Keyword Essay

A reclusive English teacher suffering from severe obesity attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.

A scientific expedition travels to an alternative Earth in hope of finding a new home for humanity, which has destroyed its own planet. But is it even possible to escape old patterns?

A college student prone to procrastination has a month to complete an important essay.

An orphan narrates his essay “What is Family?” and how he found his answer when he met “Surfing Uncle” developing a bond like a father, uncle, grandfather and brother from the — heart.

21-year-old Amina lives with the chronic illness ME/CFS. Her brother Liam accompanies her through everyday life with his camera. Amina shares her feelings, thoughts and resilience with us. In an interplay of documentary observation and artistic staging, the siblings find ways to make both the invisible illness and their way of coping with it visible.

Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts It’s Just Business, Baby) examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts, renowned as a sites for sex work, sex clubs and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic.” The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire in the encounter between the two. (Ayanna Dozier)

An auteur-director who wishes to make a documentary about Armenia imagines a fictitious character that has the ability to travel through bodies. The latter will alternatively embody: a young farmer that dreams to flee from the countryside to more urban spheres, a prostitute who is a survivor of rape, a narcissistic client, a fallen artist and finally, a resisting deserter.

A cinematic essay interweaving private archive images and a mixture of reflective, speculative and poetic intertitles that, like “an old movie from the 20th century”, invites us to meditate on what Des Pallières once liked to call “our old homeland”.

The "cueca" is Chile's national dance. Marveled by this form of dancing, the narrator reflects on the meaning of dance in our lives and how it has been portrayed in the history of cinema.

What is a film if not a therapeutic act? Wa(te)r is a poetiс reflection on my 2022–2023 diary entries, poured from one medium to another. I uncovered countless water metaphors intertwined with life and death throughout these entries. I often revisit recurring dreams—one of floods, the other of war—that have haunted me since childhood. Water flows, and everything changes. It ties me to the very beginning, with my mother's hands bathing me, and to the very end, with suicidal despair. All I strive to express emerges from the water, my words engulfing themselves. In these times, water is the most precious resource, reliable conduit to memories, and promise of oblivion. Dedicated to my dear mother and her protective touch.

Necromancy: The summoning of the dead through magic.

The filmmaker's mother describes stories of his lustful youth over the phone, causing them to reflect on his current love life at the age of 30.

To My Motherland is an experimental personal essay film that blends personal photographs and home videos to explore the complexities of immigration, language, and returning to the motherland.

As the gaze sinks into the landscape, a relationship disintegrates, leaving love as a fleeting memory between archives and dreams. The writing of the days is imprinted on traces that repeat themselves in a constant déjà vu. Pain becomes noise and dissolves like particles in the air, in an attempt to reconstruct the inevitable. A leap into the void between the desire to remain and the impulse to erase a wound.

Equal parts documentary, visual essay, experimental collage narrative, and parodic homage to and of all things Barbie, this caustic and exciting visual foray embraces the complicated terrain of feminist discourse, cultural criticism, and political rhetoric, as well as insights on gender, identity, and personal experience where all roads lead back to the phenomena that is Barbie.

Responding to the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, 103 Shots examines the disorienting effect of violence in the space of intimacy.

Six million tons, suspended by the slightest gesture. Mother of the World presents a series of brief vignettes of Cairo just prior to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. These fragmented scenes choreograph class structure and foreign influence into an intimate, poetic view of a nation about to change.

A collage-style video essay that explores the idea of love through touch. Guided by fragments of films, paintings, photographs, and other visual images, a sensorial and poetic narrative is constructed around the protagonists of Alan Stephens Foster's painting "The Fall." Like a moving moodboard, the work connects different artistic and cultural expressions to portray gestures of affection, desire, care, and presence between diverse bodies. All of this through the hands.

A dangerously charming, intensely obsessive young man goes to extreme measures to insert himself into the lives of those he is transfixed by.