Cat Skin

A few weeks before Carnival, slum boys organize huntings for stray cats, whose leather can be used in Samba percussion instruments, like the Tamborim, a small drum.

The Boy and the Wind

A young engineer on holiday gets involved with a boy who has a strange relationship with the wind. Their close friendship arouses suspicion in the small town. When the boy disappears, the engineer is accused of murdering him.

El pasito de onda

She works nights, when most people are asleep. As she listens to trendy music, she practices the words she means to say to jump out to the world that she senses, is vibrating outside.

Cherry-Red

Anna and Marie are two women who could possibly love each other, but each must decide if she is willing to throw away her old life in pursuit of this new overwhelming feeling.

According to Mateo

Mateo and his boyfriend, Marc, arrive home after a night out with Luke, a guy they've just met. After an argument, Mateo leaves the flat and bumps into Jon, a drug dealer they have called. Mateo convinces Jon to take him to his house where he discovers he can't feel anything if it's not through pain.

Vidiots

Ferdinand is trying to cope with the breakup with his girlfriend.

Eclipse

The event of the century is about to take place, a spectacular total solar eclipse. A girl is going to witness it with her grandmother and, despite her happiness, she will have to face her fear of the dark to enjoy the moment when it gets dark in the middle of the day. But when that happens, both of them will understand that sometimes the mind is also overshadowed by a reality that can erase all its memories.

All of Us Strangers

One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor, which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life.

The Good Teacher

The Good Teacher is a film about the lives of school teachers in a low-income urban area and the challenges they face while trying to provide a quality education to students. Dominique Daily is a first year school teacher who gives up his football career after an injury to teach Math at Louis Jones high school while struggling to cope with his short-lived life long dream of being a football star.

Manzanas

Manuel and Alexander met in 1945. They fell in love and together they fought for the creation of laws and norms for inclusion and equality in society.

Intended Parents

'Intended Parents' is a short film about a Black millennial couple, seeking to expand their family through surrogacy. With one partner identifying as a transgender woman, the couple (Alexandra Grey as "Robyn" and Lawrence Locke as "Anthony") find themselves continously educating or being imprisoned by outdated traditions and opinions from loved ones. While the film explores the intersections of love, gender, surrogacy, acceptance, and desperation; the powerful couple aims to deflate multiple negative stigmas as they prepare for the life-alternating roller coaster of fertility and surrogacy.

Soğuk, Uzak ve Kirli

Untitled

From the music of UK composer Anne Dudley, Belgian filmmaker Stijn Coninx crafts a story of a hearing-impaired woman on various runs, determinedly straight ahead of herself, crossing deserted forests, meadows and swamps, in different get-ups. This short film is part of the 2x25 Project of Film Fest Gent and the World Soundtrack Awards. The project commissioned 25 composers to compose a short piece of music, after which 25 filmmakers made short films that are the ultimate symbioses of music and cinematography, fitting completely within the DNA of the festival. The result: 25 exceptional films where the music inspired the form, narrative and texture.

Olivia

"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress Julie and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Julie and the other head of the school Cara in its final months.

4 Moons

Four interwoven stories about love and self-acceptance: An eleven year-old boy struggles to keep secret the attraction he feels towards his male cousin. Two former childhood friends reunite and start a relationship that gets complicated due to one of them’s fear of getting caught. A gay long lasting relationship is in jeopardy when a third man comes along. An old family man is obsessed with a young male prostitute and tries to raise the money to afford the experience.

Willow & Lydia

After suffering their fourth miscarriage using IVF, lesbian couple Willow and Lydia are desperate for a baby and running out of options, which leads Willow to try an ancient fertility ritual.

Martha and the Bird

A fantastic story of Martha, a little girl, who finds true love three years after her mother died.

The Last Word

A charismatically verbose writer who befriends the resident bartender on a train ferrying dark secrets. The writer’s sanity begins to unravel as he faces a haunting truth he can’t escape.

Millimeterle

Measuring their power and proving themselves is part of the boys’ everyday life. Even for the 13-year-old gentle-natured Yannik. Until his best friend’s upcoming sexual curiosity suddenly puts him in a threatening situation. Where is the line between game and reality and what happens if that line is crossed?

The Car Thief

Two friends are engaged in theft of cars in order to extort money from their owners. The next stealing runs smoothly. The owner of the car agrees to pay, but puts forward an unexpected condition ...

Monster

A mother battles with her son's fear of a monster lurking in the closet, but soon discovers a sinister presence all around her.

DC Showcase: Death

Vincent, an artist with unresolved inner demons, meets a mysterious girl who helps him come to terms with his creative legacy… and eventual death.

Just Charlie

Football star Charlie has the world at her feet. With a top club desperate to sign her, her future is seemingly mapped out. But the teenager sees only a nightmare. Raised as a boy, Charlie is torn between wanting to live up to her father's expectations and shedding this ill fitting skin.

Canvas

After a heartbreaking loss, a grandfather struggling to reclaim his passion for painting finds the inspiration to create again.

The Truth About Emanuel

A troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.

Curve

Clinging to a smooth, curved surface high above a sentient abyss, a woman tries to cover the few feet back to safety without losing purchase and falling to her death.

Stutterer

A lonely typographer with a cruel speech impediment but an eloquent inner voice must face his greatest fear.

My Brother the Devil

Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.

Celia

In 1950s Australia, young Celia is growing up with a sense of isolation and mistrust of the world that surrounds her. Her mother and father won't let her play with the kids next door because their parents are communists. Then her pet bunny is taken away because of rabbit overpopulation. And, more traumatizing yet, when her grandmother dies, she's the one to discover the corpse. To cope, she retreats into elaborate fantasies.

The Ghoul

A homicide detective goes undercover as a patient to investigate a psychotherapist he believes is linked to a strange double murder. As his therapy sessions continue the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur.

A Dry White Season

During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.

Fireworks

A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a 'light' and is drawn through the needle's eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to bed less empty than before.

Lick the Star

Kate has been absent from high school for a week due to a fractured foot. Upon returning, she discovers that her clique of friends has devised a new, secret plan codenamed "Lick the Star."

DC Showcase: The Phantom Stranger

Jess joins her friends at a party in a dilapidated mansion hosted by the mysterious Seth. When odd things begin to happen to Jess and her friends, the Phantom Stranger intervenes to save her from a dreary fate.

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, accepts. After the unique beginning to their love affair, the well-connected and volatile artist assimilates Dyer into his circle of eccentric friends, as Dyer's struggle with addiction strains their bond.

Inside

A mentally ill patient is questioned to see if he is fit for release.

Alien: Specimen

During the night shift in a colony greenhouse, a botanist does her best to contain suspicious soil samples that have alarmed her sensitive lab dog.

The Little Prince(ss)

When Gabriel, a 7-year-old Chinese kid who loves ballet, becomes friends with Rob, another Chinese kid from school, Rob’s dad gets suspicious about Gabriel's feminine behavior and decides to intervene.

Split

The story of a young woman who takes an epic journey to claim her own darkness and sexuality so she can stop putting it into the hands of her abusive lover. When Inanna, a young actress, working as a stripper, becomes obsessed with a mask maker, she sacrifices parts of herself and her life, piece by piece, in order to win his love. At the same time she enters a mythic journey in the theater. One that forces her to face the many abuses endured by women around that world and that blurs her performance, her dreams and her real life and results in a provocative and powerful confrontation that frees her. -- from official website

Return

A tale of terror. Cathy Reed has been institutionalized most of her life because of Schizophrenia, as a child her parents thought she was possessed by demons and had her exercised by priests. Medical science saw different. Now decades later Cathy is freed, relocated to her own flat and given a chance to be independent. Once alone things are not what they all seem and when her nightmares turn real she questions her state of mind before she is left to face her demons.