Category: Best Short Documentary ARFF Amsterdam 2022

Original Film Title: BULLY

Director’s Name: Alejandro Mendoza Llopis

Writer’s Name: Laura Chimara, Gustavo Mosquera

Producer: Alejandro Mendoza Llopis, Willy Martin, Luis Luyando, Nelson Mata

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 9 minutes 30 seconds

Film Description:

How does it feel when your classmates point at you, insult you, and hit you for being different, or even more unfair, just for fun? Bullying is a reality… Bullying is unwanted and aggressive behavior among school-age children that involves a real or perceived imbalance of power. The behavior is repeated or tends to be repeated over time. Both children who are bullied and those who bully can have serious and long-lasting problems.

Original Film Title: Before I Die

Director’s Name: Mark Anders, Rush Sturges

Writer’s Name: Mark Anders

Producer: Mark Anders, Rush Sturges

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 10 minutes 30 seconds

Film Description:

Following the untimely death of their father to Early Onset Alzheimer’s, the Bussell family grapples with the life-altering decision of whether or not to find out if they too carry the gene. Out of the family’s five children, Tristan Bussell, 36, is the only one who decides to take the DNA test. This uplifting documentary short focuses on how those test results profoundly change the way Tristan chooses to live his life.

Original Film Title: גבעה 314

Director’s Name:Omrie Levy

Producer: Omrie Levy

Country of Origin: Israel

Country of Filming: Israel

Language: Arabic, Hebrew

Runtime: 27 minutes 2 seconds

Film Description:

My childhood’s view – Latrun’s hills. “Oasis of Peace”, A settlement set on hill 314, has founded on coexistence between Arabs and Jews. Ibrahim, a herder Bedouin, lives there with his family for 51 years. Since 1999 the settlement and Silence Monastery, the landowners, has made an agreement therefore Ibrahim has been threatened to be deported.

Original Film Title: Anthropocene

Country of Origin: Italy

Runtime: 15 minutes

Film Description:

Our planet has been sick for a long time.
People have to use face masks because the air has become unbreathble.
Due to the harmful sun, two sisters are forced to study and play in their own home.
Suddenly the ventilation system stops working, so the two girls have to use artificial respirators but after a while they faint.
However Vanessa, a very curious little girl, finds the strength to react and decides to go out.
Thus a fantastic surreal adventure begins.
Vanessa finds a strange object: it is a forgotten book that will lead her to look for the colors and scents which our sick planet still keeps for those who want to dream.

Original Film Title: Sprechen ist Leben – vom Stottern befreit

Director’s Name: Sonja Schütz, Sabine Schütz

Producer: Sonja Schütz, Sabine Schütz

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany

Language: English, German

Runtime: 56 minutes 36 seconds

Film Description:

In the documentary, 11 formerly stuttering people aged 9 – 30 years tell of their daily, painful experiences around stuttering with its limitations. Stuttering affects 1% of the world’s population.
They all felt powerless at the mercy of stuttering and were looking for a way out. The therapy odyssey of the affected people, which sometimes lasted for years, left its traces, destroyed hope and made a vision of the future according to one’s own ideas impossible.
In the worldwide unique therapy concept against stuttering “D.E.L.P.H.I.N.”, they found the solution for their goal to overcome stuttering

Original Film Title: Buonasera, siamo dall’Ucraina

Director’s Name: Sergei Antonov

Writer’s Name: Sergei Antonov

Country of Origin: Italy

Country of Filming: Italy

Language: English, Russian, Ukrainian

Runtime: 8 minutes 24 seconds

Film Description:

This documentary is about Ukrainians demonstrations in Milan against war in Ukraine. A group of people go to protest everyday since the war began (24 February 2022). Sometimes they do different performances or flash mobs so they could have a chance to be more viral and let people now what is going on in their country.oem of them all.

Original Film Title: THE HEART OF SHELLEY

Director’s Name: Nick Hugh McCann

Writer’s Name: Nick Hugh McCann

Producer: Ian Vasey

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: United Kingdom

Language: English

Runtime: 11 minutes 26 seconds

Film Description:

In 1822 the poet Shelley was drowned and cremated on an Italian beach. 200 years later his wife Mary, the mother of Frankenstein, sears our consciences and troubles our souls with her husband’s haunting ‘Mask of Anarchy’, the greatest Human Rights poem of them all.

Original Film Title: SIGNS OF LIFE

Director’s Name: Marko Nikolić

Writer’s Name: Marko Nikolić

Producer: Nebojsa Miljković

Country of Origin: Serbia

Language: Serbian

Runtime: 34 minutes

Film Description:

SIGNS OF LIFE is a film that reaches out for the stories behind long-abandoned hotels in Serbia, told by their former employees. Through combination of visual and historical narrative elements, we discover that these once crowded premises still show signs of life. As these rotting buildings are bravely struggling for air, their destiny reveals itself to be a metaphor for the present state of our society. Do we euthanize them, deliver the coup de grâce, end their miseries, or do what’s in our power to bring them back to life and give them a new sense of purpose? Would rejuvenating them bring back at least a fragment of what they used to mean to us, that we miss so much today?

Original Film Title: Everything But The World

Director’s Name: DIS

Writer’s Name: Casey Jane Ellison, Ava Tomasula y Garcia, Leah Victoria Hennessey, Emily Allan, Ryan Trecartin, Brontez Purnell

Producer: Brontez Purnell, Riel Roch-Decter, Sebastian Pardo

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 37 minutes

Film Description:

In a series of interrelated vignettes, Everything but the World links the agricultural revolution to Amazon fulfillment centers, addresses the gulf between the complexity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of their private everyday lives, and confronts our obsession with “the end of the world” knowing the arrogance of that word: ‘the’.

Original Film Title: Sulukule: Gentrification Eliminated Community

Director’s Name: Melis Isil Simsek

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: Turkey

Language: Turkish

Runtime: 31 minutes 49 seconds

Film Description:

Sulukule was a historic district in the heart of Istanbul, where the Turkish Romani gypsy community lived for centuries. Planned gentrification happened through political land grabbing and using the communities’ unique lifestyle to spur support of its demise. Today the members of this Turkish Romani community are all over Istanbul, and a very unique Istanbulian subculture has disappeared. Could this community have been saved by a socially sensitive architectural initiative? Could the organic lifestyle of people occupying this land have been protected as well transformed by an architectural solution?