Golden Shorts: Best Films in Major Festivals

Winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno, ABANDONED GOODS tells the story of the journey of the Adamson Collection, one of the major bodies of British asylum art. It contains around 5,500 objects created between 1946 and 1981 by patients in Netherne psychiatric hospital in Surrey. Blending archive, reconstruction, interviews and observational footage, the film explores the transformation of the objects, from clinical material to revered artworks, examining the lives of the creators and the changing contexts in which the objects were produced and displayed. Narrated by an unseen cataloguer, the result is a moving impression of the unseen history of post-war asylum life in the UK.

Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlinale, AS LONG AS SHOTGUNS REMAIN takes place in the summer in Bouloc, a small village in the south of France. It is extremely hot and all lies abandoned. The streets are deserted, devoid of people. 18-year-old Joshua wanders around aimlessly. Single-family homes, rows of swimming pools. It is the memories of his best friend Silvain's suicide that guide him and that he reads in the walls of the houses. Joshua doesn't want to continue living either. He already belongs to the world of the dead, but still has to take care of his brother before he can cross over completely. He must find a family for him. His brother ought to be saved, even without him. Joshua commences his search. (Berlinale)

NOAH represents the romance that occurs in the era of online networking, consisting only of images displayed on a computer monitor. It is about the life of the main character, Noah Lennox, who even while talking with his girlfriend, often connects to other trivial happenings in another city or around the world. He feels, communicates, and eventually loses something on the Internet - on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. With a narrative focused on our era of doubt and grief, the film is nothing but a comprehensive interpretation of how digital story-telling has changed our daily life, thoughts, and emotions. (Byeong-won Jang, Jeonju International Film Festival)

In this short comedy, Luis Vaz de Camões, the greatest Portuguese renaissance poet, struggles creatively while engaging in a hedonistic, coprophagic, and drug addled lifestyle. TAPROBANA follows the poet, and his lover Dinamene, as he writes his masterpiece, the epic poem Os Lusiadas. He travels from the cacophony of the Indic jungles, surrounded by allegorical elephants and rhyming macaques, to the frontier of Heaven and Hell, where he is confronted by his fantasy: fame and immortality. (GABRIEL ABRANTES)