In The Giant World, we explore the notion of "giant" across dimensions—physical, conceptual, and metaphorical. This program invites audiences to zoom in and out, shifting perspectives to examine scale and its implications in our natural and constructed worlds. From the vastness of cosmic horizons to the microscopic giants ruling unseen realms, these films delve into how we perceive and grapple with enormity.
Giants carry weight—literal and symbolic—emerging as forces of creation, awe, power, and destruction. This issue contemplates the good, the bad, and the ugly of our giants: ecosystems on the brink of collapse, technological behemoths reshaping society, myths brought to life, and scientific lenses unveiling colossal truths.
Through a kaleidoscope of storytelling and cinematic form, The Giant World reminds us that scale is not just about size—it is about perspective, impact, and understanding our place within the giants that shape us and the ones we create.
Every life form originated from the same cells billions of years ago. First there was one cell that formed colonies, which became group of colonies that evolved into all kinds of species like trees, insects, giraffes and humans. All is connected, moves together and reacts to each other. There is no
The Siberian permafrost is melting, ancient bones rise up from the ground and wild animals seem to have disappeared. Holgut is a contemporary tale based on historical, mythological and current stories. Two brothers and a scientist venture into the vast Yakutian wilderness on two quests. Roman and Ky
A meteor impact 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. Helene Garber's 'Chixculub - tierra extraterrestre' is shot in Yucatan, Mexico where a guide takes us on a carsick taxi risde towards a small town, when the square is set up, as a sort of 'memorial' for the extinct species, all the while
Clara looses one tooth while sleeping. Swallowed by a gigantic mouth, she enters an underground world where a Surreal Sci Fi advertising invites her to "ELECTRODENT" a clinic that promises to fix teeth... but not only.
Like an exploration from the sky to the bowels of the forest, it is a journey that leads through the layers into the ground to reveal the buried memory. The film demonstrates deep political issues in a historical and actual story about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and its original people
At the beginning, there is simultaneity. A marine fossil of a crinoid discovered near the summit of Mount Everest, a famous British mountaineer who vanishes, and a Russian statesman who dies are the starting points of a story on the transformation of matter. Of these bodies, gone in 1924, all that r
One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro- events from "satisfying video" that swarm on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds through an appropriation way by referring to trance and minima
In PLANET ∑, giant creatures are trapped inside the ice. Submarine explosions provoke a global warming, and a new life begins for animals. This is the third piece from the PLANET series, after PLANET A (Locarno 2008) and PLANET Z (Berlinale 2011).
The world as a plaything for a giantess from outer space. A Godzilla-imitation on the way to herself: the giantess from outer space in the streets of a big city, fooling around, producing destruction, copulating with the Eiffel Tower. An orchestra of big feelings, the melodrama, defamed in infantile
Superjednostka (Polish for Superunit) is a huge block of flats designed as a "housing machine". Up to three thousand people can live on 15 floors of the building. The lifts only stop every three floors so the residents must go through a maze of corridors and stairs in order to get to their flats. Th
"Barely arriving at the level of the plateau, we find ourselves in front of an exceptional rock of Twenty-five meters high on the west side and twenty on the opposite side. It is possibly of a monument to humanity, erected in a very remote time, since in it you can immediately guess human heads of d
It starts with a sudden hole in the ground. As the narrator's voice explains at the beginning of Adina Camhy's Crater, a hole in the floor of her apartment opened up overnight – a negative space, the trace or scar of a mysterious event. Accompanying this narration, as in the rest of this strin
Triangulated sites (Biosphere 2, Sunset Footprints, Casa Grande Domes) of virtual realities in the Sonoran Desert trace visionary intersections of the cultural and natural information systems that struggle against containment. Parables of ritualistic impermanence are rendered in the physical reliqua
Filmed in vibrant super 16mm color, and black and white film, Notes from the Anthropocene, is a sensory elegy to the dinosaur. The dinosaur icon shifts from narratives of extinction, to human exceptionalism, and power. Its materiality whether fossil or plastic toy has, through popular culture, becom
In this one-shot short film a sheep ruminates in a forest while the words of Gaston Bachelard make an attempt to penetrate the scene. A short image-sound integration reflecting one of my (Marco Furyu's) feelings when reading Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.
Each year, the artist Theo Jansen tests out his latest ("beach animals") on the Dutch coast. These are almost mythical beings made from manipulated plastic tubes, tie wraps and sails. Powered by the wind, these PVC arthropods can move independently across the sand. In , we follow the philosophically
For 30 years, Terry Gilliam struggled to make a screen adaptation of Don Quixote, including an abandoned attempt chronicled in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. Gilliam never gave up and neither did the documentarians. HE DREAMS OF GIANTS represents the culmination of
An 89 year old marketing gimmick subliminally resurfaces on a lonely road in the American west.
I was informed of a passage which I pursued, plodding on, lightwards, & when I came out of it I made a film about it, seeking vessels for the story in the spaces & worlds I found in my vicinity the lilypond that flowered a purple lily everyday, in its waters a thriving ecosystem of snails of two kin
WWW {the whale who wasn't} is a tale of conquest and destruction. Utilizing fragments of early educational films and animation, the piece develops a sci-fi counter-narrative of subjugation and annihilation told from a non-human perspective.
Gyres are gigantic ocean currents that carry all kinds of objects across oceans. When they leave the vortex of the gyre, some of these items eventually wash up on the shore, where "beachcombers" pick them up and strive to trace back their itineraries. Gyres 1-3 invents a filmic movement that circula
Through the eyes of cosmic cartographers, MappaMundi takes its viewer on a greatly accelerated voyage through 950 million years of development on Earth, 150.000 years of human migration and 15.000 years of human cartography. The film visualises the continuous changes taking place in our world, chang
Whale From Lorino is a film about the descendants of the oldest of Siberian tribes on the far away land of Chukotka. For them, the yearly hunt for the endangered whale is not only a tradition, but a necessity for surviving winter in a fragile place devastated by Soviet influence. The clash of two di
How different is one species from the next? How can we distinguish body from mind? In Lilian Mehrel's short film, air is expressed as a verb – to breathe / to air out. Mehrel drew her inspiration from molecular biology, water creatures, the connection between living things, and the importance
The Newt Congress takes place at a conference building surrounded by nature where participants have come together to optimize the exploitation of giant talking newts. Adapted from the novel War with the Newts by Karel Čapek.
A resurrected mammoth tells her story of escaping from the Pleistocene Park to hide in an abandoned coal mine, where she expects her natural death.
PLEASE NOTE: There is a 10-minute version of this film available. It can be viewed here if you feel this would be a better format for your festival. Please view only after considering the 42 minute film. Thank you! Twig 10 minute version: https://vimeo.com/clairesanford/twig10min Yellow streams of s
Nothing really survives here. The bottom is so deep that no light ever reaches it. Very few boats go through. It is unknown when the falls will take place. This experimental documentary portrays a space object and its fall into the darkness of a space cemetery. A woman scientist reveals her attachme
Focus On Infinity is a cinematic journey to the places, people and machines that are involved in exploring the origin of our cosmos and of our existence. It is a very personal and intuitive investigation into the roots and boundaries of our imagination dominated by sensual perception. Not unlike an
The Cosmos is alien and playful. Cosmos probes and flows through the everyday world, pushing the boundaries between the infinite and the familiar.
Cosmorama observes the world such as it doesn't seem to us, making an inaccessible strata of the luminous spectre visible. Shot near an observatory, the film uses an infrarouge imagery process with which astronomers usually observe objects of deep space. The film creates the conditions of a tangible
Monuments show a world that seems alien, although they spring from the most common experience one can have in Southern California: driving a car. These infrastructures of speed and power form gigantic concrete layers that dominate the landscape. They are the "accidental" monuments of the economic sy
How is the world seen by an island – a place made of multitudes, living and nonliving? The space and time through multispecies viewpoint is infinitely complex and narrowing it down to linear film might seem impossible. Island of Multitude gets entangled in the island's complex world following
Two bears are hungry in NYC. Hungry for salmon. Follow Big Bear and Little Bear's respective expeditions through the city in search of a scrumptious meal. From lavish fine dining to lively food carts – through the simple act of eating – the relationship between bears and salmon enables t
Inci's mother died during the night. The five-year-old wanders alone through the vast hilly landscape by the Black Sea. She meets a young woman in a red sweater and is fascinated by her. Zeynep, who grew up here as well, has returned after many years away. Her luggage is heavy and the journey is lon
Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily
A man chooses to run away from his everyday life in order to lose himself in the desert of Death Valley.
The first dive-in of a Monarch butterfly wing revealing the intricate scale structure, the pigmented scales, (fuzzy) borders. The borders of the wing evoke the borders between countries, notably between Canada, US and Mexico. The soundscape was created by director Alexis Gambis in collaboration with
For more than a century, residents of the tiny town of Pine Bush, NY, have seen strange things in the sky. After thousands of sightings, this quiet hamlet has come to be known as the UFO capital of the world. Produced by Supercluster.com
A primal scream; is it that of the blue men, that of a monstrous creature, or perhaps that of a changing territory? An hour away from Venice, in the province of Pordenone, lives the only Tuareg community in Italy. Although they are no longer nomadic, they maintain a singular relationship with their
Every night across the globe, billions of zooplankton migrate from the depths of the ocean to its surface. This diverse community includes pelagic creatures that spend their entire lives in the open ocean, as well as the planktonic larval stages of various taxonomic groups. This short film, "Fall in
The regeneration process of the flatworm, set to the eighteenth-century myth of the Rotte river.
Microscopy, timelapse, and observation beautifully captures a lab's full study of squid embryonic development. Original score gives a momentum and underscores the aesthetic beauty of these images and data. Squid Development with music composed and performed by Kristina Dutton and Nathan Clevenger.
Tlāloc is a water god of the Aztec pantheon, a primary god - of rain, fertility, lightning, and the ruler of a paradisiacal otherworld, Tlālocan. He is associated with caves, springs, and mountains; this film evokes the materiality of water, color, sound, and cinematic space. It moves between corpor
In the Émosson region (Canton of Valais, Swiss Alps), a paleontological treasure was discovered at an altitude of 2400 m. On a sandstone slab, footprints left by animals 240 million years ago were unveiled in 1976 during an exceptionally warm summer that melted the snow covering the footprint
Human activity appears to dominate our planet's urban spaces, but a closer look reveals that we share every corner of our busy cities with trillions of microorganisms. These microscopic investigations of downtown Vancouver reveal the blurry boundary between human society and the natural world.
The "Joaquín Antonio Uribe" botanical garden in Medellín, Colombia, is a living museum and a Science Center; its herbarium Jaum treasures about 86,000 plant specimens and a representation of the flora of all the ecoregions of Colombia; The Arví Regional Ecotourism Park is an eco