ND/NF Shorts Program 1
Featuring Sonia K. Hadad’s Exam, Agustina San Martin’s Monster God, Wong Ping’s Wong Ping’s Fables 2, Rajee Samarasinghe’s The Eyes of Summer, and Dorian Jespers’s Sun Dog.
ND/NF Shorts Program 1 screens virtually nationwide from 12/9 to 12/21. Get tickets here.
Exam
Sonia K. Hadad, Iran, 2019, 15m
Persian with English subtitles
This precisely calibrated nail-biter from Iranian filmmaker Sonia Hadad follows a teenage girl who reluctantly transports her father’s cocaine on a school day. Enlivened by a gripping performance by Sadaf Asgari (who picked up the Special Jury Award for Acting at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival), Exam delivers genre thrills and serious social commentary.
Monster God
Agustina San Martin, Argentina, 2019, 10m
Spanish with English subtitles
Glowing red, an all-seeing power plant looms above a foggy town and seems to anticipate an unknown cataclysm while a punk teen longs to escape.
Wong Ping’s Fables 2
Wong Ping, Hong Kong, 2019, 14m
Cantonese with English subtitles
Hong Kong animator Wong Ping renders social dynamics and economic anxieties through intersecting moral tales of an anthropomorphized cow and three sibling rabbits. Something like Memphis Design as envisioned through a video game, this candy-colored continuation of the award-winning Wong Ping’s Fables 1 builds upon the self-taught animator’s bizarrely funny observations of contemporary society.
The Eyes of Summer
Rajee Samarasinghe, Sri Lanka/USA, 2020, 15m
A young girl communes with the spirit world around her in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War in this dialogue-free movie about ghosts and the pain of memory.
Sun Dog
Dorian Jespers, Belgium/Russia, 2020, 21m
English and Russian with English subtitles
“The everlasting night is unbearable,” laments the client of a young locksmith in a frozen city in northern Russia. He stumbles through the inky darkness, captured by a floating, roving camera evoking the delirium of deep winter. Will the sun ever rise?
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