SHORTS
Retrospective 7: Art in Motion: Tentacular Images
Curated by Pol Merchan
This selection of short films explores the plasticity and corporeality of cinema—stretching, cutting, transforming, and amplifying its tentacular extensions. Celebrating the strangeness of experimentation, the works traverse a wide range of media, settings, and themes: from a reimagined myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, to clay dildos that rewrite history; from animations blending flowers and genitalia, to desktop cinema essays exploring race, class, and gender through typography.
More than a short film program, this selection acts as an art class of possibilities, where images and textures continually reshape themselves, offering a glimpse into the endless potential of images to transform perception.
Sinema Transtopia
24.05.2026 – 17:00
Printed Sunset
Two ambiguous characters seated against one another, sharing an easy intimacy while enjoying the sunset. Steadily holding our gaze, the couple try to divert our attention from what turns out to be a cardboard backdrop. A syrupy soundtrack underscores the deconstruction and transformation of a classic cinema trope into a novel beauty. —IFFR
Director: Andrés Barón
Writer: Andrés Barón
Country: France, Colombia, 2017
Language: No dialogue
Subtitle: Neither English nor German
Duration: 6 min
Infinite Galatea (Galatée à l'Infini)
Pygmalion, disappointed of the women of his time, decides to create an immaculate woman with his own hands. He models his creation at the height of his expectations and level: she should be able to satisfy his pleasures and provide his kingdom with workforce.
A visual essay about the body as a socially constructed discourse throughout gynecology, a science serving itself of an ideological scalpel to mould gender, sexuality and desire.
Director: Maria Chatzi, Fatima Flores Rojas, Julia Maura, Mariangela Pluchino y Ambra Reijnen
Writer: Julia Maura
Country: Spain, 2017
Language: French
Subtitle: English
Duration: 17 min
FLESH (CARNE)
Rare, medium rare, medium, medium well and well done. Through intimate and personal stories, five women share their experiences in relation to the body, from childhood to old age.
Director: Camila Kater
Writer: Camila Kater, Ana Julia Carvalheiro
Country: Brazil, Spain, 2019
Language: Portuguese
Subtitle: English, German
Duration: 12 min
Dildotectonics (Dildotectónica)
In this day and age, Rebeca attempts to create a collection of non-phallic ceramic dildos. During the Inquisition, Josefa finds a dildo that is used in their forbidden love relationship with Maria. Although in different timelines, the paths of Rebeca and Josefa end up crossing each other.
Director: Paula Tomás Marques
Writer: Rebeca Letras, Paula Tomás Marques
Country: Portugal, 2023
Language: Portuguese
Subtitle: English
Duration: 16 min
Flora (꽃)
‘At Kindergarten I thought I could grow a penis from my vagina, just like the other boys.’
Although Chaerin Im was born as a woman, she never had affection or interest in objects or properties that corresponded to the category of ‘feminine’. At the same time she never had the feeling that she should have been a man. Through twist and turns of uncanny sculptures resembling a penis and/or vagina or both, Chaerin questions the general gender connotations.
Director: Chaerin Im
Writer: Chaerin Im
Country: South Korea, 2018
Language: English
Duration: 4 min
I am a Flower
Queer artist Sam, on the verge of fully transforming into a flower, spends one final day at a lavish spa with their mother.
Director: Ariel Victor Arthanto
Writer: Ariel Victor Arthanto
Country: Germany, 2024
Language: English
Subtitle: English, German
Duration: 13:15 min
BOOKANIMA: Dance
BOOKANIMA, a compound word of ‘Book’ and ‘Anima’, is Experimental Animation project to give new cinematic life to books. It aims ‘Book Cinema’ in the third scope between Book and Cinema by Chronophotography Animation, paying homage to Edward Muybridge and Entienne-Jules Marey.
Director: Shon Kim
Country: S. Korea / USA, 2019
Language: Korean, English, French, Spanish, etc.
Subtitle: English
Duration: 7 min
The Comic Sans Video
The Comic Sans Video is a “desktop cinema” essay on the ways in which taste is determined by race, class, gender. Provoked by the Twitter response to the Eric Garner “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt design, the video draws in equal parts on the theoretical writings of Pierre Bourdieu and conversations with two colleagues and my mother to reflect on both the public discourse and my own aesthetic prejudices.
Experiments with Chronophotography Animation of Dance, featuring in sequence Ballet, Sanjo, Contemporary Dance, Jazz Dance, Aerial Silk, Tap Dance, Aerobics, Disco, Breakdance, Hip-Hop and Ballroom Dance.
Director: Roger Beebe
Country: USA, 2018
Language: English
Duration: 8 min
