The 2024 short films selection takes you through a range of genres, toying with fantasy, and digging deep into our hearts and souls.

How much can we really know and understand one another? asks Isadora Neves Marques, with great elegance and humour in her film As minhas sensações são tudo o que tenho para oferecer (My Senses Are All I Have to Offer) ; while Jan Bujnowski’s Taniec w Narożniku (Dancing in the Corner) observes how love for football creates a bond between father and son, becoming a political and intimate metaphor.

And actually, how do we really know ourselves? In Cem Demirer's Noksan (Absent), the protagonist ends up doubting his own mental health. A delicate journey through strange territories, heightened by a mind-blowing mise-en-scène. And Veronica Martiradonna’s radical, deeply moving Supersilly is the stark embodiment of its narrator’s childhood trauma.

A poetical and political manifesto steeped in contemporary society, Daphne Hérétakis’ What we Ask of a Statue is That it Doesn’t Move (Ayτο που ζηταμε απο ενα αγαλμα ειναι να μην κινειται) playfully questions our current inertia and the overwhelming weight of the past. Desire and the possibility of a new world are also at the core of Valentina Homem’s A menina e o pote (The Girl and the Pot), which imbues her protagonist’s journey of initiation with potent cosmogonic visions.

Other journeys of initiation: Alazar, in which Beza Hailu Lemma takes us on his protagonist’s journey of initiation, an ambiguous quest for truth in the midst of a terrible drought and professed miracles; and Arvin Belarmino’s Radikals, naturalistic rural chronicle turned into a harsh, fantastic fable through constant shifts in tone.

Lastly, Guil Sela's Montsouris (Montsouris Park) a seemingly trivial story, taps deep into our emotions through its use of burlesque and straightforward storytelling; and Marinthia Gutiérrez Velazco’s Ella se queda (She Stays) is a spellbinding, uninhibited cinematic endeavour, at the crossroads between an old-fashioned tribute to the New Wave, and a Grindhouse-like experimental trip.

A special screening will take us through various expressions of intimacy and desire.

A deceptively classic coming-of-age story with Lucie Borleteau’s 1996 ou Les Malheurs de Solveig. A deeply moving documentary - Elena López Riera’s Las novias del sur (Southern Brides) - in which elderly ladies whose fire is still very much alive, tell us about their desire as women. Finally, Anna Hints and Tushar Prakash's Sannapäiv (Sauna day) tells a manly chronicle in a sauna unlike any other… or is it really?

La Semaine de la Critique will continue to be by these talented filmmakers’ sides by offering them the opportunity of taking part in its Next Step programme, geared to provide guidance and training toward making their first feature film.

Marie-Pauline Mollaret,

Short Film Selection Committee Coordinator