A Pickled Sunday
The shadow of a mundane monday breaks into the lazy sunday of a disaffected salaryman. Or maybe it’s the opposite?
MP4: Watch - Download
Flash: Vimeo
via Directors Notes
Ark
An unknown virus has destroyed almost the entire human population. Oblivious to the true nature of the disease, the only remaining survivors escape to the sea. In great ships, they set off in search of uninhabited land. So begins the exodus, led by one man…
Ark is a short movie directed by Grzegorz Jonkajtys who produced it with Marcin Kobylecki at Platige Image.
Watch it. (Flash Video Quicktime, HD)
Watch it. (MPEG-4, Hi res)
Pièces détachées
Paul (Antoine Coesens Lazaro), an obsessive casino player, finds himself with lots of debts and it is threatened with death by Benjamin Stern (Jean Claude Dauphin), his creditor. His friends now refuse to lend any money, he then decides to commit the unthinkable: sell one of its organs […] But by committing this act against nature, Paul puts his finger in a grim spiral that takes him to the borders of madness and death.
The short movie has been written and directed by Sébastien Drouin and produced by himself and Pierre Buffin at BUF.
The film is in French language, with no subtitles!
She Who Measures
Are we truly free? Are our desires truly our own or merely imposed products of the society we live in?
“Film critics’ jury of the 32nd International animated film festival in Annecy (Nadezhda Marintchevska, Avedik Olohadjian and Doris Senn) has decided to give the prestigious FIPRESCI Award to Ona koja mjeri (in English: She Who Measures) by Veljko Popovic.”
The movie was developed at Lemonade 3D and produced by Kenges.
Watch it. (Flash Video)
Tentacle
This powerful PSA for Dunkelziffer demonstrates the unbearable trauma, sexually abused children suffer from.
Directed by The Vikings, of Epuron’s fame.
Watch it. (Flash Video)
Tuesday
A beautiful short animation by Swedish director Åsa Arnehed. Here’s what Andrew Allen said on his place at Short of the Week, where I’ve found the film:
It moves at a crawling pace that, ironically, catches your attention among the mish mash of seizure-inducing videos online. Everyone fights for attention by making things bigger, brighter, and faster, and so no one stands out. It takes a well-timed film like this to bring things back into balance.
Watch it. (Flash Video)
Phone Sex Grandma
I hope you don’t rely on telephone sex to get your rocks off because this short documentery would certainly kill that. A one-joke short but the one joke is pretty funny.
Watch it - via Cinematech
Terminus
Incredible graphics for this short that works on many levels. Is it about emotional baggage? ghosts? people? bullies?
Watch low quality at Youtube or high quality quicktime (200mb!)
Salaryman 6
The mundane and repetitive life of the salaryman is shown in detail as he attempts to piece together his life using the aid of a pocket camera, after losing his memory.
Short film by Ne-O (Jade Knight and Ryoko Tanaka)
The wide aspect ratio and the cold photography gives it a sort of “nightmarish real” visual quality.
Watch it. (Flash Video)
Download. (MPEG-4)
via shortsville
Pistache
Created by Valerie Pirson, this beautiful video illustrates how interior and exterior forces affect our sense of balance.
Watch it (the subtitles are hard to read, get ready to squint)
The video is hosted at Lumen Eclipse, their archives are filled with all kinds of experimental video goodies.
Dave Gahan - “Kingdom”
The concept and song play beautifully together. You could spend a semester dissecting this video. My first thought: desolate parking lots and exterior of houses (and what they symbolize) could be the invisible sharks that exist underneath the water, threatening to destroy everything alive. But as nature started to flash, could it be everybody had left the artificial world to return to the natural world. Maybe leave the physical world for the spiritual world. Or it could be simple as an alien abduction (i kid).
Special mention to the cinematography and color correction. This would be a video I would love to see on HD. No blowouts, high contrast but without that extreme look that music videos seem to thrive on.
Lars and the Real Girl Trailer
This looks very promising. And seriously, anything with Ryan Gosling in it is worth watching.
Human Puppets & Palindrome
From Simon Schwarz’s Myspace page, I found a couple of abstract works that are quite delicious.
Two Human Puppets roam a desolate, broken down home. Not a search but more of a discovery. The piece walks a fine line of having enough action to engage the viewer and yet keeps its distance. The end lovemaking is quite beautiful.
Palindrome is another piece that could have quickly become tedious. The action simply consists of a woman waking up from bed and eating breakfast. A lot of the action goes back and forth in time. Unlike other videos that reverse time, there isn’t a fascination with how physical objects move in reverse. Instead, the back and forth is focused on the idea of habits where the magical seem to be so mundane.
Dear Stranger
I have posted my short film on Squigglebooth. I am going to let it sell itself.
Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville
From Wikipedia:
Alphaville is a 1965 black-and-white French science fiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Its original French title is Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution). The film stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the Berlin Film Festival in 1965.
Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. Although set far in the future on another planet, there are no special effects or elaborate sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings represent the city’s interiors. In addition, the characters refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this role in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.
