SHORT RIGA
As an individual department within this year’s festival the team behind the wittily titled SHORT RIGA have devised a remarkable feat – altogether three competitions of new shorts from around the world, Baltic student films and a separate category for music videos. Showcased within three respective programmes SHORT RIGA will take over the newly established small theater KINO BIZE as well as organise workshops and host an award ceremony.
Three self-conscious, highly-educated pedophiles give an insight in their minds and thoughts. How do you cope with a sexual orientation that’s considered morbid?
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Anna is milking the cows, Jakob smokes pot, Berni works on a telescope and Ulrike celebrates her birthday. So far, everything is fine in Otto’s farm. When Ulrike’s coffee cup breaks on the kitchen floor, something dark breaks loose. Sometimes the devil has to take the hindmost.
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Seven short episodes, each containing one sole image, are combined together in order to create a psychological thriller.
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Object is a creative re-imagination of a rescue mission, taking place in two worlds – on the ice desert and underwater. The film is told from the point of view of the rescue team diver, entering the world under the ice, and of the ordinary people, awaiting on the shore.
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After a casting, 2 filmmakers agree they found the perfect 14 years old girl for their new movie. Still, they must convince the mother to let her play the role of a sexually abused child. What follows is a witty argumentation on parenting and abuses made in the name of of art.
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Coro dos Amantes is made of two “songs” that tell the same suffocating event in two voices from two different perspectives.
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Athens, in the heat of summer. A bunch of schoolkids are hanging out in the yard. The classrooms are empty. The sun is scorching hot. A water bomb falls out of the sky, stirring up a water fight. It’s game on. But in this game, you play till you drop.
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At the seaside beach the fates of a balding sailor, a young girl and two modest creatures – the bee and the crab are entangled. Following their greed, they meet each other by the waffle stall. An animated story about primal desires present in the human nature.
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The film tells the love story of the refugee Patrick and Sara from Berlin, who are fighting together for refugee rights in Berlin. When harmless advance turns into a sexual assault, the group is forced to rethink their aims and the private love story grows to an unwanted public dimension.
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A journey through the abstract situation of a practice of the voluntary fire brigade. It is a poetic, sensuous short film about the construction of reality and the pursuit of meaning and belief.
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A sensitive and introvert teenager lives under the shadow of his mother in Israeli periphery. The film explores questions of marginality and poverty in a Jewish-Arab society searching for its identity.
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Luka moves to a small coastal town to live with his aunt, while his parents are in the middle of divorce. Besides the numbness, there is also Jana – a girl from the neighborhood who likes to take care of her tan. It’s a lazy end of the summer. Kids are jumping from the edge of the abandoned submarine port enjoying last days of vacation. When you are a kid, you never know that childhood ends.
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Collector of cursed musicians, unreasonable murderers, fairground freaks, paranoid revolutionaries, flatulists and suicidal anchorites, a patient in a psychiatric institution presents a gallery of the great names in history who haunt him.
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Home is a place. A family. A history. Relationships. Home is a memory that forms a person. Maybe a dream? This is a story about a girl coming back Home. This visit brings a storm of chaotic, difficult memories. She needs to deal with them to leave.
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A night in the life of Pio, a young Romani boy living in southern Italy.
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When her husband suddenly dies, Karin starts visiting a counselor. Used to being a housewife for years, she feels she has lost her identity. Now Karin has to learn more about herself and plan her income and future. Her husband was a charismatic priest always in the centre of peoples’ attention, earning respect regardless of his flaws and shortcomings. Maybe now it is the time for Karin to take her husband’s place? To become more careless and to look and behave like she has always wanted.
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Four generations, each with a crisis, set in four different parts of Norway on the Norwegian Constitution Day. Ten-year-old Birger hates marching with the boys’ brigade. War hero Konrad (90) refuses to listen to another sumptuous Constitution Day speech. Graduation queen Carina (18) just cannot believe Morten isn’t interested in her. And father-of-two Ola (46) searches for his ‘self’ in a hunting lodge in arctic Svalbard.
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Círio de Nazaré, held in Belém (Brazil) since 1793, is one of the biggest Catholic processions in the world. Each year millions of pilgrims accompany the saint’s statue competing for the privilege of holding the long sisal rope that leads the carriage throughout the city streets. In disarray with the rules of the celebration, and in order to assure their relics, some promisers cut the rope in the middle of the ritual.
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Synthetic, animated figures coexist with elements of realistic images, diverse landscapes meet each other, music tracks of different origins and moods overlap and collide with real sounds of human environment. Sound layer of the film is on par with the visual and literary ones, fully reflecting the basic assumption of the film’s aesthetic: to build an utterance by overlapping contradictory tones, emotions and messages.
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On the 3rd October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Abraham, one of the survivors, walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks and vividly remembers the nightmarish experience. Meanwhile, chaos breaks loose at the harbour, whilst hundreds of coffins are being loaded onto a military ship.
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A young journalist, Zane, meets a man, Matīss, who claims to have risen from the dead. Matīss offers Zane to write an article about him, but in exchange wants help finding his wife. Is Matīss a victim, a madman or a skilled impostor?
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Mart dreams of leaving to California. He believes that the grass is much greener at the other side, but when a new opportunity, a much more comfortable one, appears he will have to decide whether to leave or to stay.
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Last night Matas and Tomas kidnapped and raped a girl. Now it’s morning and both are at a loss at what to do next. The brothers circle their hometown, visit familiar places and slowly descend into darkness both will be unable to climb out of. As the night falls they find an inexplicable solution. In 2013, near Panevezys, Lithuania, two young men burned a car. A girl’s body was found in the trunk of the car.
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It is not easy to make sense of the world and grownups’ reasoning if one is only seven years old. This is the story about Justine and the morning of her birthday.
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Pechory is a town on the southeastern border of Estonia and Russia. Most Estonians left the area after the Soviet takeover. To Light is a poetic documentary about a mother and her son, who decided to stay behind when the Estonian town of Petseri became the Russian town of Pechory. After seventy years there is hardly anything Estonian left in the town. Linda and Mart Kallas try to maintain contact with their homeland, but that is no cure for their loneliness. Now they only have each other. The mother needs the son and the son needs the mother. The mother is at the very end of her life. The son is searching for a light in the darkness.
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Three friends in their twenties are trying to do the impossible – have fun on a casual Friday night.
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A comical story about two brothers living in the countryside and trying to solve problems in their own way. Kris and Otto find themselves in the middle of a caricature reality of countryside lifestyle, no matter what they are doing – trying to support their family, bragging about their egos, entering a gasoline venture, or playing music everywhere they go.
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Jaunieši Jēkabs, Linda un Rihards bauda romantisku, bohēmas pilnu pavasari. Rīgā plaukst ābeles un nenovēršami tuvojas karš.
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This video has it all: lots of cash, half-naked women, men who exploit the macho image, cityscapes, and cars, new shiny cars. It’s just that it’s also very self-ironic, playing with well-established images and symbols of success and fame. The result is a surprising work of art which leaves you inspired, confused and amused all at the same time. Because riders never die, we just multiply, and that’s exactly what’s going on right here: if you multiply an image enough times, eventually, you might even become that image.
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Nobody knows how to define LOVE. How to describe the feeling of falling in love. Yet, at the same time, LOVE is the most written topic of all. We all think about LOVE and we think about our loved ones. LOVE is an essential element of life and must be interpreted through all mediums, forms and stories. The super-slow motion technique gives a dimension to the story that is highly needed – it is a well-known truth that the world stands still around the person you love.
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Have you ever swam in a suit? Or ridden a skateboard on fire? Have you played a game of chess while there’s golden confetti falling from the ceiling? Have you maybe tried drawing on the black board with a chalk in your mouth? No? “Rīgas Modes” offers you a glimpse of all these activities and more, providing the audience with a collection of deeply upsetting, inspiring, unreal and beautiful images which will either make you want to start a new Pinterest board, or drive you mad. Or possibly both.
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It might be a crazy party. It might be an ordinary night at a club, where burning sculptures constitutes a normal evening. It might also be a nightmare, or a dream, depending on your personal taste and comfort zone. Either way, Unity is a wonderful feast for your eyes, with its black-and-white, or cold blue sights and sceneries, which are a true pleasure to look at. Indulge, watch, but don’t touch – it might all turn out to be a complete mirage.
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In this world we tend to think of relationships as something that have a beginning and a potential end. What if we would be robbed of the ability for actual destruction? What if we simply could not run away?
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On a seemingly ordinary night at a grill bar by a highway, nothing outside the ordinary happens. Somebody is drunk and passed out on the table. Some other guests try to get in, but the owner of the place has other plans – he needs to dance. And then, suddenly, clock starts ticking backwards, there is a beam of intense light – and an encounter that could not be called ordinary by any means.
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We start with a close-up, and then, gradually, we start seeing the bigger, the more complex picture. And boy, is this picture indeed complex. Numerous tiny threads start enveloping the musicians, while the music develops more and more threads as well. At some point, you even realize you cannot believe your own eyes, but it’s a good thing – it means every smallest detail is constantly changing.
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A journey of an over modern future wave guy to conquer the virtual reality and reunite with a beyond focused laser-cat-combatant. In order to get there and to open the window he has to get high and get low.
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In this sleepy, sombre world which seems even a tad bit hypnotised even – nobody blinks, nobody moves, life appears in the form of a young, energetic woman. Her body breathes life in these motionless rooms, and sets a stark contrast between her and people, seemingly stuck in time and space. A wonderfully rhythmic performance which is bound to make you want to move, even if you are trapped still.
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A love song video inspired by the classical story of Romeo and Juliet, turned into a personal interpretation. Experimental/non-photo real 3D animation provides a fun clash between classical ‘high art’ text and cartoony, lego like ‘low art’ animation. The strategy typical to pop art, used to provide us with a dreamy and trippy interpretation of a well-known love story.
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The video attempts to point out and ridicule the unsuccessful drug policy in Estonia. The Soviet style and imitations in the video are the keys to unveiling the truth: current drug policies in most western civilizations are extremely outdated and need to be revised. If the leading corporations and politicians do not resolve this problem, the people will take matters into their own hands.
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Some music videos manage to tell quite an epic tale. Like this one, which includes an encounter with the Venezuelan border police, crossing the ocean in a car, and chasing the escaper’s dream on the dunes in Venezuela. An epic tale of bringing one’s dreams to reality, ‘’Į Venesuelą’’ challenges the genre, its conventions, and what we expect from a video in the Baltics. Also, do birches really grow in Venezuela?
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Breathe in, breathe out. Transcend this reality and find yourself in a place where events don’t make much sense and involve a man being strangled with a rope that glows, way too many bloodied people to feel comfortable around them, and a very special pedestal for a mini chair and mini deer horns. Making sense is an arbitrary notion, as long as it’s aesthetically pleasing.
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In distant Lithuania, music is heavily controlled by an oppressive special police force called The Beat Patrol, ensuring the quality of beats and basses all over the country. They search neighbourhoods for people listening to bad music, and deliver violent punishments and instant executions to maintain high standards. If you want to live, make sure you only listen to seriously heavy bass tunes, and never ever play the acoustic guitar in public.
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