Content from Haute école d'art et de design – Genève (HEAD – Genève)

Lucien, a 28-year-old cabaret musician, suffers from pathological shyness. Tonight, instead of doing his standard pianist's routine, he wants to get up on the stage and sing his lyrics for the first time in front of an audience. Waiting in the wings, he calms his stage fright with alcohol and cigarettes. He wants to make it through this hell, which will also be his liberation.

In times of body positive movements this film pays tribute to the mainstream representation of the male body which the director has a love-hate relationship with. Through a series of gleaned images from the internet and elsewhere (“net found footage”), our cultural obsession with unrealistic beauty standards is put into question.

Andreas will soon be twenty. It’s a special moment in which the threads of his life become inextricably entwined into a knot. Entering the adult world and slipping back towards childhood. Studying, football matches with mates, and family life centred around his father’s workshop. A new relationship with a boy his own age and a long-time “friend” who works for his father becomes too much for him. A moment when Andreas has to choose, a knot he tries to unravel, overcome or flee.

On the island of Reunion, Lunet and his grandfather Dadabé set on a quest to turn a hen into a dodo bird, whose magic feathers might save the boy’s seriously ill mother.

Two young men are playing in a bathtub. Then a third and fourth slip in to join them. They are called Émile and they are looking for their “perfect mother” when a fifth man arrives, the Émile who reconciles them all.

Somewhere in Geneva, a friendship between a group of girls has been forged between the Rhône and the Arve, right where the two rivers meet and mix homogeneously. A departure can turn things upside down.

Gabriel, a young Georgian man, has a love relationship with a transgender woman Amaia, who lives in the Tbilisi suburbs. Embedded in the reality of Georgia, their relationship is threatened. They are given over to the sheer strength of their feelings and are fragile in a violently hostile environment. A narrative of exemplary discreetness.

Adrianna, a young DJ artist and activist in the queer community, has learned to evolve in a world that is sometimes too stifling for her. By creating her own family and learning trades in which she can use all her creativity, Adrianna is spreading her wings.

To escape from a lack of perspective in Kosovo, Hana decides to resort to the services of Emir, an illegal smuggler in Serbia that will drive her to Hungary. On the way, complications arise as Emir's unscrupulous associates try to take advantage of Hana's vulnerability. In the midst of the frozen winter, Hana's courage and determination and Emir's principles and beliefs will be put to the test.

Max goes thru an odd night across a hazy city to discover his true self. He encounters with Les Étranges, inhabitants of a dreamy underworld who guide him thru it, teaching him the value of love.

Calvin crosses the city with a conquering step. He sells honey from the Middle East, natural Viagra from Malaysia and passes his sales knowledge to younger people. His skin-deep voluntarism is at the service of a future perspective that his family would not have wished for him.

At dawn, a group of friends meet on the rooftop of a school in Athens. It's their ritual. Overlooking the city, this symbolic place will be theirs until the next morning.

Rayane, a black-market delivery man, goes on one fraudulent mission after another to raise enough money to pay for his sick father's operation. After a mission goes wrong, he returns home, money in hand, and comes back to reality: his father has in fact been dead for two months.

Eli and Gian go on a field trip to the theater where their older brother works. The two boys are soon left behind, as the theater is preoccupied with the play in progress. In the midst of this chaos, the two brothers explore their new-found freedom.

Jean & Michel go on a journey in the Clos du Doubs in search of a rare bird. During their wanderings, the couple crosses seasons at full speed, a certain amount of rivers and above all, ups and downs.

A post-apocalyptic, eco-fiction short film portrying two construction workers wandering in a “zone” where inner and outer territories intertwine. In a constant search for traces, they are increasingly confronted with a universe that over days and nights becomes overwhelming.

Ibn Kenyatta has been in prison since 1974. In 2019, he reflects on his refusal to appear before the New York State Board of Parole. The words resonate from his cell with images of the Great Migration. The invocation of a life before walls. The images' epistolary narrative takes us from Alabama, his birthplace, to the New York subway where he was arrested and beaten. Before arriving to Haiti's spiritual world, his words pass through cotton fields and factories. We encounter Bobby Seale in prison, a youth who embodies his African heritage during the Vietnam War, while his fathers are murdered in the United States.

Tatum, a young man in his forties suffering from a deep depression, is hired as a museum guard. Tasked with looking after a sculpture that exerts a mysterious fascination on the public, he gradually falls under its spell himself. He protects it as if his very existence depended on it, at the risk of losing touch with reality.