Wild and weird shorts from around the world.

ULTRA PULPE
2018. Bertrand Mandico. 37min.
Texas Premiere
For Bertrand Mandico every film is like a séance trying to wake up the ghosts of cinema. In loud and rainbow-coloured episodes the film muses on queer sci-fi film shoots. As he reflects womanhood and eroticism, desire and disgust, Mandico looks at actresses like a drug one must consume in order to survive. Demons of lost feelings haunt the images as do filmmakers from Jean Cocteau to Joe D’Amato. In all of it waits an ontology of cinema to be deciphered. It is related to light and the need for emotions: “Films are monkeys that fuck their muses blinded by the light of projectors.” (Patrick Holzapfel)

LES ÎLES
2017. Yann Gonzalez. 24min.
Texas Premiere
Three characters wander through an erotic maze of love and desire.

ASPARAGUS
1979. Suzan Pitt. 20min.
Suzan Pitt conjures up a distinctive, passionate, hushed vacuum of sexual and artistic metaphor as we follow a mysterious woman on a journey from intimate toilette, to a longing gaze out her curtained window to a hallucinatory garden of totemic flora, to the theatrical projections of her visions to the amazement of a vast audience. That the (faceless) protagonist receives her glittering inspiration while performing oral sex on an asparagus stalk only points to the inadequacy of language to describe what is essentially a feminist dream of ruthless self-control. (Suzanne Buchan)

BLOODY HELL
2018. Katharina Hingst. 8min.
Texas Premiere
When Camille wakes up on the morning of her 16th birthday the world seems to have changed over night. Nothing makes sense and everything sucks. While impatiently waiting to finally start her first period, she’s challenged with the emotional stages of premenstrual chaos, struggling to break free to begin her transition into womanhood.

PROLOGUE TO THE TAROT: GLENNA
2018. Brittany Gravely & Ken Linnehan. 6min.
Texas Premiere
Described by the filmmakers as a “cinematic tarot card”, Brittany Gravely and Ken Linehan’s twice-exposed Prologue to the Tarot: Glenna is a shimmering portrait of the titular Glenna, accompanied by drapes and opulent crystals worthy of Kenneth Anger or Josef von Sternberg. (TIFF)

GOOD QUEEN
2018. Sequinette Jaynesfield. 10min.
Good Queen is a 16mm experimental re-telling of the French Revolution, where Marie Antoinette is a chicken. Full of wild Rococo excess, drag queens, strippers, cakes and lavish jewels, the Queen meets her surprising fate at the hand of the discontent revolutionaries.