Short Films

Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer and cinematographer whose award-winning work addresses the collision of identities, and themes such as feminism, queerness and African immigrants interacting in African, white American, and black American culture. This edition presents thirteen of her short films.

Born in Houston, TX, now residing in Toronto, Blake Williams is one of the most exciting experimental filmmakers working today. In recent years, Williams has been exploring the possibilities of 3D technology, creating visually striking, enigmatic films from archival and found footage that have screened at festivals and museums around the world.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder stars alongside his future collaborators — Hanna Scyhgulla, Irm Hermann, and Peer Raben — in this short, radical condensation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play Pains of Youth that incorporates the screeds of Mao and May '68 protesters.

A fierce condemnation of anti-Semitism and the barbaric war machine of capitalism, inspired by a letter written in 1923 by composer Arnold Schoenberg to painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Originally released on a double bill with Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach, a short about a precocious, determined nine-year-old boy, and a story concerning a rejection of all forms of authority, whether family, school, or nation.

In the sun-dappled Tuscan countryside, the boar hunter Meleager, having been murdered by his own mother to avenge the tragic accidental killing of his brother, engages in conversation about fragility, resistance, and love with Hermes, who has taken female form.

Straub’s testament of love was made seven years after the 2006 death of his partner and collaborator Danièle Huillet, and nearly 60 years after they met in Paris and planned to adapt this short story by Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette.

Left for dead in a freak horse accident, Montaigne reflects on many things, among them the nature of consciousness and the soul, reason and automatism, waking and dreaming, the self and the other.

As a young man, Straub fled to West Germany after refusing to fight for France in the Algerian War. Later in his life, he returned to this bitter historical experience with this terse noir about “the instinct to heal” and to murder.

A film about ghosts and madness that is itself a kind of ghost, this short from master Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) tells the story of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune who was driven to insanity by unseen forces.

The newest work to emerge from Harvard’s groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab, Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field is a mesmerizing short film, a ghost story about buried cities, lost civilizations and Western colonialism.

Drawing upon the rich mythology of Ghana, this magical short film combines semi-autobiographical elements with local folklore to tell the story of a young American woman who returns to West Africa for her father’s funeral, only to discover his hidden double identity.

A haunting, apocalyptic vision rendered in vivid black & white tableaux, a striking short film from the long-form master, Lav Diaz.

The first film made outside his native Baltimore, a luminous short film exploring place, character and transition from filmmaker Matt Porterfield (Putty Hill).