.
When all is said and done, conclusions are not so important after all.
On a hot summer evening, in a suburb of a large city, a teenage girl has her first sexual experience.
The phenomenon of being a foreigner in Germany.
A poetic documentary exploring the Sri Lankan roots of a group of young people and their relationship with the complexities of British society.
A video letter from a murderer to the police who are trying to hunt him down.
A day in the life of Penarth's worst barber and keenest fitness fanatic.
Poland 1939. Two soldiers of a German reconnaissance patrol explore a forest terrain in order for their company to follow. They are mocked by two Polish boys with tragic consequences.
The Adventures of Big Jeff is a bloody magical new series following the escapades of a rollerskating Australian nudist and his chums.
One year old Billy is the apple of his Dad's eye. Today is a special day – the family are going on a day trip with a difference.
Blight revolves around the building of the M11 link road in East London, using images and sounds of demolition and road building in conjunction with the spoken words of local residents. A stunning collaboration between filmmaker John Smith and composer Jocelyn Pook; the soundtrack does aurally what the editing does visually, creating a powerful and passionate film.
Helen Chapman lives alone in her tidy flat and keeps herself to herself. She has never even spoken to the man next door. Never, that is, until the night she discovers something peculiar growing out of her carpet.
The raw material used in Blow-up comprises two shots from an old educational film about first aid. With the aid of a digital photocopier, the strip of film was reduced in size to a narrow ribbon, and Blow-up shows this transformation in reverse: the ribbon is resuscitated, swelling gradually until the initial image is recognisable and, in the end, fills the screen.
A struggling comprehensive school gets a makeover courtesy of the private sector.
A skeptical businessman dismisses a strange chain email as mumbo jumbo…
The two most popular pets go head to head.
A product of the dichotomies of algorithmic automation versus manual manipulation, and randomness versus set action, cubica provides a fascinating scene for anyone who can appreciate formal precision and perfection, while pulses of technoid soundtrack influence its direction.
Jeff gives us a masterclass on Wiccanism and the power of the curse.
Cut responds to the issue of censorship with a heady blend of tongue-in-cheek humor and music. Though Cut is unapologetic in its scathing criticism of Singapore's censorship system, the film is ultimately an attempt by the filmmaker to find a middle path to bridge the divide between an increasingly vocal civil society and its government.
A guy stops on a roadside on the way from Buffalo to Detroit. There he finds a dead body…
Your first day at work. You think that you are ready? Well, think again…
A subtle game with time in the city of Rotterdam. A true horsewoman riding on the large square of the historic centre changes into a surrealist and historic mo(nu)ment.
The artistic interpretation of a time and space based analysis of a video feedback, delivering an insight into the fascinating world of spatial complexity and dynamic behavior. The apparently hidden becomes visible in a process of aesthetic experience.
A curious and remote coastal research site becomes vibrantly graphic testament to impermanence. Using experimental animation techniques the film studies photographic exposure and exposure to nature's elements.
A kiss, a happy couple. But then the woman is kidnapped, and the man sets off to save her. A dramatic rescue story full of wild chase scenes begins. On its surface, Fast Film tells a simple story. The catch is that all its scenes were taken from 300 different works produced in the course of film history, which is also the number of identity changes its heroes undergo.
A young boy tries to discharge his stress and anger caused by the death of his little sister in a car accident. But all to no avail. The only solution is to meet the person who unintentionally caused the accident. A film about guilt and frustration.
This short begins where Austrian TV movies of the 70's and 80's left off in the depiction of rural life.
The surreal and disturbing tale of Glenda – played by Shirley Henderson – a social misfit whose love for Freddie transforms her life.
When a young man's luck on the fruit machines conspires against him, fate dictates an absurd descent into self-destruction.
A story of two children who react with naïve simple emotion to a situation imposed upon them by their father's secret. The striking thing about Ramsay's short was the acute sense of atmosphere created through a considered and spare use of sound.
A young man gets into a pickle after visiting his local dominatrix.
Inspired by the bittersweet representation of a Wife's role in the 1950s, this film manipulates and animates imagery sourced from manuals and magazines of the period. Jack Jones delivers the hard to swallow lyrics from the lounge room classic 'Wives and Lovers'.
When Henry kindly agrees to look after an old lady's suitcase at the airport, he's quickly surrounded by the Police and accused of being a terrorist. Can Henry find some way out of this mess…alive?
An autonomous piece that explores and portrays the visual-audio context of music and live performances.
Nowadays making hit music is extremely easy, just follow these simple instructions.
Mog finds an extreme way of coping with Christmas and his writer's block.
In the narrow confines of a coffee shop the ceaseless flow of customers weaves a colourful tapestry of motion. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee dissipates their loneliness and evokes ephemeral bliss.
Müller's found footage masterpiece: collecting the most kitschy and colourful images of disturbed housewives in evening gowns from 1950s Hollywood melodramas, Müller re-cut them into a film that both comments on gender entrapment in classic-era Hollywood while exhibiting the sheer joy of image mutilation.
A visual objection against similarity.
A woman dying from a gunshot wound struggles to stay alive. Her only chance is to keep talking to the emergency services on the phone. Someone is listening, but no one is answering her call for help.
A dog journeys through his urban environment — bewildered by his chance encounters, his feelings of isolation and alienation are reinforced at every turn. Will he ever find solace?
A prison inmate is expecting a visit from her husband and their daughter. During the visiting hour, in the smallest and most controlled space, their lives together take place.
A teenage girl relies on precious memories of her sister to survive a hostile world.
An exhilarating dynamism results from a precisely composed interplay of colour and form as filmmaker and electro-acoustic artists' methods employ a variety of painterly elements which are allowed to interact, overlap or contrast.
Jo Jo in the Stars is a story of love, self-sacrifice, and jealousy played out against a black and white world that is both nightmarish and hauntingly beautiful.
Autumn of 1987, Thomas Schmitz, a white-collar worker in Munich, seems to lead the ordinary life of a normal citizen. Not even his wife suspects he works as a spy… until one evening.
A protest film on the circumstances at the American embassy in Oslo, Norway after September 11th 2001. It's also a film the embassy tried its best to stop from being made.
Pearl, 15, loves Jack, 18, but he doesn't know she exists, so she decides to knit her passion for him into a scarf, and hides it in his locker…
What happens when the memory of a rape and what happens with the spot where it took place?
When Agnes arrives home tonight, she is going to tell Bruno she is leaving him.
Four months have passed when Antoine decides to come back to Paris, having left his family and Louisa, the woman carrying his child with no news.
An ordinary room overlooking a vast industrial landscape. In the distance…
Inspired by the dynamic paintings of Jackson Pollock and dancing in a Brixton nightclub. This uplifting animation uses music, line figures and movement.
Simeon is thirteen, a silent loner growing up in poverty in redneck South Africa. Marianna, a sexually experienced girl of 19, entrances him. He begins to follow her everywhere. When he's caught peeping all hell breaks loose.
The legendary tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch winds through lower Manhattan and suggests how best to truly commemorate 9-11 and what should be done with Ground Zero.
A short biography of a little man.
A mugger and his victim have a strangely companionable afternoon.
Why shouldn't a girl walk home alone? This dark tale has brooding atmosphere, a short sharp shock and witty punch line all in four minutes!
A young boy, Ben, lost in a vortex of poverty, is bullied at school and neglected at home. Driven beyond endurance by the harsh adult world he lives in, the child finds a chilling resolution to his problems.
Why doesn't his girlfriend answer her bloody phone? A man takes a fag break from the office to work out the options.
The police hunt for a rapist takes an unusual twist.
A dramatic day in the life of a remote answering machine. An emotionally devastating idea realised with beautiful time lapse and simple use of an answer phone voiceover.
Northern Soul tells the story of Mike Sherbert, a lonely young man who is obsessed with American wrestling. His dream is to become a professional wrestler and compete against his heroes in the WWF. There's only one problem: he weighs nine stone and has the pain threshold of a two-year-old child.
Catching the Number 54 bus is a sinister experience for both passenger and driver. With Ewen MacIntosh from *The Office*.
The music of Luciano Berio is explored using a combination of three dimensional shapes, colour and movement to show the music's complexity.
Painting is movement. Mid-flight between the tool and the canvas, the driving forces of nature are uncovered and the world is reinvented in the flow of the paint.
In a nose-centric world, one man battles with his nasal deficiency…
A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house at night, eerily lit surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building. She enters it. Found footage from Hollywood forms the basis for the film. Tscherkassky's dramatic frame-by-frame re-cycling, re-copying and new exposure of the material folds the images and
Fragments from a film by Kurosawa are subjected to a mirror effect, thus creating ethereal figures constantly re-melting into each other and slipping away again. A metaphor for the impossibility of love.
A football player goes to hospital to get his drugs test done. He gets a phone call. He hangs up and steps into one of the cabins of the paternoster. A camera is already set up in the cabin…
A woman on her way home from work.
A man ends up in a hospital corridor. He is moved around because he is in the way.
After the fall of Phnom Penh in 1979, the brutal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and his ruthless Khmer Rouge army spent the next decade retreating towards Thailand. Set in 1985, the efforts of the dictator's office staff to throw a surprise birthday party for their boss are documented.
The passing of life is depicted through the relationship between a sick man and his pregnant daughter.
The miracle of childbirth (not actual size).
In this eerie fairytale a claustrophobic, fun house mirror atmosphere speaks to the song's main theme: Beware the dangers of believing in illusions, no matter how tantalising they may appear. Promo from Bristol-based Collision Films, commissioned for Radiohead's first single from the album 'Hail to the Thief'.
An ironic look at the way newspapers report childrens' deaths: accidents, bad mothers, angry fathers and the bogeyman… these are terrible stories that make great copy.
This will be the most important lesson of your life. Maybe the only important lesson.
Two colleagues bump into each other after work outside the supermarket and go on a pub-crawl. One is looking for sex, one for romance.
Seishi — 'life or death' realisation of a dream, exploration of self-emotion.
Simon, a professional actor, is on his way to Melbourne for an audition and finds himself sitting next to Jack, who seems to be the world's daggiest and most irritating amateur.
The border between perception and imagination becomes indistinct as a distant confusion of voices can be heard between fragile melodies.
After leaving his best friend stranded at the scene of their crime, teenager Gavin struggles with the guilt of his actions and desperately tries to regain his mate's trust.
Annie walks the streets of the East End of London, in the footsteps of Josef Stalin and Mahatma Gandhi. She's obsessed with local history. She's trying to forget her own past.
'I am going to show you how you will be able to save your life' — the standard phrase employed by all stewardesses becomes a dubious promise in its decomposition. Visual composition is synchronous with the repetitive and minimalistic sound as close shots alternate between even closer shots.
A homage to the original work of Dr Henrich Hoffman.
The subject of both static image and song lyrics are identical, though not immediately obvious. Images betray little, and the economical editing follows the stumbling and driving rhythm of the music.
Carlos is a drug dealer who has to cope with his rebellious son, a persistent fly and a SWAT police team. His only weapons are the fly swatter…and his old gun!
Father and Boy live together in a small board cabin. The Boy works in an automated slaughterhouse, turning joysticks and spends his nights watching the oxygen gauge of his sickly father, an old man who has lost his spirit.
A documentary exploring an old lady's habit of recycling and reusing things. Everything she does involves cutting, including her precious garden, which is made from cuttings taken from different public spaces including garden centres.
Two taps discover they can create a rhythmic sound from the water dripping from their spouts but are constantly interrupted by a third tap.
A man goes to work and does his job.
This banker's interest is far more than his deposits. His life's work is full of little miracles…but for how long can he pull it off?
Even a God might have to reincarnate to get rid of a pesky fly.
The separation of conjoined twins and its extraordinary consequences.
Are shoes better than sex? Are shoes to die for? The Shoe Collector is unscrupulous in the search to acquire objects of desire.
The tale of a gardener's war against slugs and his mysterious, flower-hating next door neighbour. Garden wars!
Three short documentaries about Spoon Jackson, a man who has spent twenty-five years in prison and survived through his poetry.
Three apparently unrelated scenarios lead towards an emotionally charged resolution in this thought-provoking film. Winner of the Pathé Five Minute Award (2001) and distributed theatrically in the UK with *Italian for Beginners*.
An alternative world based on a companionship fantasy where women take the lead.
Ever since Tom hit his head he's been getting dizzy spells, indulging in eBay and having conversations with the devil.
A cold man looks for a warm heart on the internet.
Ten minutes inside a man's intoxicated imagination.
One of the most seminal (and notorious) films of the avant-garde and the most fully realised Surrealist film. The dreamlike quality of the film's logic and the striking originality of the images combine to create a series of visual metaphors. Legend has it that Buñuel and Dalí performed a live mix to the first screening of the film; the result is this iconoclastic piece of surrealism
An impressionistic documentary which takes you to a world where colours vanish, sounds distort, and machines make music. This coalmine is hell and heaven at the same time.
A film about a man trying to make headway in life.
The dark and disturbing story of a young woman's physical and emotional struggle for escape after she awakens to find herself in the damp, suffocating blackness of a car trunk. Based on the spoken poem written by Nicole Blackman.
What price would you put on your health? Ben is about to find out… Ward 13's newest admission faces medical attention of an unwanted kind – and no amount of apples will keep these doctors away…
Billions of dollars were spent to find out if there ever was or even still is water on Mars. Now two astronauts are on their way to the North Pole of the red planet to find out…
One night, Mani runs deep into the woods, wondering where her ill sister Sooni could have gone.
Heather's mother tests her 10-year-old daughter's love to the limit – shoplifting and car theft are only the start of it.
Excerpts of collages from an old folio, apparently a religious book of instruction or lamentations, supply the background which is evenly overlapped by violently chaotic grids making a textual reference to eschatology and other finalities. With piercingly over-modulated "micro processed" scratch sounds that mercilessly tear everything projected above and below them along into the digit
Swedish photographer Esaias Baitel spent four years, 1977–1981, photographing racist and anti-semitic street gangs in Paris. Little did the gang members know that the photographer paying attention to them was himself a child of Holocaust survivors.
Early cinema explored thousands of different methods of slipping and falling photogenically. By 1925, all tricks and innovative gags had been used up. Deutsch's found footage is peopled with recycled figures and the undead: Early cinema silently reproduces the living beings who once dared subject themselves to its gaze.