In a stylish and sensual fantasy world, a young vampire falls in love with the moon. The two yearn to consummate their impossible romance, and when the vampire is offered a choice between his immortality and one night with the moon, he departs on a journey to join his beloved in the sky for one night of cross-species bliss.
This film screens as part of Shorts Program 10: Outré.
As eight-year-old Agata boards a full bus from Poland to Belgium by herself, she notices that those around her seem different. The magical realism of Autokar authentically recalls how strange and inscrutable the adult world can seem to children, lending the story a subtle humor and nostalgia.
This film screens as part of Shorts Program 2: Animation.
During her shifts supervising a wild swath of southern Irish terrain, park ranger Jen is fierce when it comes to fending off the poachers who attempt to encroach on the wildlife inhabiting the forests she safeguards. But shorts when an old boyfriend returns after a long absence, bringing with him memories of a tragedy that changed the course of their lives, cracks begin to show through her tightly controlled demeanor. As the past rears its head, Jen is faced with reconciling deep-seated traumas with new threats lurking both at home and in the woods.
Crackling with intensity, Whitetail is both a white-knuckle thriller and a meditation on the possibility of redemption for past sins. Anchored by a riveting lead performance from Natasha O’Keeffe, writer-director Nanouk Leopold’s probing character study is amplified by its rugged woodland setting, reflecting the unexplored depths of Jen’s fractured psyche.
Inside a home for young mothers in the Belgian town of Liège, five teens learn to care for their newborns, and themselves, as they navigate the challenges of early parenthood. Finding camaraderie and stability among the fellow members of their community, Jessica, Perla, Julie, Ariane, and Naïma come to rely on one another for support, finding a kind of sisterhood as they bond with their babies. Grappling with the lasting impacts of addiction or abandonment, mental illness and family strife, each girl struggles to break free from the darker aspects of her past, hoping to forge a path toward a brighter future.
Brimming with compassion and poignancy, Young Mothers earned the Best Screenplay prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the venerable writer-directors famed for films including the Palme d’Or winners Rosetta and L’Enfant. The Dardennes beautifully capture the small moments that pass between mother and child, soliciting such naturalistic performances from their young actors that the film often feels closer to documentary than fiction. Despite the difficult circumstances facing the characters, Young Mothers finds uplift and the possibility of a better tomorrow.
The Chilean desert, 1982. It is rumored that a single loving gaze between two men is how the plague spreads—an illness both mysterious and lethal that is tearing through a remote mining town. At the center of the paranoia is a community on the margins: a home where eleven-year-old Lidia grows up among a fierce and loving queer family. As fear and violence begin to spread even faster than the plague, Lidia sets out to find the truth about this mythical epidemic to protect her beloved kin.
With sensuous magical realism and poetic tenderness set against the harsh desert backdrop, director Diego Céspedes draws us into a pivotal moment in queer history as lived by its most marginalized and misunderstood protagonists. An ode to the care and resilience of trans family, this breathtaking debut never loses sight of the power of love in the face of dire circumstances.
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