Night Cinema
We comfort the sleepless and give the sleepy a jolt at our legendary late-night screening marathon, where audiences will be treated to a range of short films from comedies to nightmares, and a lot of madness.
We comfort the sleepless and give the sleepy a jolt at our legendary late-night screening marathon, where audiences will be treated to a range of short films from comedies to nightmares, and a lot of madness.
When Gordon calls a sports radio phone-in to rant about the footballer Jack Grealish, he reveals a bit too much about his deepest held desires.
Mélanie, a 41-year-old influencer, stops mid-sentence while recording a post for her social media when Sarah, an attractive 28-year-old woman, arrives by car and parks in a space reserved for people with disabilities. Shocked, Mélanie decides to call Sarah out for the violation, all in front of her son and her online followers.
A lone wanderer roams the Namibian desert with a cart-mounted cathode ray tube television and a signal-scanning device, seeking one thing above all else — a stable TV connection. When his signal dissolves into static, he crosses salt pans and mountain ridges in pursuit of reception. Along the way he enters a village, reaching out for human contact, only to be turned away. Deeper into the desert, exhausted and defeated, he destroys the very thing he has been chasing. But a new signal leads him to something he was not looking for — another person. Through music and dance, two strangers become something more.
A man is trying to find his place among friends.
Copenhagen has one of the world’s most advanced metro systems: fully automated, without drivers, running nonstop, day and night.
The M3 line runs in a circle beneath the city, never once touching daylight. But how does the intelligent machine cope, trapped in an endless loop through dark tunnels?
In an alternate 1980s America, a video dating shoot takes a terrifying turn as lonely singles discover they’re under surveillance.
A disciplined dancer, consumed by the pursuit of perfection, traps herself in an endless rehearsal. With each repetition, her body is pushed beyond its limits, until pain becomes part of the choreography.
She is relentless as her reality starts to fracture. When she finally collapses mid-routine, she is met with overwhelming applause from an unseen audience. In that moment, destruction and fulfilment become one.
A 27-year-old Black woman from Schijndel is convinced she is Bella Hadid. During an interview for a fictional documentary, she is confronted with the truth, with fatal consequences. What begins as an absurd portrait of identity and self-image turns into a tragicomic media satire in which Bella is quite literally turned into an object.
When Peter and Jill engage in an online flame war, they learn just how wrong "making it personal" can go.
How can human beings prove their own existence?
Parky is a parking ticket machine that serves the Sunshine Parking Structure in downtown Chicago. Stationary and permanently walled between the elevator and the ground floor entrance, Parky is relegated to the life of an observer, watching through his singular fish-eye security lens. Despite his lack of vocabulary and ability to communicate, we begin to understand his longing to feel and do the things that people can.
An animated celebration of working lives, honouring the people whose hands carry memory, craft and belonging across generations.
Drawn from the archives and workers of John Smedley's historic Lea Mills, The Hands was commissioned by Animate Projects as part of WORK Records, a creative heritage programme exploring historic working lives across the East Midlands.
Exploration in the unconscious where everything is connected, nothing is determined and the emphasis is on the ever-changing. In a naturally altered state of consciousness, the boundaries of time and space dissolve. Sounds become visible, forms audible. Deeper focus offers more: connections of tones and undertones linked to visible forms and their mirrored reflections – periodically interacting with each other.
An earth of silence and dust. Life, pitiful, sprouts again in the ruins. Who watches?
It is an experimental under-the-camera animation crafted with real strands of hair. In Persian, the word tar carries a dual meaning: both a strand of hair and a traditional Iranian string instrument. Within this symbolic interplay, an enraged centipede storms a young girl’s inner world, shattering musical instruments. Amid the chaos and dissonance, the delicate sound of the tar emerges, opening a fragile space for transformation.
Musicians Bobby Conn and Monica BouBou retreat to the astral plane, leaving their imaginary companions DUKS and L.A.R.R.Y. behind. Alone, the curious pair discovers a mysterious bottle and drifts back from the astral plane through crude TV dreams into Earth’s fast-food gravity.
In a barren desert, a lone traveler encounters shifting horizons, living shadows, and an elusive figure who seems to be part memory, part mirage. Inspired by the music of Woody Jackson, the film blurs the line between sound and image, creating an immersive meditation on solitude, myth, and the subconscious.
Tulipomania's album titled Absolution, inspired by an invitation from acclaimed author Jeff VanderMeer to contribute music as part of the publication of Absolution, the surprise fourth volume in his award-winning Southern Reach series.
Secrecy, trust and betrayal drive the elusive musings voiced in the film perfectly placing it within Tulipomania’s album soundscape resonating with the complex energies enveloping Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution.
Sharing themes of existential dread with VanderMeer’s novel, equally unafraid to excavate the darkest of human impulses when confronted with the unknown, the film presents partial glimpses of a fractured narrative, questioning the possibility of piecing together a complete truth.
Mirroring the process of influencing/being influenced – the text of the novel was mined, then mutated, distorted and transformed to create something new.
Animation techniques involved the assembly of collaged imagery directly on highlighted, erased and often torn pages of the novel, shot in frame by frame stop-motion.
Multiple copies of the novel were purchased then destroyed in the process of creating the animation.
a man lists the things that he has.
In an isolated 18th-century Estonian village, Elo struggles to survive in a community that offers her neither safety nor kindness. Pious villagers fear the dark forests surrounding them, believing supernatural spirits lurk among the trees. But when Elo finds herself betrayed by those she once trusted, she begins to question who she should really be afraid of – unseen spirits in the woods or the people at home.
Anna Veisman (2002) is an Estonian filmmaker whose mixed heritage and rural upbringing shape the textures of her storytelling. Born in South Estonia and later moving to Tallinn, she studied languages and audiovisual media before stepping into the world of film as a set designer and line producer. Her creative path took a detour into the music industry as a media and PR manager for the popular Ukrainian electro folk band Go_A, for whom she also produced and directed a music video that gained over a million views on YouTube. In 2025, Anna returned to her first calling — cinema — with her debut independent project, "Eyes of the Forest", now beginning its journey through the festival circuit.
Raúl and Lucas have been friends their whole lives. One day, Raúl is driving Lucas home... but first, he asks him for a favor. An important one. After all, Lucas owes him.
Despite his hellish prison cell and the constant suffering, Felix the good giant always seeks the bright side of life. His bullet-proof serenity infuriates the vicious Chief-Warden who has sworn to uncover the inmate's secret and eradicate his happiness once and for all. A fantasy tale on the price of freedom.
Lola wakes up in the hospital, her collarbone broken, a neck brace around her neck, lying on a stretcher. Two paramedics arrive and strap her onto it to move her. They leave the hospital and wheel her along the sidewalk – far, too far. She grows worried, protests, calls for help. Strapped to the stretcher, she has no way to free herself.