Third Wheel (Switzerland) by Kevin Haefelin

Samurai comedy about a three-way relationship with a ghost set in Edo Japan. Following his abrupt death, Gohei, a master carpenter, returns as a ghost to make peace with his wife, Sachi but finds out he is invisible. He must rely on Sakichi, his once-neglected apprentice gifted with psychic abilities.

Running time: 00:04:00

The Other Side of Despair (Switzerland) by Varsy Buchmann

"The Other Side of Despair" is a moving portrait of a young Armenian artist, Art Petrosyan, who sets fire to his own paintings. Shot during a time of profound loss and upheaval in the aftermath of the forced deportation of 110,000 people from Artsakh, it provides a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the relationship between art, identity, and the struggle for survival.

Running time: 00:08:30

The Core (Romania) by Robert Obert

This short animated film illustrates a common consciousness from which materialized instances of feminine and masculine emerge, only to morph again into a single core. It is a metaphor of a love connection between two partners, fueled from the same source, but also for the power of creation that consciousness holds. This  also collects and shows sections of each partner’s transformation process, revealing and underlining that everything begins and ends from and into a single point, it shows the nucleus of narratives from each individual,  their symbiosis and eventually their exit. The author considers this animation a meta frame where we can be spectators to a process of creation and emotion.

Running time: 00:01:11

A Mother Goes To The Beach (Portugal) by Pedro Hasrouny

Teresa, a single mother spends a day at the beach with her six-year-old son, Benji and her sister Marga, who is back to Portugal for a summer vacation. The day becomes very stressful with her sister’s constant speech about her son’s achievements and her criticisms towards Benji.

Running time: 00:15:31

Moi-même (United States) by Mojo L Lorwin, Lee Breuer

Moi-même is the long lost sole feature film of the late avant-garde theater legend Lee Breuer (1937-2021)... Shot in 1968 in Paris and abandoned later that year, the project was resurrected by Breuer’s son, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, who began restoring and re-imagining the unfinished film in the last year of his father’s life. The plot of Moi-même follows Kevin, a thirteen year old American boy, as he tries to assemble a film collective in Paris and make an autobiographical movie against the backdrop of the May 1968 protests. The film features a cameo by Jean-Luc Godard, footage of the student protesters outside the Sorbonne, and early performances from some of Breuer’s most important theatrical collaborators including Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Fred Neumann, also known for their work with Samuel Beckett. Faced with hours of unedited silent film (Breuer’s original intention had been to dub the film later), Lorwin has spent the last three years writing a script, editing the picture, and working with a number of voice actors, musicians, and sound professionals to create a feature film out of the raw footage. A collaboration between father and son across half a century, Moi-même is both a lost 60s arthouse film and a new experimental film in its own right, which uses the original footage to tell a story about the political and artistic legacy of the 60s in our time and to explore the meaning of abandoned projects.

Running time: 01:04:46