- Demi-Goddesses
07:25Germany 2023
Directed by: Martin Gerigk
Screenplay: Martin Gerigk
Animation: Martin Gerigk
Music: Martin Gerigk
Dialogue language: No Dialogue
‘Demi-Goddesses’ is the second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society. Overall, the intention of the film is that it will spark conversations and inspire the viewer to imagine a world where gender is not a limiting factor. At best, the audience will leave the theater with a greater awareness of the issues and a sense of possibility for a just future.
- The Entropy of Truth (v)
05:48United States of America 2024
Directed by: Jing Wang, harvey Goldman
Screenplay: harvey goldman
Animation: harvey goldman
Technique: multiple, drawing, digital, particle simulations
Music: Jing Wang
Production/School: harvey goldman, Jing Wang
Dialogue language: English
“What is……is what will not be….. appearing, and then vanishing. Impermanence, now permanent. The entropy of truth. The truth…of entropy. As we approach the singularity. Eerily slipping through the slender corridor of now. Entropy of Truth is a poetic work reflecting upon our search for “truth” while meandering through the universe on this stone we call earth. It is also a meditation on the “permanence of impermanence”. film narrative from the poem “Entropy of Truth” by Harvey Goldman The “visual music” collaborations of Jing Wang and Harvey Goldman attempt to produce a synesthesia like experience. The audience is encouraged to “see” the music and “hear” the visuals. The imagery and audio components are constructed without hierarchy, a true melding of sound and image.
- The Surrogate Vistas
04:12Australia 2023
Directed by: Helena Papageorgiou
Screenplay: Helena Papageorgiou
Animation: Helena Papageorgiou
Music: Jonathan Weber
The concept is based in traversing several different vistas, these tilted realities provide a momentary glance into a surreal world that explores a combination of organic, sci-fi and bizarre environments. This magical realism’s journey’s supporting characters include synthetic anthropomorphic objects fused with a dream state cosmos. Providing a moment of escape this exploration through the imagined immerses the viewer in familiar surroundings with unfamiliar fabrications. Taking everyday objects and scenarios such as dogs and plants and to island settings- these subjects are transformed into grand, sometimes humorous cartoon-like figures fused together with the ridiculous and unreal via animation. For instance the opening scene transformation is a dripping moon which slowly reveals an island turning into a human form that escapes their world by tapping the land and being propelled into a travellator journey of interplanetary matter. This is that playful deception and transformative power I see within animations. Through the lush and magical settings each vista conjures up a kaleidoscopic world infused with a dreamlike, surreal sensibility – often directly related to a particular perception or the atmosphere of an encounter, individual or scene.
- time
/ zeit 05:20Germany 2023
Directed by: Ingrid Gans
Production/School: Ingrid Gans
Urban hustle and bustle, constant walking by day and night, incomprehensible acceleration, crossroads or new paths, change of perspective, pausing, the beauty of structures?
- 13 Strokes...
07:28Greece 2023
Directed by: Ioulia Lymperopoulou
Screenplay: Ioulia Lymperopoulou
Animation: Ioulia Lymperopoulou
Technique: Photography TIFF Files and Digital Animation Design
Music: Dimitrios Karas
Production/School: Ioulia Lymperopoulou
Dialogue language: English
Subtitles language: English
To write and create the short art experimental film “13 Strokes…” i was inspired by my short story “Thirteen Strokes” [Dark Traces (Collective), Publishing House Iliaxtida, Athens, September 2022], concentrating on the heart of the narrative, the uncured trauma that keeps on taking up space in the thoughts and ends up consuming vital energy. Sometimes by appearing in the dreams in different or repetitive forms, even in an evolving way, in time. Time was an essential element in my short film. Time that people spend on important relationships creating deep bonds, from which stems a thread that goes beyond our dimension, beyond death and inevitably determines our lives. Another important element, as a different facet of the conception of the idea of time, was the internalization of the experience and the subjectivity in which the experience is kept in the memory and maybe mentally revived or relived. The power of wishful thoughts, therefore, memories, unfulfilled expectations, desires and imagination can shape a metaphorical sphere, both real and fictitious, where time dimensions, past, present and the still unborn and yet constantly in formation future, can be channeled. Once immersed in that spectral world, a passage expressed by the introductive animation and the poem, a struggle, with oneself, with the memories, seen through a distorting mirror, and with the trauma, eventually starts. Seeking the truth in the depths is a battle of life and death with an uncertain result. Since not always the trauma is overcome. In this inner journey, still photos resemble the flashes that emerge like random files from our memory folders. They serve different functions in the way they are being utilized. They only seemingly unfold a linear narrative, while the clock strike in the vacuum gives the pace, as a reminder moreover of our mental and psychical capacity to overpass time and make it seem frozen, by opening, in this case, symbolically a metaphysical gate beyond which the variant dimensions intersect. Still Time, marked by the two dimensional design of the clock, there, comes in contrast with the characters that move in the sequences. While all the two dimensional designs give a hint of what has been real, of what is actually real or not, either literally in reality or symbolically in the perception of reality by the characters and its projection in their minds. More specifically, the number 13 is the border line between these two transcendent places. It also appears “in motion” when the still photos move in a clockwise cycle, like a clock pendulum or with a point of view from the bottom to the top, either to show the ambiguity of the situation, the uncertainty of the outcome, the culmination of the feelings or the fight to the last breath, always with the purpose to underline the escalating emotions of the characters in their interrelation. The emotions, as well as their position in the relationship, their awareness also as to the whole situation and the level of being able to control it or being controlled by the other, by their subconscious or by an eye above that surpasses them, technically are all enlightened mostly by the shooting angles and their blinking that includes both literally their existential state, being alive or dead at the moment, and their fear to disappear if not existing or not being saved in the memory of their loved ones. In terms of cinematography, concluding, the integration of method and content was expressed in several ways. With the different, for example, OTS (Over The Shoulder) angles that are used to give the illusion of movement and cyclicity here, when the characters look at each other face to face in a confused and disquiet state of mind, and simultaneously to imply the turbulent passage through another space and time. With the straight looks into the camera, also, that break the wall of distance and signify a meeting point of consciousness and subconscious, on the axe of a different time dimension, that underline a turning point in their awareness, very much like a penetrating gaze into their tortured and clouded minds, scenes-shots to which the viewers bare witness. The objective of these engaging perspectives, even by stimulating sentiments of unease and discomfort, is to make the experience more personal.
- Shapes
05:20Hong Kong 2023
Directed by: Tsz-wing Ho
Animation: Tsz-wing Ho
Technique: 2D digital, 2D hand-drawn
Music: Errol Leung
A psychedelic and mysterious galaxy composed of different shapes. They conduct various transformations with textures, patterns and colors.
- & MORE
03:11Hong Kong 2022
Directed by: Tsz-wing Ho
Animation: Tsz-wing Ho, Tsz-wai Pun
Technique: 2D digital, 2D hand-drawn
Music: Long-man Luk
Production/School: School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
Dialogue language: English
& MORE draws from the architecture of the M+ museum of Hong Kong. Our film challenges the definition of a museum by looking at it as an object itself. Through a geometric play of shapes and forms in the M+ building, we explore what underpins our material world.
- Vision
07:18Japan 2023
Directed by: Çağıl Harmandar
Technique: 2D digital
Production/School: Taruto Fuyama
Eyes are magical spheres that make up dreams and retain memories. In our eyes, the visions of the within and of the beyond overlap. New worlds come to be when our gazes meet.
- Mirror Products Catalog
04:05United States of America 2023
Directed by: Annapurna L Kumar
Dialogue language: English
A group of mirror factory workers publish a book of reflections.
- Track 31
06:20Austria 2023
Directed by: Nikolaus Jantsch
Dive into the Visual Wonderland: Immerse yourself in the mesmerizing world of hand-painted film, where each frame is a unique work of art. "Thalija's Super8 Summer Trip" transforms your screen into a canvas of colors, textures, and emotions. The nostalgia of Super8 film captures the essence of the 70s, taking you on an artistic voyage like no other. ???? The Soundtrack of Adventure: Thalija's signature post-rock sound provides the perfect musical backdrop for this extraordinary visual experience. Let the music carry you through a sonic journey that complements the vivid scenes unfolding before your eyes. The synergy between the experimental visuals and the evocative tunes will leave you spellbound. ???? A Kaleidoscope of Colors: Get ready for an explosion of colors that will leave you awestruck. The hand-painted film technique infuses every scene with a kaleidoscope of hues, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Each brushstroke on the film adds depth, emotion, and a sense of artistic wonder to every frame.
- Study No. 294
07:50United States of America 2023
Directed by: Robert Gordon Campbell
Screenplay: Robert Gordon Campbell
Animation: Robert Gordon Campbell
Technique: Experimental
Music: Tom Baker Triptet
Production/School: Robert Gordon Campbell
Dialogue language: English
Short experimental animation with improvisational jazz soundtrack by the Tom Baker Triptet.
- Inbetweening Beings
05:00Canada 2023
Directed by: Isaac King
Screenplay: Isaac King
Animation: Isaac King
Technique: Installation, Projection, Mixed Media
Music: Bram Gielen
Production/School: Isaac King
Inbetweening Beings connects animation and ecology. With projected installation, outdoor stop-motion, and found materials, humans are invited and implicated into nature.
- The Sun, The Mast or Gravity
05:53Croatia 2022
Directed by: Mario Mu
Screenplay: Mario Mu
Animation: Mario Mu
Technique: Digital Film
Music: Strahinja Arbutina
Production/School: Museum Of Contemporary Art Zagreb
Dialogue language: -
Subtitles language: -
Corroded steel cables emerge from the riverbed and become a branching, nervous system-like structure. Dealing with the destruction, healing, despair and desire, the perpetual transformations of the shape-shifting architecture unfold the myths surrounding the work of the Yugoslavian architect and his devotion to build a pavilion using the ruins of the bridge that was destroyed in the second world war. Following the transformation that encompasses different architectural typologies, from the never-realized mast of the Yugoslav pavilion to the ruins of the National Museum of Aleppo, the video explores alternative perceptions of spatiality through the morphology of digital spaces.
- KEVIN FROM ANOTHER WORLD
03:17United States of America 2022
Directed by: Diana Lee Woody
Screenplay: Diana Lee Woody
Animation: Diana Lee Woody
Music: Diana Lee Woody
Production/School: Trey Nichols, Diana Lee Woody
Dialogue language: English
A giant cat arrives in his flying saucer creating panic among the humans.
- Aqua Fantasia
13:58United States 2023
Directed by: Patty M Simon
Combining visual art from Simon's decade-long practice with meaningful objects and playful animation, "Aqua Fantasia" is an underwater world where the real meets the absurd, a constructed fantasy of the deep blue sea, inviting viewers to become immersed in an aquarium of wonder.
- Pic Pic
06:49Canada 2024
Directed by: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand
Screenplay: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand
Animation: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand
Technique: Pinscreen
Music: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand
Production/School: Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand
Dialogue language: no dialogue
Pic Pic is an experimental animated film that metaphorically and conceptually reveals an erotic and exhilarating dimension of touching.
- The Black Hole
04:40Italy 2024
Directed by: Ivana Pistorozzi
Screenplay: Ivana Pistorozzi
Animation: Ivana Pistorozzi
Technique: 2d animation and real video footage
Music: Ennio Colaci
Production/School: Ivana Pistorozzi
Holeboy is consumed by anxiety, so he eats up everything he can get his hands on, causing a lot of grief to his family and fascination for the doctors who try to treat him. He is unable to understand that our mouth is a hole and every hole can also be a door, and what you let in can brutally change and devour you...
- FOREIGN AFFAIRS
02:44Germany 2024
Directed by: Yotam Goren
Screenplay: Yotam Goren
Animation: Yotam Goren
Technique: 16mm film
Music: Carmel Riboch
Production/School: N/A
Dialogue language: N/A
Subtitles language: N/A
Shot on 16mm film in New York and composed in Berlin, the work explores polarizing themes of the metropolis. Audibly and visually, the viewer is put in a flicker between serenity and intensity; harrowing ambience cut with sharp beeps, vulnerable steps mashed in high velocity.
ATHENS ANIMFEST
