Encounters 29 · Bristol
121 films from 34 countries are recorded in the archive for this edition, with 8 award winners.
The twenty-ninth edition featured João Gonzalez's Oscar-nominated Ice Merchants alongside a carefully themed international competition: Geographies of Memory explored technology and recollection, Political Luts Pack examined power structures, and Alchemical Encounters pushed formal boundaries. The UK competition included Duncan Cowles' Outlets, Alex Lawther's For People in Trouble and Dean Puckett's The Devil's Footprints, while the animation programme showcased Shunsaku Hayashi's Our Pain and Andreas Deja's feature-length Mushka. Maryam Tafakory's Mast-del continued her exploration of Iranian womanhood through found footage.
In the north of Colombia, a group of queer activists use extravagant performative actions to denounce the disastrous exploitation by the country's largest coal mine.
Among intrusive memories, a woman hears a disconcerting call from the depths of her being. A cryptic cry for help guides her to the original wound, to her inner child, becoming her own protector.
Brought together serendipitously in a moment of mischief, two elderly care home residents form an unlikely relationship when they make an enchanted discovery.
Prolific background actor Jill Goldston takes centre stage in this unique portrait.
Sarah, a young Ukrainian girl, discovers an orphaned baby Siberian tiger and realizes she must either raise him or leave him to the perils of the snowy wild.
In Wiltshire, a young farmer tends to the family's dairy farm with unwavering dedication. Despite the hard work and long hours, rewards are scarce in the current tough economic climate.
Behind the "sensitive content", behind this symbol of the crossed-out eyes, in this Deep Blur, two real eyes have been wiped out by the violence in the Middle East.
With Nigerian Queer history erased from the national narrative of Nigeria, Queer Nigerians in the UK gather to tell their stories, documenting their experiences so they can never be erased again.
A sailor must come to terms with the trauma of war and the mysteries of the deep, as he endures another shift on the Middle Watch.
In the search for his evil twin, Sinus descends into a frenzied trip towards the depths of his psyche in this psychedelic fairytale.
The inner turmoil of a grieving son collides with the failing political tenure of the Conservatives.
A Plymouth flat is a locus for community investigation into histories in the surrounding landscape.
A rickety bus trundles through wilting countryside towards Wonderland, theme park like no other.
An ordinary young couple finds an isolated place to park their car and love each other away from prying eyes. At least that's what they believe... Deep in the forest, their intimacy will be the scene of an unsettling encounter between sensuality and horror.
A porn animation of watercolour paintings that explores tensions of desire.
A struggle between inner chaos and reality explodes to create a world of cowboys, horses, and western landscapes.
A road trip pushes a dysfunctional family to the brink after their journey descends into a claustrophobic hallucinatory nightmare.
A young Pierrot Grenade contemplates the spirit of carnival.
In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a woman walks into a chadari store in Kabul to buy her first full-body veil and face an uncertain future.
The Crowd is evoked by the composition The Crowd from the 1971 album "Sing Me a Song of Songmy, a Fantasy for Electromagnetic Tape" by İlhan Mimaroglu and Freddie Hubbard. Pelin Kirca turns the associations she had into a surreal game and invites the audience to participate.
A documentary found-footage collage about the fear of death and hell and how people continue to fuel "hell on earth" on social media.
Three teens try to buy their first bag of weed. A recent switch of school creates a tension between them.
Three queer stories told through three breakthrough appointments.
With the help of 16mm film and voice messages, this film brings my exiled friends back to their empty rooms.
In an alternate world where having sex means swapping bodies with the other person, a young woman struggles to be herself, defying her small conservative community where swapping is taboo. A deeply intimate portrait of identity in transition.
Behind the "sensitive content", behind this symbol of the crossed-out eyes, in this Deep Blur, two real eyes have been wiped out by the violence in the Middle East.
A personal notebook of a time spent at science labs in Zürich. A mind map gone wrong of unfinished ideas on thought disorders, medical imaging, cells, and aging.
As we walk through the streets of a past Mariupol through a computer screen, the recurring presence of a bicycle intrigues. Who owns it?
Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage, created from scraps of orphan 16mm films from the 1980s.
Our common pain, although experienced individually and uniquely, is what connects us. It is the ambiguity and variety of our existence that allows us to imagine an infinity of variables, some of these alternatives may be malignant, and some benign.
Two sweaty men end up at odds with each other in a crowded sauna. A short film about prejudice and politics. And cock.
A fantasy rom-com that follows a gender-swapping Gen-Z narcissist on a quest to pay rent on time.
In the north of Colombia, a group of queer activists use extravagant performative actions to denounce the disastrous exploitation by the country's largest coal mine.
A monologue is performed in a building that inhabits the thickness of a borderline, reflecting on how free movement, free knowledge and free space are under threat.
In The Fruit Tree a young woman, Sharleece, wanders through a house that is available to rent in the sleepy desert town where she lives, California City. Looking out of the window evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles.
Three friends discuss a plan to change their lives forever and reclaim heritage in the name of honour.
As chilling as it is absurd, Kamal Aljafari's Paradiso XXXI, 108 repurposes found footage from Israeli military propaganda and turns it into a fictional drama of men playing at war.
In December of 2004, the bodies of a young couple were found in the middle of Dartmoor, a vast moorland that sits in the south western corner of the United Kingdom. The following film is made up of footage which was recovered eighteen years later.
Unable to move on from the death of his granny, a filmmaker desperately searches for the right film idea that will finally allow him to let go… Through a series of stylistically different film ideas Outlets takes you on a journey into the grieving process of a creative brain. Can you ever really let go of a loved one once they're gone?
Mother and Father lay the child in his cot at the same time every night. However, come morning, only a shallow crater remains; a baby-shaped depression. The boy was destined to be a wanderer.
Light pollution makes a glow-worm's love life a living hell.
Time continuously elapses, apathy can trap consciousness into a loop. Escaping this stagnation one can discover the true beauty of existence.
Rainboy is a gardener in the sky, while working he injures the vain sun. Revenge!
The sun sets and the eyes are closing. Rocking from one green leaf to the next, the little monkey glides gently to sleep. Suddenly the world of dreams gets darker, more colorful and wild. Mysterious plants, creatures and shapes line the trajectory through the night. Somni is a cinematic lullaby.
What hides behind those masks, the leather and the rubber, and who can help me fix my pipe?
Hey Puss! Still playing hard to get? Let me be your pussycat.
A lost Irish folk song, an ancient homoerotic love story on an epic journey to a genderqueer utopia.
Two people meet one night in London, their relationship blossoms and fractures, intertwined with impending societal collapse.
A film inspired by the absurdity of everyday life.
Among intrusive memories, a woman hears a disconcerting call from the depths of her being. A cryptic cry for help guides her to the original wound, to her inner child, becoming her own protector.
A man is summoned from Mumbai to his village to deal with a termite infestation threatening to destroy his childhood home.
A recently retired father invites his son to help him with the cherry picking in the garden. The father is in no hurry to finish the cherry job though, as he tries to catch up with his son. The cherries remain in the background.
Images and a territory. The ghosts of the past come face to face with the present.
Chapter closing without closure.
In this remarkably tactile animation, Alisi Telengut reimagines the formation of a sacred lake in Siberia and draws connections between an endangered Indigenous language and matters of history, ecology, and humanity.
An ethnographic exploration of the work and life realities of non-player characters, the digital extras in video games. Their labour loops, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.
The evolution of the Tamar river's landscape through time.
Insects flash for the fraction of a second to immediately withdraw from the field of vision again.
A content moderator for a social media site begins to suspect his young son is hiding violent tendencies when their family pet is mysteriously wounded.
Prolific background actor Jill Goldston takes centre stage in this unique portrait.
16mm shots of the sun are layered and superimposed, paired with a soundscape.
Goodbye Python is an accomplished genre film told through the eyes of both its trans protagonist and its trans director. A film about learning to love and then to let go, this is a compelling watch with some strong visual qualities.
With ever escalating bad news stories broadcast daily a woman finds an undisturbed night's sleep impossible.
Two crocodilian men go to a swimming pool to cool off. One of them is seemingly of a different and special kind; the other is unable to control his desire.
A nameless man no longer manages to count further than six. A sequence of tragic-comic moments and strange encounters takes its course. Is the world slipping away from him? Loosely adapted from the famous work of the avant-garde poet Daniil Kharms, Incidences tells of the search for sense in a nonsensical world.
Brought together serendipitously in a moment of mischief, two elderly care home residents form an unlikely relationship when they make an enchanted discovery.
A prehistoric hominid is about to leave his country to work abroad, but his passport goes missing.
The story of an unplanned city Dhaka, told from the point of view of an off-screen architect.
The anemone flower that "I" liked. A precious flower that holds memories which tie "You" and "I" together. A story that represents "Me", "You", our "Childhood Friend" and our goodbyes.
An introspective essay about the search for a place that exists between reality and imagination: a placeless place made up out of dreams, chimeras and a desire for gender fluidity.
Every day, a father and his son jump with a parachute from their vertiginous cold house, attached to a cliff, to go to the village on the ground, far away where they sell the ice they produce daily.
One day, an old water pipe caused a ceiling leak.
A subtle examination of how a human life is measured and valued within an ableist paradigm.
Crowds of people start to chaotically fill the screen, whilst a tourist tries to navigate their way through.
Farmer Olga is torn between the love of her pet pigs and her lust for meat.
A naive teenager is out of his element at a drug-fuelled get-together. To break out of his shell, he'll have to smoke and drink his way through a night that'll be far more grisly than anyone expects...
An animation series that draws attention to the collective amnesia of the 1922 Great Fire of Smyrna/Izmir by examining the urban park, Fuar, built on top of its ruins.
Andy has never seen another human. Then a severed hand arrives in the mail.
It starts with a sudden hole in the ground. As the narrator's voice explains at the beginning of the film, a hole in the floor of her apartment opened up overnight – a negative space, the trace or scar of a mysterious event.
Upon finding 1920s photographs of crossdressers in the Middle-East, Mona goes on a journey of uncovering lost histories and her own identity.
FROM.BEYOND is a kaleidoscopic depiction of alien life on earth.
This film is about gazes and goodbyes. An attempt to weave images with words and to weave a poem with images.
Following a violent incident; Eissa a 17 years old African migrant in Egypt is in a quest against time to save his loved ones whatever it takes.
Paul B. Preciado says "Trans bodies [...] though living, speak in languages unknown to the colonizer, they have dreams psychoanalysts are unaware of". Through creation, the artist does a live performance of synthesizing a "woman".
A person brushes the teeth of a dog and turns into a bus.
On the hottest day of the year, Barbadian fruit pickers Nicole and Vincent endure exploitative conditions on a UK fruit farm. When the farm's owner arrives, tensions reach boiling point.
Sarah, a young Ukrainian girl, discovers an orphaned baby Siberian tiger and realizes she must either raise him or leave him to the perils of the snowy wild.
A taboo-busting comedy-drama about slut-shaming, Catholic guilt and female pleasure.
As part of a fishing community's annual ritual, a young boy must kill his first crab in order to become a man and gain his father's approval.
Anna lives in a perfect house, but living on the edge of a tornado can be difficult. When she ventures outside, she is forced to face the chaos that she usually hides away from.
Dan goes for a walk in search of Daniel, a man buried in Nympsfield in 1719 and described as 'a black stranger'.
With Nigerian Queer history erased from the national narrative of Nigeria, Queer Nigerians in the UK gather to tell their stories, documenting their experiences so they can never be erased again.
When autistic Thomas meets Agnes, he learns how to use his storytelling to bridge the gap between them.
A meditation on the unlikely bond between endometriosis and Japanese knotweed.
An experimental short-film shot on 8mm documenting the interconnected queer community of Bristol and London over a three-month period.
In this day and age, Rebeca attempts to create a collection of non-phallic ceramic dildos.
In 23 short scenes, deep-seated fears are visualized as surreal nightmares.
The film present a collection of views of Manhattan from a 20th-floor studio apartment. Each shot doesn't comprise one single view, but rather the image of three shots taken in succession with the same strip of film running through the camera, each time using a different color filter in front of the lens – first red, then green, then blue.
Chased by his nightmare knife hand, the paper boy has to confront his real fear which supposed to be his hope.
Rowin has little luck catching fish at his fishing spot. One day, on the coastline where he fishes daily, he encounters a mysterious young man who will change everything.
In an abandoned hospital, an encounter between a lonely sex streamer and a grieving old lady unleashes a flood of memories and virtual data.
Weaving archive footage from space explorations with personal family videos, the film focuses on the emotional journey of Fernanda Gonzalez.
A highly innovative shadow puppet film, illustrating a demonic world of very familiar social injustice and political resistance.
Tyler Overall's final days before prison, after the Bristol Kill the Bill protests.
A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires, both inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.
In 1979, the Pacific Club was opened in the basement of La Défense – the business district of Paris. It was the first nightclub for Arabs from the suburbs; a parallel world of dance, sweat, young loves, and one-night utopias. Azedine, 17 years old at the time, tells us the forgotten story of this club and of this generation who dreamed of integrating into France but who soon came face to face with racism, the AIDS epidemic, and heroin.
During a sleepless night, a girl's anxious thoughts create a storm that whisks her and her stuffed lion into space. Together with her lion, she faces her fear and steers her spaceship out of the storm. Finally, she is able to fall asleep.
A day in the luxurious life of a fashion queen.
The protagonist comes home from work and outside is the epidemic ravaging the city. She wakes up in the middle of the night and realizes she can't move while a constant stream of things break into her apartment, eating away at her body and mind, until the alarm goes off and it's time to go to work again.
A nostalgia filled trip back in time to a simpler life when plastic toys fell out of cereal boxes and made your day.
Gabriel Terán is an exceptionally resilient person: with a physical disability that prevents him from moving without his wheelchair and a diagnosis of hydrocephalus at birth, he manages to exceed all expectations to become a Paralympic athlete in karate and an exceptional surfer. But none of this would be possible without the unconditional support of his surf school and his instructors who profess a therapeutic discourse based on the teachings of the sea. In this micro documentary we will see Gabriel make the journey from the beach to the sea to surf, a path that for many can be simple, for him it is quite a journey.
A short story depicting action of shaving legs and the results that may occur.
In Wiltshire, a young farmer tends to the family's dairy farm with unwavering dedication. Despite the hard work and long hours, rewards are scarce in the current tough economic climate.
While cleaning out her deceased nan's house, Tessa discovers a mysterious wooden box, containing an item that will change her life forever.
The Guerrab is considered a usual element in the popular markets in Morocco, with very special red dress with very nicely decorated, it carries a shoulder-skin gourd made of goat skin which helps to keep the water cold. The guerrab is always armed with a bell to make himself heard and mark his presence. However, with the evolution we live, the profession of lguerrab no longer has the same importance! It has become an element of decoration! A character with whom tourists take pictures! This job is disappearing.
Many details.
The princess rejects her tiring life in the tower without waiting for the rescue of Prince Charming.
The long awaited television spin-off of the hit cinema sensation, "Manwitch".
On 24 February 2022, Ukraine was shaken by powerful bomb and missile explosions. Russia, led by a ruthless dictator, began to write its new bloody history. But in the end, this evil, horrible and unjust history, written with only one letter of the alphabet, will crush Russia itself and its dictator.
A VHS collage film commissioned as part of the BBC's centenary celebrations with Make Film History, using archive footage and a custom-built VHS telecine.
Tehran, with its religious fabric and the traditional character of certain areas, holds a significant influence on individuals. The city's unique blend of religious and cultural elements shapes the perspectives and experiences of its residents.
On a beautiful day in a swamp, a fisherwoman living her best life and hanging clothes to dry catches with her fishing rod a mutated fish that attacks her and transforms her into a fish.
An imaginary house functions as a museum of my fragmented identity. There, I keep all of my versions and make them coexist. Meanwhile, I finish the construction of my machine. Nearing the end of my search for myself, I arrive at a confession.
A conspiracy theorist subjects his home to a drastic transformation.
Two carers say goodbye to each other at a funeral.
A criminal has an encounter with Britains newest vigilante The Face and faces the consequences.
Winter, 1735: A British Soldier battles with his conscience after being banished to a remote outpost.