A Time to Die, Joe Gibbons
(USA 2006, 8:30 min)
“A diatribe directed at certain species of flowers that have forgotten their place in the big picture.”—Joe Gibbons

One Short Story [1], Alexandra Crouwers
(The Netherlands 2005, 3:24 min)
This is the spot, the exact spot, where they all get lost eventually: Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, the prince on his way to Sleeping Beauty… It happens so often and it’s such a common thing that most of their stories don’t even mention it. Some things that have happened here have never been put into the shape of a fairytale because of the gruesomeness of those events. The thing is, if you choose the wrong path (and they’re all wrong except for one) you will end up cut into pieces or sucked empty or whatever. Dead anyway. The ones that survive get all the stories, the other ones are lost forever…”

Wood Report, Tina Willgren
(Sweden 2006, 1:57 min)
A video inspired by television news and its techniques to portray and dramatize significant events. Camera movements, graphics and a jingle are used to highlight the content, namely: events taking place in the Nacka Reserve, Stockholm, during May 2006. During the time of filming nothing of hot topic news value really took place, instead the every day action of the forest area for example dangling leaves and swaying tree branches, bird movements and the mere appearance of plants and objects in front of the camera create the actual ‘drama’.

A Wondrous Film About Emma Brooks, Jack Feldstein
(Australia 2007, 17:05 min)
A fantastical re-animated neon film that’s both funny and profound. A wondrous film about Emma Brooks is Jack Feldstein’s stream-of-con-sciousness narrative with the visual style of Andy Warhol pop art. It’s a magical surreal neon creation about one girl’s search for the truth …and what she finds out along the way.

Ocnophilia, Manon Bovenkerk
(The Netherlands 2006, 5:30 min)
Two women, one seemingly no longer amongst the living, play a game of attracting and repelling in claustrophobic rooms and hallways. The outside is a desolate landscape of stark and unforgiving architecture.Inside, the desperate need for contact leads to physical obsession, strange infections and croup-like tumors. This visceral horror story is constructed entirely out of precise and refined charcoal drawings; movement is suggested by slight camera movements and the gloomy soundtrack. Ocnophilia, meaning an extreme attachment to certain objects and persons, is also the title of the book published simultaneously with the film, which uses the same drawings to arrive at a ‘sequential narrative’.

Het Grote Geheugen, Robbie Cornelissen
(The Netherlands 2006, 9:48 min)
An animation of immense imaginary buildings based on pencil drawings. People are virtually absent. Thoughts and reflections coagulate and have taken a physical shape.

The Hyrcynium Wood, Ben Rivers
(United Kingdom 2005, 3:00 min)
The film began as a document of abandoned farms in South East England, but went off on a tangent, exploring the collision between the real and the imagined, and the hope of creating a hermetic world within that. The work also attempts to merge a marginalized, uncommercial approach to filmmaking with the spectacular and consequent mass appeal, of Cinemascope! This continues the use of cinematic reference in my work as a way of involving the audience, who come with their own set of references, and expectations to be confounded. I found the title in an out of date Thesaurus looking up the word ‘mystery’ – which is essentially what this film remains to me. (Ben Rivers)

The General Returns from One Place to Another, Michael Robinson
(USA 2006, 11:00 min)
Learning to love again, with fear at its side, the film draws balance between the romantic and the horrid, shaping a concurrently skeptical and indulgent experience of the beautiful. A Frank O’Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

La Martienne, Jean-Claude Taki
(France 2005, 8:30 min)
This film is a part of a new work that I’m doing since two years with my mobile. And the Martian Girl is the story of my meeting with an illegal immigrant, and perhaps more besides…