Shorts Program 4: Close to Home
Thursday 2nd February / 18:30 / City Kino Wedding & Online
Shorts Program 4: Close to Home
Sure, it‘s nice to escape to the world of ghostly apparitions and supernatural killers, but sometimes, you‘re just itching for that dose of reality, right? Here‘s a selection of shorts that deal with issues that feel eerily familiar like family neglect, classism, grief, toxic relationships and covert racism.
(Content warning: eating disorders)
Everybody Goes to the Hospital (9:01)
Written and directed by Tiffany Kimmel, US, 2022 | German Premiere | Available online
Based on her mother’s experience of getting an emergency appendectomy in 1963, Tiffany Kimmel’s Everybody Goes To The Hospital is a haunting stop-motion animated incision into children trauma, interpreted with a poet’s eye.
Merah Bawang Putih (Shallots & Garlic) (17:17)
Directed by Andrea Nirmala Widjajanto, Indonesia/Canada, 2022 | European Premiere | Available online
When polar opposite sisters Nur and Karina reunite for their grandparents' wedding anniversary dinner, Karina starts itching and blames Nur for putting garlic in her food.
The Forfeit (14:02)
Directed by Phoebe Brooks & Josie Charles, UK, 2022 | German Premiere | Available online
A young working-class Welsh woman meets her wealthy English boyfriend’s eccentric family for the first time on Christmas Eve. She’s thrown straight into the family’s traditional Christmas game, and struggles to keep up with its in-jokes and strange rules. But as she improves, she begins to uncover a dark secret in the family’s past.
Ethel (7:50)
Directed by Beatrice Jäggi, Switzerland, 2022 | German Premiere | Available online
Young Ethel discovers in the cellar a box with clothes that belonged to her late mother and embarks to unearth memories. The child attempts to understand her mother’s passion. A tale of letting go and growing up.
Seafoam (6:21)
Directed by Izzy Stevens, US, 2022 | European Premiere
Billy tumbles down the rabbit hole after visiting her mother at a psychiatric ward and recognizing an orderly who works there. Suddenly, he is everywhere. Billy can’t escape. The fish, the cowboy, her mother... What's real? In this disorienting psychological thriller, Billy wrestles with a plague of nightmarish visions, and a dizzying descent into insanity. Is Billy ill, like her mother, or is she prey?
Scooter (12:00)
Directed by Chelsea Lupkin, US, 2022 | Available online
Abandoned by her boyfriend in the middle of the night, a woman is faced with an unthinkable choice when she discovers a woman trapped in the back of a van.
White Devil (14:29)
Directed by Mariama Diallo & Benjamin Dickinson, US, 2021 | German Premiere | Available online
A Black woman's quarantine experience takes a disturbing turn when the dynamic she has with her white partner is impacted by events happening outside their cozy brownstone.