HERD ANIMALS + DEAR ME – A LETTER TO MY YOUNGER/OLDER SELF + ONLY IN MY HEAD + MY FIRST HOME + "FEELS LIKE…"

Herd Animals

Alma Winneche / Denmark / 2023 / 13 min / World Premiere

Revolution lurks in a dark and dystopian world where nothing exists but structures and norms and a series of shiny white dominoes.

Four people sit in a dark room with nothing but a domino game on the table in front of them. Above them, a godlike voice murmurs, ordering them one by one what to do. They rise and tell stories of an angry child, ethnicity, structural imprisonment, painting, childhood, death, conformity, malaise and fragile voices. But beneath the divine commands lurks a blinking rebellion against the powers that be. And a rebellion against the past and the structures and norms and standards they have each been forced to live up to throughout their lives. Four people who have had enough of being herd animals. And maybe it’s time to put your finger on one of those shiny white dominoes.

Dear Me – A Letter to My Younger/Older Self

Stella Malfilatre / Denmark / 2023 / 8 min / World Premiere

Stylish, visual LGTBQ+ manifesto written by various queers for their younger and their older selves.

In a film studio decorated with flowers, a diverse team of queer people lie, sit and stand. They take turns reading a letter aloud to each other. The letters are written by them, and they have written them to themselves, both their younger and their older selves. There are stories about coming out, about the meaning of being queer, about not compromising, about finding a place to belong, about coming out on the other side of the uncertainty that comes with feeling different. The story is peppered with dance and big smiles, and ‘Dear Me – A Letter To My Younger/Older Self’ is a happy celebration of the different characters and their individual and personal experiences and lives, and of the importance of needing each other.

Only in my Head

Benjamin Fischermann / Denmark / 2023 / 19 min / World Premiere

A gentle and demystifying story about four different people’s subjective experiences of voluntarily receiving electroshock treatment.

Four people enter the National Hospital in Copenhagen to receive electroshock treatments for mental illness. Each has their own reason for being there, and each has their own way of dealing with the treatments. One is nervous, another relaxed, a third doesn’t care. ‘Only In My Head’ is a rare glimpse into a subjective experience shrouded in myth and prejudice, but which few have ever experienced. A gentle observation that demystifies a controversial treatment method and shows the process from the patient’s point of view from their arrival, their difficulties, the conversations with the sympathetic nurses and to the treatment itself.

My First Home

Vixtoria Vogel Salomonsen / Netherlands, Denmark / 2023 / 18 min / World Premiere

Techno-paced blitz portrait of Dutch Lola and the great but impossible love she had to run away from if she wanted to continue living.

If Lola wanted to break up with heroin, she had to leave the Italian man she was with as a young girl and with whom she took the heroin. She did, and now she’s a woman in her 60s, energetically tumbling around the Netherlands. She still considers the relationship of her youth her first home. But the home she has since created for herself is filled with fourteen colourful birds, special clothes and glittering beads she has carefully collected over the years. ‘My First Home’ is an aesthetic journey into Lola’s world, alternating between observation and fast-cut sections full of overlit photographs and techno music. But most of all, it’s a film about love. Both the kind of love you walk away from but never really recover from, and the kind of love you find instead.

"Feels like…"

Stella Reinholdt-Raabjerg / Denmark / 2023 / 8 min / World Premiere

An essay dressed in pink robes, examining society’s perception of women from the women’s own perspective.

On one side: Iridescent green statues of women, all thin, beautiful, mildly sad, carrying a child or admiring a man. On the other: Naked female bodies of all shapes and colours placed in a pink studio. By mixing the two sides, Stella Reinholdt-Raabjerg tells the story of how society perceives women. It is an essayistic quest for the feeling of being a woman, told from the women’s own perspective. A personal love letter to women and an attempt to showcase the complexity of women’s feelings and thoughts through a long tunnel of exposed bodies and music.