Animation Competition 1

This selection features four stories about strong women followed by a gender-bending story. These films put women into a different world from the one they’re either accustomed to or prescribed; sometimes the enemy is within, sometimes it’s your own environment. The films examine identity and what it means to grow up – in some cases literally in soil – differently from how you define yourself. All these characters lead intense, and sometimes confrontational, lives. They never fail to observe their surroundings, sometimes too prominently, sometimes almost voyeuristically. How they decide to respond is a choice they can’t escape.

Imbued Life

Imbued Life is a film about a young woman's connection with the lifeforce of nature. She uses her talent for taxidermy to “return” animals to their natural habitat. However, the true search for the answers begins when she starts finding a roll of undeveloped film in each of the animals she treats. Her obsession drives her to seek an explanation for the connection she feels which haunts her dreams as well as her waking moments.

Paracusia

A woman alone in a small flat is carrying out her daily housework when she starts hearing sounds from the other side of the wall. The neighbour’s undecipherable doings are slowly invading her enclosed space, increasingly merging with her mundane chores. She picks up the typewriter and starts writing, equally triggered and distracted by the strange noises. In her struggle to map out the features and actions of the elusive character next door, her own reality gradually starts to disintegrate.

Symbiosis

A betrayed wife starts to investigate her husband’s mistresses. Her jealousy is gradually replaced by curiosity.

Purpleboy

Oscar is a child who sprouts in his parents’ garden. Nobody knows his biological sex, but he claims the masculine gender. One day, Oscar lives an extraordinary but painful adventure in an authoritarian and oppressive world. Will he manage to have the identity recognition he desires so much?

Sororal

Three sisters are facing an impending disaster: the flooding of the lands where they live by the sea. In the midst of such chaos, their sisterly union is shaken up, and each of the sisters experiences the imminence of death, in their inner selves, in different ways.