{"id":75453,"date":"2026-05-04T10:43:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T08:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.krakowfilmfestival.pl\/?p=75453"},"modified":"2026-05-04T10:47:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T08:47:57","slug":"international-short-film-competition-full-programme-revealed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.krakowfilmfestival.pl\/en\/international-short-film-competition-full-programme-revealed\/","title":{"rendered":"International Short Film Competition: Full Programme Revealed!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In short cinema, every frame and every second operates with exceptional intensity, condensing emotion and image into something that lingers long after the screening. This year’s International Short Film Competition charts a course through worlds that are geographically distant yet remarkably close in their reflections on contemporary life. It is a cinema of bold voices, formal daring, and unrestrained imagination. No fewer than 36 titles will compete for honours at the Krakow Film Festival.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Short documentaries<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The short documentaries in the International Competition often go beyond conventional non-fiction, drawing on essayistic forms, found footage, the visual language of video games, private recordings and hybrid forms to articulate a reality increasingly mediated through screens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In This Suffocating Now<\/em><\/strong>, Vika Kirchenbauer examines \u2013 from a personal and admittedly privileged point of view \u2013 what is currently ‘in the air’ in Germany: a creeping fascisation, a violence simmering just below the surface, and the fractures running through liberal society. A comparable effort at unmasking, albeit of a historical nature, is undertaken by Radu Jude. The award-winning director returns to KFF with a short documentary: in Shot Reverse Shot<\/em><\/strong>, co-directed with Adrian Ciofl\u00e2nc\u0103, he sets Edward Serotty’s photographs against the archives of the secret police services, presenting Communist Romania of the 1980s from two perspectives \u2013 that of an American journalist and the Romanian surveillance apparatus. Propaganda and the official record of history are similarly contested in Memories of a Window<\/em><\/strong> by Amin Pakparvar and Mehraneh Salimian, where Iranian citizens film protests from their cars and windows of their homes, constructing an alternative archive of resistance. In All The Light That Remains<\/em><\/strong>, Moona Pennanen fuses documentary and fiction to craft \u2013 through the story of Ukrainian labourers planting trees in a Finnish village \u2013 a haunting meditation on memory of place and of a war that reverberating like an echo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A different type of unease emerges in films preoccupied with the desire for immortality and a world after humankind. In The Revolution Against Death<\/em><\/strong>, Joshua Oppenheimer, the director of the devastating The Act of Killing<\/em>, turns his attention to elderly Americans who attempt to soothe their fear of loneliness and oblivion with the aid of digital technologies. Where Oppenheimer’s subjects seek to exist as long as possible, Tomasz Wolski’s How to Conquer the World<\/em><\/strong> leads us through familiar yet hauntingly empty spaces, assembling the traces of everyday life into a post-apocalyptic vision of the world. Empty spaces and the experience of isolation are likewise the subject of Murmurations<\/em><\/strong> by Xavier Marrades, who filmed starling formations over his hometown in Spain during the pandemic lockdown whilst reflecting on his HIV diagnosis and his longing for human closeness. Elsewhere, digital and archival imagery become vehicles for meditations on love, grief, and generational anxieties. In Cairo Streets<\/em><\/strong>, Abdellah Ta\u00efa returns to footage from 2007, moving through the Egyptian capital in search of someone dear to him. At the other end of the globe, Oscar As\u00e1n’s no_mercy_in_Mexico<\/em><\/strong> follows two young men searching for a missing friend in a reality where cartel violence has become the fabric of daily life and brutal execution videos circulate freely online. Considerably lighter in tone, though scarcely free of anxiety, Elie Grappe and Anna-Marija Adomaityte’s I Think You Should Be Here<\/em><\/strong> transports us to Geneva, where seven girls deploy TikTok-like slogans and gestures to articulate the pain of growing up today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The competition also includes films about the ‘invisible’ professions upon which so very much depends every day. Pawe\u0142 Chorz\u0119pa’s <\/strong>The Tuners<\/em><\/strong> reveals the less visible contest playing out at the Chopin Competition, where representatives of the world’s leading piano manufacturers work around the clock on the timbre of every note \u2013 a craft that itself becomes art. Meanwhile, Woodeaters<\/em><\/strong> by Julia Pe\u0142ka chronicles a relentless struggle to save a Lemko Orthodox church, where a hired entomologist reaches for Zyklon B \u2013 a compound associated with mass extermination \u2013 to protect the historic wooden structure from pests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Short Fiction Films<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The short fiction selection in the International Competition, much like their documentary counterparts, guide us through intimate experiences enriched by broader social reflection. In Faux Bijoux<\/em><\/strong>, directed by Jessy Moussallem, the body of Mireille, who is carrying a child for a wealthy couple whilst concealing the arrangement from her family, becomes an instrument of labour, and a dream of a better life lays bare the economic inequalities. Similarly robbed of any real choice \u2013 although in this case because of an abortion ban \u2013 is Siti, the protagonist of Jen Nee Lim’s Fruit<\/em><\/strong>, who makes desperate attempts to end her pregnancy until an encounter with an eccentric woman finally offers her a chance to fight for her own life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Emilia Ondriasova\u2019s controversial This Room Is Impossible To Eat<\/em><\/strong> likewise centres on the body, though shifting towards grooming and the relationship between 14-year-old Tereza and a much older man. By contrast, Adrien Fonda\u2019s Odonata<\/em><\/strong> approaches corporeality with far greater subtlety with the solitude of its protagonist disturbed by two women. What gives this Rohmeresque tale of intimacy and desire an unsettling twist is the use of extremely close-up photos of insects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Questions of responsibility, trust, and the pursuit of truth is central to Yann Rehberg’s Eyes Won’t See<\/em><\/strong>, in which the protagonist conducts a painful investigation into the suicide of a teenager, with suspicion falling upon her close colleague. A different kind of responsibility is at the heart of J\u00falia Coldwell Serra’s Nobody Barks<\/em><\/strong>. Unable to bring herself to admit that she has hit a dog with her car, the protagonist invents a tall tale for her nephew \u2013 though who is to say that great faith does not work wonders?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The darker dimension of collective imagination pervades Igor Smola’s It Lives Under the Snow<\/em><\/strong>, in which a disappearance in an Azerbaijani village and the weight of a local legend dissolve the boundary between rational investigation and mounting dread. Clyde Gates\u2019s CUL-DE-SAC!<\/em><\/strong> similarly mobilises the fantastical to tell a story about labour and exploitation: invisible angels ceaselessly power machines, illuminate cities, and heat homes until rebellion exposes the fragility of the entire system. That invisibility also has a social and class dimension. In Carmen Baltzar’s All the Love in My Body<\/em><\/strong>, tourists treat two young Romani sisters selling toys on a Greek beach as little more than part of the summer holiday landscape \u2013 until a sudden tragedy brutally exposes the double standards of human empathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The competition is not without stories of war, migration, and the moments when pure chance determines the entire course of a life. In Mykola Zasieiev’s Easter Day<\/em><\/strong>, war shatters the normality of a holiday when a young man who steps out to fetch food for his cat falls into the hands of military conscription officers \u2013 though humour and simple human gestures provide moments of respite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The morally ambiguous A Short Film about War<\/em><\/strong> by Nadim Suleiman takes a young Palestinian refugee onto the set of a film about World War II, forcing the protagonist to confront his own memory and trauma as the boundaries between fiction and reality start to blur. Social status, migration, and the economics of survival are the concerns of Jo\u00e3o Niza Ribeiro’s Asphalt Reds<\/em><\/strong>. Inspired by real events, it follows a young courier who becomes entangled with the brutality of migration policy and the logic of platform capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Short Animated Films<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The animated short films in the International Competition traverse worlds in which the imagination knows no bounds. Three Cups of Coffee<\/em><\/strong> by Natalia Krawczuk is perhaps the most grounded, though rendered with considerable subtlety and restraint. The protagonist’s encounter with a man who was once close to her, measured out through successive sips of coffee, becomes an attempt to close the door on the past. A return to places that can no longer be recovered in their original state also drives the protagonist of Marta Reis Andrade’s Dog Alone<\/em><\/strong>, in which homecoming from abroad intertwines with grief. Family bonds \u2013 though in a different register altogether \u2013 resurface in Elizabeth Hobbs’s Daughters of the Late Colonel<\/em><\/strong>, a sparkling adaptation of Katherine Mansfield’s short story about grown sisters who remain imprisoned within their overbearing father’s military ceremonial even after his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The titular heroine of Carla and Her Legs<\/em><\/strong> is similarly struggling to break free from an order imposed by others. Christoph B\u00fcttner presents the story of an acrobat without legs whom the world of variety sees as a curiosity rather than an artist \u2013 until the chance to fight for her name on stage presents itself. Another form of oppression is the subject of Paulina Zi\u00f3\u0142kowska’s Procrastination Yoga<\/em><\/strong>, a sharp and ironic study of the cult of productivity in which even breath, movement, and apparent rest are subordinated to capitalist logic. This anxiety about systems of control extends into \u0160imon M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019s Quantum Jump<\/em><\/strong>, where a luxurious residence populated by identical figures disintegrates during a surreal journey through abstract 3D animation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yet if animators so readily cross all borders, intergalactic ones present little obstacle. In Leo \u010cernic\u2019s Cosmonauts<\/em><\/strong>, a singles-only space voyage becomes an absurd and humorous odyssey through competing visions of love. From a journey into the cosmos, it is but a short step to the myth of creation, which Karolina Chabier’s Kosmogonia<\/em><\/strong> transforms into an oneiric story presenting creation as the greatest of powers \u2013 and yet one that escapes all control. Where imagination touches on what is most deeply concealed, Bea Lema’s Corpus Christi<\/em><\/strong> emerges \u2013 an embroidered fable about illness and trauma that cannot be healed by cold reason alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From personal unease, the animations turn towards visions of the future. Jack Wedge and Will Freudenheim’s Acid City<\/em><\/strong> leads us into a metropolis adrift upon a polluted ocean, where acid, heat, and deformed bodies compose a cyberpunk reality. The future also has its digital dimension in Normal Planet<\/em><\/strong> by Ekiem Barbier, a psychedelic virtual museum where the boundary between viewer and exhibit dissolves entirely. However, it is Niles Atallah’s Merrimundi<\/em><\/strong> that ventures the furthest into creative chaos \u2013 a haunting repository of damaged toys, psychedelic cherubs, and digital noise in which discarded matter is animated by unbridled imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Short documentaries<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n