Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival — A–Z of films

The widescreen of Hanane Abi Khalil's camera manages an intimacy, one born of proximity.

Kaneko writes/directs/animates, the brevity of this piece all the more effective for not a moment wasted.

This is not easy viewing, but beneath the gleam of staring eyes and the bloodied lips is something visceral.

Lazarus and co-writer Dorothee Levesque keep things minimal.

There are kindnesses within the film, but stark ones.

That this manages to be so heartwarming is down to an ensemble effort, the cast's chemistry convinces and so too decisions made behind the camera about what to show and what not to.

Damian Kosowski's film is cold and claustrophobic, tight in shot and focus in the few scenes outdoors and distant and distressed even by the bath.

There is much to admire here beyond the immediate perceptions, sensibilities too.

Yi Baoxingchen's film is as mixed media as a single thing like film can be, and all the stronger for it.

Though it has subtleties aplenty its core confrontation lays it on a little too thick.

There is a rhythm to this, a catchy sense of improvisation.

Jose Lillo's performance as Pedro is of chiselled weariness, whisper, mutter, movement.

Inventiveness with camera in what feels like location shooting rather than two-camera studio gives it a versimilitude that helps carry its comic elements.

Fee Strothman's camera is somewhere between the dreamlike and the documentary.

Gorgeously shot, from from the candlelit parlours of the nouveau riche to the wet streets of a man on his differing uppers.

As pleasant as this is, their performances might have been better highlighted in a tighter run-time.

It's beautiful to look at, there is detail and delight in every stitch and stem.

The camera in Dominik György's film is never still, tight within this small space to faces and hands, the tremble of finger and lip.

The liberties taken with the work of a playwright famed for his contemporary analysis of the morays of fin-de-siecle Vienna are a triumph.

Marc Camardon's film, co-written with Jordi Tortosa, explores familiar themes with verve.

This is a delight, a chaotic collage of the dreamlike and the deliberate.

Sonia Ladida Schiavone's film, with Rosario Cammarot's cinematography, has the sense of something born of the stage, but transformed by cinema.

Gabriela Lourenzato's film takes us along and at the close makes the allegorical actual.

Ferman Narin's camera creeps along with the grocer, through doors, up stairs, and further as things escalate.

Shot through with a rightness, every frame a photograph, every unstill moment a miracle.

Though dressed in the detritus of the modern era, it is a tale sufficiently plastic that its flotsam and jetsam could be substituted for any cargo discarded.

Able direction, crisp production and a convincing cast in something that has clear aims and hits its target.

Alexey Lyubimov's performance is rooted in the physical, the palpable.

You Guolin's cinematography is crisp, a combination of lens and grading that feels old without feeling tired.

This is grain as grit, the fuzziness of focus the grip of grime across everything we see.