The Future Shorts Festival is the biggest pop up festival of its kind, showcasing the most exciting short films from around the world. It breaks boundaries, borders and conventions to connect a global audience to the world’s best short films. The creators of the acclaimed Secret Cinema, Future Shorts have redefined the way we experience film. The festival is a true celebration of cinema as a communicator and community.

This year’s festival will screen worldwide from November 1st, 2011 to January 31st, 2012. Program highlights include the Oscar-winner “God of Love”, the BAFTA-winning “The Eagleman Stag” and the Sundance-winner “Deeper Than Yesterday.”

Films to be screened:

-The Eagleman Stag
-God of Love
-Deeper than Yesterday
-Incident by a Bank
-Luminar
-The External World

1. THE EAGLEMAN STAG
Dir: Michael Please
Duration: 8.55 United Kingdom - 2010
Winner of Best Short Animation at BAFTA, and Special Jury Prize at SXSW

The Eagleman Stag is a unique 9-minute stop-motion animated film which depicts a man’s haunting obsession with the passage of time and his unorthodox relationship with a beetle. Directed by Michael Please, the production was a highly ambition final year film for while studying at the RCA – it is based on a story he previously wrote entitled “The Life and Time of Peter Eagleman”. Orchestral music was integral to this film and composed in tandem with the animation process.

2. GOD OF LOVE
Dir: Luke Matheny
Duration: 18.38 United States - 2010
Oscar Winner in 2011 for Live Action Short Film

Matheny, who wrote, directed and starred in this 19-minute inventive comedy about love-inducing darts won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2011. A recent film student graduate at New York University, God of Love was produced as his thesis film project while enrolled at NYU’s MFA program. At the Oscars, he was hailed as one of the best acceptance speeches of the evening and thanked his mother for her contribution to the movie.

3. DEEPER THAN YESTERDAY
Dir: Ariel Kleiman
Duration: 19.52 Australia - 2010
Winner of International Short Filmmaking Award at Sundance

Filmed on an old decommissioned military submarine with 35mm cameras, Deeper Than Yesterday tells the story of a Russian crew who suffer a rather savage form of cabin fever. Directed by Ariel Kleiman, a graduate of the VCA at the University of Melbourne, recently said “the more uncomfortable I feel making a film the better it will be.” Jurors have compared the film to “The Lower Depths,” Maxim Gorky’s best-known play – very Russian with long period of isolation and madness.

4. INCIDENT BY A BANK
Dir: Ruben Östlund
Duration: 11.54 Sweden - 2009
Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlinale

A detailed and humorous account of a failed bank robbery: A single take where roughly 100 people meticulously recreate an actual event that took place in Stockholm in June 2006. Directed by Ruben Östlund, these events were witnessed first hand along with his producer Erik Hemmendorff while on the way to the Swedish Film Insititute. The film questions the reality of how, really, robberies happen, and what they might or, should, look like. “Making ‘Incident by a Bank’ is a way to correct the false images of robberies we see almost daily in action movies made in Hollywood,” says Östlund.

5. LUMINARIS
Dir: Juan Pablo Zaramella
Duration: 6.17 Argentina - 2011
Winner of Audience Award at Annecy International Animation Festival

Inspired by the Argentinian instrumental tango piece entitled “Lluvia de Estrellas” (Star Rain), “Luminaris” tells the story of a man living in a world controlled and timed by light. Each day inhabitants of this fictional world awake and are pulled, as if by some otherworldly force, to their jobs by sunlight. Combining pixilation and stop motion techniques; the surrealist short pairs styles reminiscent of art deco with black cinema. Zaramella explains, "Originally, I approached the project as a puppet animation story, but doing some pixilation tests in the gardens of Fontevraud, just for fun, the seed of the present short was born: the idea of sunlight as a magnetic force.”

6. THE EXTERNAL WORLD
Dir: David O'Reilly
Duration: 16.56 Germany - 2010
Winner of Best Animation – Tampere Film Festival

A boy learns to play the piano in this rather dark but occasionally humorous mediation on the anxieties and fears of a modern civilized society. Created as a lo-fi animation, “The External World” is a surreal seventeen-minute collection of vignettes which borrows themes from pop culture, cinema and videogames – classic and contemporary. Some have heralded this short as “a unique reconstruction of the universe” while O’Reilly recently noted in an interview, “I like creating experimental films that have an emotional function.”

Partner: Electric Shadows