Ascenso

In this short from acclaimed queer filmmaker Fan Popo, an introverted senior school student and a transgender vintage shop-owner, two lonely souls are swimming in the fast-changing-city pool. Can they break the wall of communication? Where are they heading to?

Mexico. 1940. The agent of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) Ramon Merkader comes to the house of Leon Trotsky. Under a long leather raincoat he hides an ice pick. He is here to kill the unsuspecting Russian revolutionary. Moscow. 2019. The modest honours pupil Yura helps his schoolmate Masha in history. They just study Merkader’s murder of Trotsky. The uninhibited Masha decides to tempt nerdy Yura. The director of studies comes into the classroom in the most intense moment. Afterwards the school principal calls in the class teacher of Masha and Yura for a talk. He considers that such an irresponsible teacher has no place at the school and is set to dismiss her. The school bell rings. As if by magic, the endings of these three stories intertwine, giving rise to a new surprising reading of the known events.

A Peacemaker, who rejects his final mission to save an endangered planet, is believed to be cursed when a solar storm hits his spaceship.

‘Flicker’ is a portrait of Danny (Peter Newington), a typical twenty-something Dubliner, who gets assaulted one night in a city centre nightclub. Escaping the incident with only minor injuries, Danny throws himself back into his old routine: early-morning classes, five-a-side football, late nights on the sesh with the lads. Pretty soon, however, Danny begins to realise that the assault has affected him in more ways than one.

Trapped in a cyclical cage, a hopeless young wrestler claws his way through daily living, encountering pain and desolation in his everyday struggle.

When a young woman is shoved out of a cafe moments before a grenade is detonated by the very man who commits the attack, she struggles with the guilt of survival as she attempts to uncover the reason why her life was spared when so many others were taken.

When a recently divorced man loses custody of his daughter, he finds comfort in a children’s book character in a magical book his daughter has left behind.

In a robbery gone wrong, two women are forced to reckon with their values, livelihood, and relationship.

One man, one vehicle, one journey, countless stories told during the taxi driver Ah Fa’s daily grind on the road. At the same time, his joy and sorrow of plying his trade is revealed through his interaction with passengers, and his family and fellow drivers.

A story about a family of three – father, mother, and daughter, and then just mother and daughter, whose relationship becomes tense after the father passes on. As the poem goes, “the moon is not always full, life is always full of ups and downs”, the father has always had a wish. What is it? And how will the mother and daughter carry on with life?

A single lady meeting a butcher and discovering her tiny world expanding.