Director’s Cut – dir. Alvaro José Cogollos, Juanita Santafe

(FINALIST)

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Original Film Title: Director’s Cut

Director’s Name: Alvaro José Cogollos, Juanita Santafe

Writer’s Name: Alvaro José Cogollos, Juanita Santafe

Producer: Alvaro José Cogollos

Country of Origin: Colombia

Country of Filming: United States

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 6 minutes 4 seconds

Film Description:

A choice between two lives: the calm, slow pace of peace or the exciting, relentless scream of the city.

A young couple in New York City ponders the future of their relationship. Under the camera’s gaze, this couple debates living together in New York.

VENTRICULARITIES – dir. Reza John Monahan

(FINALIST)

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Original Film Title: VENTRICULARITIES

Director’s Name: Reza John Monahan

Writer’s Name: Reza John Monahan

Producer: Reza John Monahan

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: Japan

Language:

Runtime: 12 minutes 36 seconds

Film Description:

Shot in Japan amidst the fading sakura bloom of 2023, “VENTRICULARITIES” is a structuralist reflection on the transient interlace of existence.

Merging the organic delicacy of spinning petals with the industrial splendor of vanishing trains and shifting architectures, the film explores dissonance/resonance across the natural and constructed.

At once immaterial and visceral, the piece functions as a lyrical gesture echoing the ventricular mechanics of slipping time. Cherry blossoms drift like fragile testaments to impermanence, while bamboo and steel become conduits for quiet defiance with forgotten secrets.

Threaded through this visual lattice is a narration, part incantation, part elegy, guiding the viewer around states of awareness that shimmer in and out of clarity.

Here modernity dissolves into myth and neon bleeds into shadow – “VENTRICULARITIES” invites this mindful disorientation, one that doesn’t mourn transience but inhabits it.

In the end “architecture illuminates the ephemeral,” and the film resists resolution, offering instead a deepening fissure: an opening between presence and disappearance. Less a film to be watched than a rupture to be entered.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”