Golden Shorts: Best Films in Major Festivals

Give it time. You'll get over it. Jean celebrates his birthday, gets drunk and recalls the dreadful weekend that led to his break-up with Mathilde. “Do you want me to leave you? I will”. Jean becomes victim of a freefall that he himself has decided to undergo. Jumping from the lovers’ quarrel (live-action) to visual images of deconstructed human figures, silhouettes without heads, people in the form of glasses, abstract shapes (animation), You Will Be Fine shows the symbolic confusion and mind-wandering of a separation, depicting what a break up might actually feel like, with hints of existentialism and a pinch of French humour. (Teodora Leu, BIEFF 2018)

The Men Behind the Wall offers a unique look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the swipes of a dating app, as an Israeli woman is being suggested meetings with (Palestinian) men who live on the other side of the barrier. Where do boundaries begin and where do they end? Ines Moldavsky personally sets out to discover the answer to the question, and then to overstep these limits. An experimental approach to both current social issues and intimate human interactions, the film emphasises the absurdity of power and segregation, and, further, that of stereotypes and gender roles in the digital age. (Teodora Leu, BIEFF 2018)

In Froger's introductory shot, an ominous fog is slowly rising above a forest. The mood is set for our meeting with Les Intranquilles, 'the restless', three young men wearing military uniforms who roam around a ghost town. They wander through a variety of landscapes: a deserted city, some rocky terrain, a forest, with a vague aim to make it to the sea, perhaps for the last time. In this rather unconventional tale of camaraderie, with little dialogue other than short personal confessions, the young men seem to be drawn together by quiet despair and a state of intranquility that pushes them towards a metaphysical search. (Teodora Leu, BIEFF 2018)

In order to run away from a monotonous everyday life, 63 years old Daniel found an activity which gives him a way to exist : working as an extra in movies. For ten years, he has travelled from one set to the next and put on costumes of various characters. It is the fictional side of cinema that makes this man dream and leave behind the humdrum of an ordinary life. (HEAD Genève).

Lucien Monot's Genesis (the title of the film is Daniel's stage name) is a skilful cinematic account not of the man himself, but of the meeting between a young filmmaker and someone elderly, with a mutual passion for cinema.

Once more Ulu Braun sets out to deconstuct cultures, civilizations and space, picks up their most meaningful synecdochal parts and puts them together using surprising associations to make up a powerful fable about the ridicule of preconception and stereotype. In Burkina Brandemburg Komplex, everything appears out of place: stereotype elderly Germans inhabit a stereotype African village; excavations in an African mine produce a red Ferrari; the ''Museum of Prussian Cultural Heritage'' displays artifacts the likes of vacuum cleaners, food mixers and FedEx envelopes; the African curator talks passionately about the ''softness to the touch of German plastic.'' The cinematic juggle climaxes with the Ferrari in a frantical drive across the African landscape smashing to pieces that drift in the air, possibly awaiting to be cast in Ulu Braun's next fable. (Adina Marin, BIEFF 2018)