Paper Life

Fragments from Brussels, about the flow of the city, A cinema, A body, A film, and a wind that blows through the town. The film is a Schizomentry experience that blends real stories and fiction. After all, where is the border?

In a small, unassuming town in the heart of the Yucatán Peninsula, Virginio carries an invisible burden. The whispers of Xtabay, a Mayan mythical figure who seduces and portends doom, echo through his days, intertwined with the legacy of his father and his ancestors lost to alcoholism and despair. Surrounded by death, Virginio searches for a way to live with dignity and peace, before Xtabay's voice claims him as well.

At the height of the summer tourist season, the Spanish beach town Magaluf turns into a hellscape of the low-cost travel industry. For eight weeks every year, over one million mostly British vacationers ride an alcohol-soaked tide of public urination, fisticuffs and ambulance sirens for recreation. Instead of assembling a clip-reel of "balconing," when drunk idiots jump into hotel pools from their balconies, filmmaker Miguel Ángel Blanca crafts a far deeper and atmospheric look at a place where visitors and locals alike are driven by pleasure. Long-time resident Maria has little time left, so she takes in a seasonal lodger who listens to her relive her glory days. An enterprising real estate agent peddles an extravagant development, while a young gay man drifts without any plans beyond robbing a tourist for kicks. Part ghost story, part foreboding parable, this is a stylish and vivid impression of people and a place dreaming of escape. Myrocia Watamaniuk (Hot Docs)

ET CONTACT: THEY ARE HERE documents the jaw-dropping stories of individuals from around the world who share similar accounts of extraterrestrial and otherworldly encounters. Producer and host Caroline Cory, who has her own extensive history with the supernatural, takes the viewers on an extraordinary journey to uncover whether these seemingly independent yet parallel reports may actually be scientific evidence of a greater phenomenon at work. Through a series of groundbreaking on-camera experiments on human DNA, and interviews with leading scientists, viewers will find themselves pondering the nature of their own reality or yet the true origin of the human species. ET CONTACT may ultimately show that the traditionally unexplained is, in fact, far more attributable to science than fiction. NOTE: This film has been released in some territories under the title: "Among Us".

A group of Kuchi children are living in a minefield around Bagram airfield, Afghanistan. They dig out anti-personal mines in order to sell the explosives to child workers mining in a Lappis Lazulli mine. The trajectory of the blue precious stones goes towards Tajikistan and China, through an area controlled by child soldiers. When they are not waging their own mini-wars in the daily madness of life in Afghanistan, the children are fleeing away in their personal fantasies and dreams, while the American soldiers are planning their retreat...

Based on the jaw-dropping contact accounts of individuals from around the world, AMONG US explores the suspicious phenomenon of non-human presence on Earth, from angels to ETs, and unveils the many ways they may be interacting, communicating and transferring subliminal information into our consciousness and potentially our DNA. The film ultimately shows that the interconnectedness of all species may be beneficial and most likely inevitable for the evolution of an intelligent universe. This film has been released in some territories under the title: "ET Contact: They are here".

Just after Isidore moves to France to study filmmaking, his best friend dies back in the US. Through documentary, performance, and animation, a ghostly portrait emerges, prompting Isidore to question his relationships with his parents and his boyfriend in Paris.

In a hybrid film, both documentary and fiction, five young women describe the feeling of grief when losing a parent at a young age. Anna returns to her father's home, a year after his death. In one weekend, she lives through a storm of emotions as these may come and go in the process of grief.

A slice of the eccentric lives of Roca and Sammy, two members of the Gay Inmates Organization detained at the Pampanga Provincial Jail, intertwined with animated sequences of an inmate's incarceration story.

After the disappearance of Aldemar his wife decided to get overall uncertainty by including him in the list of deaths in the 1938 Colombian National Census. Today, 83 years later, I repeat her. I try to find myself among the numbers in the digital database in order to finish the torture that has also implied my own disappearance.

Liu Liu is living in a strange new land. While his mother looks after the shop, he goes exploring. Encountering a ghost monster, a fierce battle begins. Behind the shop counter, Liu Liu’s mother listens to audiotapes to teach herself Hungarian. Bored and frustrated, Liu Liu goes in search of adventure. Exploring this new and foreign land, he encounters a mysterious monster.

An exploration on being and becoming. Fleeting moments of a Filipino queer filmmaker filmed over six years.

With the lack of personal video archive, Youhanna (the filmmaker) creates false memories using lost home videotapes shot between the 1990s and 2000s in Europe, Africa, and Asia, with the help of an Artificial intelligence programme, until a real, personal video archive surfaces, transporting him into the past to relive one more memory with his late mother.

Someone tells of a dream he had, which was to go fishing and get lots of fish, this kind of dream is often associated with a symbol of good luck. But he was afraid that the dream would happen again and again, from generation to generation.