16 - 21 September 2014
Watershed
1 Canon’s Road
Bristol BS1 5TX
Box office: 0117 927 5100
Book online
Arnolfini
16 Narrow Quay
Bristol BS1 5TX
Box office: 0117 917 2300
Book online
Encounters Festival is the UK’s leading short film and animation festival, and the annual meeting place for filmmakers and industry professionals. Based in Bristol, UK, Encounters runs a six day festival in September and its main venues are Watershed and Arnolfini, on Bristol’s scenic Harbourside.
Screened films:
Paper World
dir. Wojciech Ostrycharz, 7 mins
It’s a beautiful journey through an innocent child imagination where everything is possible, the creativity has no limits and the freedom of creation is value itself. But as in almost every life story values change with the time passing by and it only depends on us which values will “blind” us. It's author's reflection about consumerism.
Ab ovo
Anita Kwiatkowska-Naqvi, 6 mins
The film shows a new life waking up as well as the anxiety that accompanies the transformation of a female body which loses its former shape responding to the internal force affecting it. The physical sensation of another human being inside the body becomes increasingly more distinct until the moment when he leaves the boundaries of the woman’s body to finally mark his independence. Ab Ovo is an extremely visual animation that illustrates the power of fertility lying dormant in every woman.
The Island
Dominga Sotomayor, Katarzyna Klimkiewicz, 30 mins
A group of people gather for a family reunion in a house on an isolated island. They are waiting for the last person to join them, but as the evening comes and he doesn’t arrive, a strange anxiety overwhelms them. The group dismantles and the family members wander away from the house separately, confronting the sea and an unspoken fear that slowly consumes them.
Baths
Tomek Ducki, 4 mins
The film takes us into the murky waters of fantasy. With a cool kind of magic, this delicately stylized film draws us into various layers of reality, as we plunge from silent melancholia into the graphic frenzy of competitive sports, where everything is turned upside down. The notion of the flipside of reality is taken literally here, to mesmerizing effect.
For more information visit: encounters-festival.org.uk