Short Films
AEGEAN SHORTS COMPETITION A
Tuesday, 22 July • 20.30 • Starfish Cinema • 105'
Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites
Premiere • Fiction • 19’ • Cambodia, France, United States • 2025
Director: Chheangkea
Language: Central Khmer
Subtitles: English
During her chaotic family’s Qingming visit, dead Grandma Nai sneaks away from her peaceful afterlife after overhearing that her queer grandson is about to get engaged to a woman.
Sappho
Premiere • Animation • 9’ • Brazil • 2025
Director: Rosana Urbes
Language: Portuguese
Subtitles: English
Sappho is an animated short inspired by the process of animation and the poetic fragments of Sappho (Lesbos, 600 BC), the first known female author in the Western world. Her connection to nature shapes the film’s aesthetic: natural inks, stop-motion with real plants, and layered lighting. The visual narrative echoes her poetic voice and the many interpretations of her legacy over time.
Fragmented
Premiere • Documentary • 7’ • Palestine, Portugal • 2025
Director: Tanya Marar, Balolas Carvalho
Language: English
Subtitles: English
After being forced to flee Gaza, Qassem grapples with the weight of exile, torn between survival and the life he left
behind. Through fractured memories, hope, and trauma, his story unfolds—offering an intimate portrait of
displacement, resilience, and the lingering echoes of a homeland that is constantly being taken away.
The Last Bet
Premiere • Fiction • 15’ • Austria • 2024
Director: Meike Wüstenberg
Language: German
Subtitles: English
The elderly couple, Ernst and Leni, regularly bet on the last piece of chocolate. They make a bet as to which of them will die first. Both want to die before the other, but each for their own reasons. In a black-humored and unsentimental way, but with a big heart, both show that they don’t want to be without each other.
Pasta Negra
Premiere • Fiction • 14’ • Canada, Colombia, Italy, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela • 2024
Director: Jorge Thielen Armand
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: English
Three Venezuelan women cross the border into Colombia to buy a packet of pasta.
Iris
Premiere • Kids • 14’ • Norway • 2024
Director: Jon Vatne
Language: Norwegian
Subtitles: English
Iris, a mischievous and imaginative young girl, encounters a toddler who has ventured away from his parents, setting off a road movie filled with pills, cash, and a unicorn.
Söder
Premiere • Drama, Crime, Comedy • 27’ • Austria • 2024
Director: Raoul Bruck
Language: German
Subtitles: English
In order to get rid of her useless husband during a weekend trip to the lake, Kerstin hires a hitman named Soeder on the dark net. But this strange and mysterious young man is not what he seems.
AEGEAN SHORTS COMPETITION B
Tuesday, 22 July • 23.00 • Starfish Cinema • 105'
The Feast
Premiere • Drama • 25’ • India • 2024
Director: Rishi Chandna
Language: Tamil
Subtitles: English
In October 2021, the fisherwomen of Pulicat lake, the largest brackish water lagoon in South India, organised a sumptuous meal for their politicians and bureaucrats. They planned to remind the powers-that-be of the rich biodiversity they stand to lose if they sanctioned a massive port that would pollute and all but erase the lake. It was a novel way of making a point, using food as a tool of protest.
Tainted By The Visual
Premiere • Documentary • 8’ • UK • 2024
Director: Laura Calzada
Language: English
Subtitles: English
This short experimental documentary explores how the experience of sound changes throughout the process of vision loss, using visual and aural language to interpret the subjective experience of blind individuals.
Sammi, Who Can Detach His Body Parts
Premiere • Horror • 19’ • Indonesia • 2025
Director: Rein Maychaelson
Language: Bahasa Indonesia
Subtitles: English
He was born with the peculiar ability to move and remove his body parts. Throughout his life, he shares his body parts with people he loves. Until the day he died, all that was left of him was a torso with a faceless head. His mother is trying to recollect his body parts.
Jeanna
Premiere • 16’ • Armenia • 2025
Director: Karen Avetisyan
Language: Armenian
Subtitles: English
16-year-old Jeanna lives in a provincial orphanage. Her routine is cut from the outside world by following from the window the visits of her mother, who abandoned her, and eavesdropping on her teachers’ conversations. During one of those, Jeanna accidentally discovers the reason why she is rejected by her mother. The shock leads Jeanna to take extreme measures.
Have I Swallowed Your Dreams
Premiere • Animation • 6’ • Canada • 2024
Director: Clara Chan
Language: English
Subtitles: English
This film is a poetic conversation between an immigrant daughter and her mother about sacrifices and dreams. Amy meets her mother for afternoon tea. They have a quiet, reflective moment. When Amy looks back on her mother’s life, she sees a young woman with big dreams. She also sees all the sacrifices her mother has made to give her the life she has now. She questions if she has swallowed her mother’s dreams. But her mother’s answer is surprising, moving and liberating.
Street Light
Premiere • Drama, Docu-Fiction • 16’ • Canada, France • 2024
Director: Romain Dumont
Language: French
Subtitles: English
During a documentary shoot, Cheun, a beloved traffic warden, gets into trouble with a local inspector. On Rue Clignancourt, his resignation has the effect of a street light going out. In this new darkness, a filmmaker must rediscover his humanity, while Cheun must continue to invent his cinema. The rest doesn’t matter.
A Mother Goes To The Beach
Premiere • Drama • 15’ • Portugal • 2024
Director: Pedro Hasrouny
Language: Portuguese
Subtitles: English
During a tense day at the beach, Teresa, a single mother, spends time with her son Benji and her sister Marga, grappling with Marga’s constant comparisons between Benji and her own son.
GREEK SHORTS
Wednesday, 23 July • 22.30 • Starfish Cinema • 108'
SIX
Drama • 12’ • Greece • 2024
Director: Leoni Xerovasila
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
It’s summer. A former athlete wakes up from hypnosis on her psychologist’s couch. She has the same nightmare over and over again, her performing her routine to the music and her trainer hitting stop, pulling off from her index finger a big ring, making a gesture to her to come close to her and slap her. Her life seems to revolve around her while she develops a neurosis. She cannot drink water normally, she weighs it and knows that 6 sips are 100g. Her everyday life is getting heavier and heavier. She works in an office, which she can’t stand. The pressure reaches the same peak over and over when the same nightmare returns every night. The thirst grows. The image and sound of a waterfall in her mind magnify. The water invites her to reconcile with it and move on with her life.
All The Games
Premiere • Drama, Mystery • 15’ • Greece • 2024
Director: Miltiades Christides
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
A young man is invited to a living room to watch a group of masked people play games.
Fatbardha
Docufiction • 24’ • Greece • 2024
Director: Kitty Kentezi
Language: Albanian, Greek
Subtitles: English
Fatbardha and Niko, an elderly married couple, live in a small house. Niko is immobilized in a single hospital bed. Fatbardha, although she moves with difficulty, takes care of both of them. Due to age and illnesses, which do not allow them to move around, the couple is coming closer and closer through their daily routine, just before they part ways forever.
A 10 Minute Swim
Drama • 24’ • Greece • 2024
Director: Achilles Tsoutsis
Language: Albanian
Subtitles: English
In 70’s Albania, dictatorship oppresses freedom. Two lovers will go against it and become the demise of the rest around them.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing
Documentary • 17’ • UK • 2024
Director: Theo Panagopoulos
Language: English
Subtitles: English
When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.
Boris & I
Fiction • 16’ • Greece • 2024
Director: Haris Raftogiannis
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
Two men working at the big Motorway, wondering about the sky & the sea, the birds & the fish.
ECHOES SHORTS
Sunday, 20 July • 22.30 • Starfish Cinema • 89'
The Mushroom Keepers
Premiere • Documentary • 16’ • India • 2024
Director: Naveed Mulki
Language: English, Hindi
Subtitles: English
Directed by Naveed Mulki for Fungi Foundation India, the movie explores the deep connections between fungi and the Khasi and Garo communities of Meghalaya, India. This short documentary delves into how fungi shape spiritual and cultural worldviews, revealing the intertwined loss of biodiversity and ancestral knowledge as old-growth forests diminish. Through intimate conversations with community elders, the film serves as both a reflection on cultural erosion and a call to action. It embodies the Fungi Foundation’s mission to foster research, education, and conservation of fungi while preserving the cosmovisions nurtured by fungal wisdom.
We Will Grow
Premiere • Documentary • 25’ • UK • 2025
Director: Areti Pagoulatou
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
During the summer of 2023, Rhodes was ravaged by the worst wildfires in the island’s history, burning over 18,000 hectares of land. During the eleven days that the wildfires lasted, the residents of the island put their lives on hold to volunteer, organizing on a grassroots level to create an alternative support network, exposing the lack of personnel and equipment available to manage natural disasters in Greece. We Will Grow visits the island nine months after the wildfires. The film follows the activists who emerged during the disaster as they reflect on their experience and loss, and as they begin to put measures in place to prevent future wildfires.
Time To Change
Premiere • Experimental • 6’ • Angola, Portugal • 2024
Director: Pocas Pascoal
Language: –
Subtitles: –
Colonization, like a forced and destructive transplant, leads to ruin, desolation, and the enslavement of fauna, flora and humans.
The Third Landscape
Premiere • Documentary, Experimental • 12’ • Spain • 2024
Director: Julen Etxebarria
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: English
The fungus Microsphaerella dearnessi, which affects the insignis pine variety, has expanded across the landscape of the Basque Country, even infecting the painted forest of Oma, the artwork of the artist Agustin Ibarrola.
I Walk While Glaciers Melt
Premiere • Animation, Documentary, Experimental • 9’ • Peru, UK • 2024
Director: Lucia Lambarri Barberis
Language: English, Quechua, Spanish
Subtitles: English
This visual essay combines animation and live-action footage to guide the audience through the Andean mountains and snowy peaks of Cusco, Peru. The film reflects on the director’s walking as a means to embrace life’s fragility and constant transformation. It revisits Andean relational animism, rituals, miniatures, and pilgrimage to question modernity and our place in an era of melting glaciers, while celebrating the shared journey with others.
Trinitario - On The Edge
Premiere • Documentary • 21’ • Trinidad & Tobago, Germany • 2024
Director: Denise Speck, Oliver Milne
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Trinitario – On The Edge is a 16mm analog short documentary directed by Denise Speck and Oliver Milne. The documentary is about stories in the cocoa industry in Trinidad and Tobago that are worth being told. Four cocoa farmers across Trinidad share their unique perspectives on the past, present, and future of cocoa farming in the Caribbean twin island; narratives told by the farmers themselves. The co-directors’ focus is to create an empowering narrative about what it means to be a farmer, and how the prevalent challenges of farmers across the region can be overcome innovatively by combining generational wisdom and living in harmony with the surroundings. Trinitario – On The Edge inspires the magic of Trinitario Cocoa, protecting the rich cultural heritage of the twin islands and returning to a more connected life.
POPUP SHORTS
Saturday, 19 July • 23.00 • Starfish Cinema • 115'
Red Flag
Comedy, Drama, Satire • 20’ • France • 2024
Director: Dimitri Krassoulia-Vronsky
Language: French
Subtitles: English
The beach. Everything is there for everyone to enjoy. Only the ocean disagrees.
Prikosymphono
Documentary, Animation, Social • 5’ • Greece, US, Italy, Mexico • 2024
Director: Elena Gazi, Dolan Bailey, Leonardo Dal Fabbro, Alejandra Diaz
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
Placed in Lefkada, an island in the Ionian Sea, a little girl finds a paper from 1955 that contains a list of objects that belonged to her great aunt and proceeds to ask her grandfather about it. He explains to her that this is the list of her dowry, an old Greek tradition in which the bride’s possessions were conceded to the groom as a formal marriage agreement. Moved by this finding, he starts recalling memories of his childhood, witnessing his older sister Armenia having an arranged marriage and leaving behind her family and the island for a better future.
Como Si La Tierra Se Las Hubiera Tragado
Animation • 24’ • France • 2025
Director: Natalia León
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: English
Olivia, a young woman living abroad, returns to her hometown in Mexico in the hope of reconnecting with her past.
RAGE
European Premiere • Drama • 9’ • Australia • 2024
Director: Renee Kypriotis
Language: English
Subtitles: English
As Julie Mac and her gang of Sharpies fight their way through their turbulent teenage years, Julie reflects on the unexpected bond between herself and the Italian tailor who crafts her iconic ‘Connie’ cardigan, a symbol that will firmly establish her within the Sharpie subculture and strengthen her sense of identity. RAGE is a snapshot of the Sharpie subculture in 1970s Melbourne, a time when running from the cops, avoiding the ticket inspectors, drinking, spewing and rooting were all in a night’s work. Inspired by the book RAGE: A Sharpie’s Journal, Melbourne 1974 – 1980 by Julie Mac.
Broken Token
Experimental, Archive • 13’ • UK • 2024
Director: Paul Rooney
Language: English
Subtitles: English
A woman awaits her lost love amid veteran recollections, gardens, and split-screen memories, symbolizing home, hope, and the return of the past through love.
The Eggregores' Theory
Experimental, Sci-fi • 15’ • Italy • 2024
Director: Andrea Gatopoulos
Language: English
Subtitles: English
He does not remember much from that time. Things have faded, like the color of a painting after too much light. The only thing that bothers him is this music. It keeps popping up… He thinks he forgot what it meant. All he knows, for sure, is that he cannot get it out of his head.
Les Belles Cicatrices
Animation • 15’ • France • 2024
Director: Raphaël Jouzeau
Language: French
Subtitles: English
Gaspard is still very much in love with Leïla. They meet in a crowded bar, a month after she left him. The conversation turns awry, and Gaspard seeks refuge under the tablecloth, away from prying eyes and closer to his memories.
Cura Sana
Drama • 18’ • Spain • 2024
Director: Lucía G. Romero
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: English
Jessica and Alma, two sisters in a situation of domestic violence, will begin to treat each other with love instead of violence through one of their routine trips to the food stamp office on the night of San Juan, a Spanish holiday.
The Temptation of An Ordinary Thought
Experimental • 6’ • Greece • 2025
Director: Thomas Pappas
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
A young man lives between his confinement and the anxiety of the upcoming summer.
NOMADS SHORTS
Monday, 21 July • 23.00 • Starfish Cinema
The Day a Zebra Turned Into a Tiger
Drama • 20’ • France • 2024
Director: Simon P.R. Bewick
Language: French
Subtitles: English
Alert: a tiger has escaped from the zoo. Alice’s school is forced to close its doors and round up the pupils for a head count. But Alice is nowhere to be found. Mathis, a supervisor who knows her well, sets out to find her. Previously seen as a zebra by her classmates and the institution, Alice is now asserting herself as a tiger.
Golden Fingers
Biography, Drama • 15’ • Greece • 2024
Director: Fivos Kontogiannis
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
In 1960s rural Greece, a 6-year-old gypsy boy battles school bullies, an abusive father, and a deeply racist society. As an outcast from a destitute family, his dream of becoming a musician seems impossible. Yet, this young boy will stop at nothing to overcome the obstacles and fulfill his dream of becoming one of the world’s finest clarinet soloists.
Something Like The End of The World
Comedy, Drama, Fantasy • 10’ • Greece • 2025
Director: Emma Doxiadi
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
After being stood up, she faints, a theatrical move in a toxic game. Her girlfriend arrives, unimpressed, waiting for her to snap out of it. But when strangers start collapsing too, their personal battle infects everyone—because once disbelief takes hold, no one knows what’s real anymore.
Bitter Greens, Tangled Roots
Premiere • Documentary • 20’ • UK • 20235
Director: Abdallah Dannaoui
Language: Arabic, English
Subtitles: English
A telephone conversation between an expatriate brother and sister tackles the bitterness involved in being uprooted from the olive trees that stood as witnesses to their family’s inherited memories, in a country that has never known peace.
Summer Breeze
Drama • 15’ • Greece • 2022
Director: Alexandros Rellos
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
A recently divorced, middle-aged man receives a smartphone from his daughter and unexpectedly reconnects with the first love of his life, who wants to meet him again.