Maribel Verdú

Julián Villagrán

Marc Blanch

Akemi Goto

Koichi Sughiara

Lola, an art restorer, has to work through the night to reveal a painting hidden beneath another painting. Her obsession with the task and her squandering of energy will bring her more than she bargained for.

A young scientist is kidnapped and taken to a house where his former mentor, a professor, is conducting experiments on shrinking humans.

A library assistant plods through an ordinary life in LA until a chance meeting opens his eyes to the power of creativity and ultimately, love. When this new life and love begin to fall apart, he discovers he has a lot to give. This short film proves that ordinary is no place to be.

The oppressively vapid life of Morgan is forever transformed when a mystical blue pyramid - that inexplicably produces doorknobs - appears in his apartment. What follows is a tale of greed and loss as Morgan builds an impossible, absurd corporate empire of doorknobs.

A sci-fi film about futuristic Africa, 35 years after World War III, 'The Water War'.

Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect.  Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D animated “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite Blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.

The seven short films making up GENIUS PARTY couldn’t be more diverse, linked only by a high standard of quality and inspiration. Atsuko Fukushima’s intro piece is a fantastic abstraction to soak up with the eyes. Masaaki Yuasa, of MIND GAME and CAT SOUP fame, brings his distinctive and deceptively simple graphic style and dream-state logic to the table with “Happy Machine,” his spin on a child’s earliest year. Shinji Kimura’s spookier “Deathtic 4,” meanwhile, seems to tap into the creepier corners of a child’s imagination and open up a toybox full of dark delights. Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle” conjures up a vision of virtual reality, while Yuji Fukuyama’s "Doorbell" and "Baby Blue" by Shinichiro Watanabe use understated realism for very surreal purposes. And Shoji Kawamori, with “Shanghai Dragon,” takes the tropes and conventions of traditional anime out for very fun joyride.

After designing a surveillance system that is spread all throughout Sweden, John Mellqvist is starting to have doubts about the morality of his actions.

An intense stop-motion tale about cybernetics gone awry.