This short animated film seems playful only at first glance—in fact, it tells the story of a life on the margins of society in a no less disturbing way. While the filmmaker is reading quotes from conversations with an invalid man from eastern Germany, a mechanical ballet of light switches and plastic dolls is set in motion.
As a heavy fog shrouds the wild woods, a helpless hedgehog starts wandering in the powdery mist. Will the young visitor find his way home? Hedgehog in the Fog has generated its own lore, and there is even a monument to the hedgehog in Kyiv.
In the dream-like narrative of At Land, a woman, played by filmmaker Maya Deren herself, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, encountering other versions of herself. Deren described the film as about the struggle to maintain one’s personal identity.
A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris. This beguiling allegory of innocence and transcendence is the only short film ever to win an Oscar for best original screenplay.
The black-and-white science fiction film from 1902 has since become a canonical work. A Trip to the Moon was hugely popular upon its original release and used animation and visual effects that were very innovative at the time.
Manuel Muñoz Rivas turns the daily passage of a ferry on a Spanish river into a ritual crossing of sacred beauty, as the passengers’ souls wander through suspended narrations of everyday life.
A woman lies awake at night. Nearby, a set of theatre backdrops unspools itself, unveiling two alternate landscapes. Upon the woman’s blue sheet, a flicker of light reflects and illuminates her realm of insomnia.
A woman, played by Maya Deren herself, returns home, falls asleep, and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and a complete mismatch with the objective view of time and space, the woman’s dark inner desires play out on-screen.
The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In Suzan Pitt’s cult classic Asparagus, the indomitable growth of an asparagus plant is associated with female sexuality. As the urbane world turns absurdist, the green fruit transforms this reality.
Swollen Stigma is a visual, surrealistic narrative about a woman travelling both literally and psychically through several rooms. Memories, or fantasies, of another woman, fill her imagination. The film proposes lesbian imagery, and its shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces, and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external.
A woman trips and falls while rushing around the house. She gets up only to discover that her home has unusual features—it is built from paradoxes, filled with illusions, and covered with patterns.
Emma De Swaef, Marc James Roels, Belgium, 2011, 17’
A gentle, middle-aged man returns to the nudist colony he grew up in to visit his elderly mother. Her sudden death leaves Willy in a state of sadness. He soon finds himself lost in the midst of a savage wilderness, trying to find comfort.
Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote his first feat together with Salvador Dalí, based on their dreams. Don’t get stuck on the plot. Buñuel deliberately omits chronology and opts for Freudian dream logic, in which scenes do not necessarily follow one another logically.
Day and night, a giant sits on a hill, far away from his smaller fellow man. He fills his days organising things and making sure everything is in the right place at the right time.
