In staccato flashes, Marcon illuminates eerie figures in the dark rooms of Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como — images that resonate with its burdened political history. He uses contrasting technologies — 35mm and CGI animation — and represents two opposing attitudes in film: structural cinema and horror. The rigid formal structure of the film is undercut by the disquieting actions of the protagonists: a man jumping off a balcony, the fearful glance of a child looking into the lens.

O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian Militant film Our Small Houses into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.

A zombie stop motion film on post-human sex: part of Meineche Hansens artistic inquiry into automated sex and the new pornographic language of algorithmic visualisation.

A relic of the heyday of MTV, Your Face set the style and started the career of Bill Plympton. As a second-rate crooner sings about the beauties of his lover’s face, his own face metamorphosizes into the most surreal shapes and contortions possible.

A chirping bird bears bad tidings. Shot on 35mm and manipulated with CGI animation The Parents Room shows a nuclear family in its darkest hour. Each member describes the harrowing event from its own perspective. A macabre operetta that marks another chapter in the versatile oeuvre of Diego Marcon, with an eerie but mesmerising score that will haunt your mind long after you’ve left the screening room.

Johann Lurf’s maximalist barrage of Hollywood studio logos, transforms these iconic corporate preludes to the big production-to-come into a sustained, stuttering spectacle in which fractured and fantastical worlds collide into a bombastic anticlimax. Like a riff on Jack Goldstein’s looping Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975), Twelve Tales Told has an aggressive musicality that resonates with our sonic memory, and rather ingeniously creates desire for the dominion that is Hollywood. (Andréa Picard—TIFF)

La Gola, translating to “the throat,” is an epistolary film that demonstrates the ability of language to convey powerful emotion when expression and visual indicators are left implicit. Over the course of eight letters, Gianni describes the successive dishes of an exquisite banquet, while Rossana gives an account of the progressive decline of her mother’s health. The two characters are played by hyperrealistic mannequins, that appear motionless with their eyes modelled and animated in CGI.