“Well I hope you’re happy with what you’ve made.” These shorts explore alienation and challenge our perceptions of ourselves and our place in the world. In Kim Gunter’s meditative As Above, So Below (New Zealand, 17 mins), the last days of a terminally ill man ground him in harmonic convergence with the landscape and the universe. In Ursula Rani Sarma’s The Woods (US, 12 mins), an institutionalized womanient finds her grasp of reality slipping. Kyoungju Kim uses texture and membranes, stark lighting and image reversals, aural dislocation and emulsion scratching to Melt in the Shade (US, 6 mins). In Ernesto Fundora’s Apocryphal (Mexico, 17 mins), the line between the 1% and the 99% proves to be illusory for a mysterious businessman. And finally, in Thibault Le Texler’s remarkable The Human Factor (France, 29 mins), 1950s archival footage deftly complements an intimate and intellectual discourse between an efficiency expert on assignment and his wife back home, addressing issues of innovation, domesticity, progress, family and how we choose to let them inform our humanity. A stunner.

Film Note Writer: Sterling Hedgpeth