SATURDAY 9:00 // CHRIS CROFTON : NASHVILLE FAMOUS (with opening short film: TAKE ME DRUNK I'M HOME)

Director: Tobias Ervolder

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Director: Anna Ostasenko Bogdanoff, Tessa De Baudinière

Country of Origin: France

Synopsis: Marseille, a scorching summer. A group of skaters in their twenties ride recklessly in border places. Driven by their passion for skating, they chase a dream of absolute freedom, pushing the limits of their own bodies.

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Director: Jon Rizik

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: World

Synopsis: A very important company audit is jeopardized when a staff member reveals the fates of his coworkers' eternal souls.

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Director: Sepideh Eghbali

Country of Origin: Iran

Premiere: World

Synopsis: A lonely, rusty barbed wire in an uncleared minefield encounters a kite blown in by the wind. He tries to connect with the frightened kite — until the kite's owner arrives, and the wire must choose between holding on and letting go.

Director: Jackson Coates

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Director: Drew van Steenbergen

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: After a late night dating app match, Drew's excitement curdles into obsession as he spends 48 hours unraveling in a haze of paranoia, overanalysis, and self-sabotage.

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Director: Izzy Leung

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Director: Katina Bitsicas, Scott McMahon

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: In Cellulose Documents: Forget Me Not, a new purpose is given to a found archive from the 1930’s of discarded studio portrait nitrate film negatives. The crumbling and decaying negatives were preserved through digital scans and reinterpreted by the artists by combining them with microscopic imagery of botanic material. This parallels the use of cellulose in nitrate film with the makeup of organic plant cell walls. Nitrate film was used by photographers and filmmakers from the 1880s to the 1950s, but was replaced by acetate safety film after it was found to be highly flammable and unstable. By preserving these found and unidentified portraits, we illuminate the obsolete material of nitrate film through the examination of cellulose at a molecular level.

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Director: Chris McInroy

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Nashville

Synopsis: Carl just wanted to sit down. The chair had other plans.

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Director: Brady Richards

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Reed is troubled by a vision forcing him to do bad things, but nobody believes him. Maybe this new therapist will understand?

Director: Said Zagha

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Director: Oskar Peacock

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Eva and Sammy have broken up. Moving out is expensive. Curtains are cheap.

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Director: Lauris and Raitis Ābele

Country of Origin: Latvia

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: In a 17th-century Livonian village plagued by rain and drunkenness, a stolen sacred relic triggers witchcraft accusations against a local barmaid. At her trial, an elderly man proclaims himself a werewolf - a self-described ""Dog of God"" - and arrives bearing a mysterious gift: the Devil's Balls. What follows is a hallucinatory spiral of religious hysteria, folk horror, and dark absurdism, rendered in rotoscope animation.

Director: Ryley O'Byrne

Country of Origin: Canada

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: What are we without our dreams? What do machines become with them? Dream Synth™ is a speculative meta documentary contemplating the transcendental nature of consciousness within our increasingly techno-mediated society — and a curious archive of our blooming relationship with Artificial Intelligence.

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Director: Josh Weissbach

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: a lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.

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Director: Kai Hasson

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Director: Drew Durepos, Isaac Brooks

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: In the near future, a struggling urban food co-op adopts AR technology to save their store. The strategy proves too successful.

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Director: Kiera Faber

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: "A mystical tale of cloaked identities, systemic traumas, and insatiable consumption: The ecology burns, reclaiming its environs.This visionary, artist driven analogue stop-frame animation synchronously incorporates buried and hand painted 16mm film frame-by-frame with drawing and armatured puppet animations; creating a surreal disorienting world-within-a-world."

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Director: Josh Raby

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Director: Sam Rudykoff

Country of Origin: Canada

Premiere: Nashville

Synopsis: A tenant in a haunted house teams up with a ghost to stop a real estate developer from demolishing the home they share.

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Director: Munjal Yagnik

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Director: Charlie Schwan

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Director: Dan Abramovici

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Director: Phynley Joel

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Director: Elizabeth Katz

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: A woman takes dating advice from her own Toxic Mind—an enthusiastic self-help guru determined to make her miserable.

Director: Kamila Kuc

Country of Origin: Poland, UK, USA

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: A haunting exploration of familial bonds, intergenerational memory, and the enduring impact of shared narratives. Filmmaker Kamila Kuc steps into the emotional stream of inherited family history as the lines between documentary, testimony, and fiction blur. (A special thank you to DELERE PRESS BOOK, If Loss Were a a Currency https://www.delerepress.com/books/iflosswereacurrency)

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Director: John Bell, Dan Bell

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: It’s a not-so-wonderful life for George Bailey when a horde of flesh-eating ghouls come to town on Christmas Eve. Through the use of traditional rotoscoping and compositing techniques, It’s a Wonderful Life and Night of the Living Dead (both in the public domain) have been woven together to create this twisted love letter to the original films.

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Director: Gustine Füdickar, Justin Streichman

Country of Origin: United States

Premiere: Nashville

Synopsis: As dream life bleeds into waking reality, a woman haunted by her Puritan ancestor must confront the terror buried deep within her bloodline.

Through ritual and violent trial of the body, she fractures the veil between worlds and is thrown into a fight for her life.

Lady Puritan is a surreal psychological meditation on ancestral trauma and the intimate horror of what we are born carrying. Set against the shadow of American Puritanism, the film explores the tension between repression and embodied desire.

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Director: Ashley Lauren Thomas

Country of Origin: United States

Synopsis: A young woman discovers the dangers of attempting to cut her own bangs.

Director: Louise Flaherty

Country of Origin: Canada

Premiere: Tennessee

Synopsis: Two young women, out for a walk on the tundra, follow a trail of colourful stones left on the ground -- but it leads them to danger. They become trapped in the lair of the Mangittatuarjuk, the Gnawer of Rocks. The young women are terrified when they realize what the monster has been doing. The women and their village must use the teachings of their elders to defeat the monster.

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