Best of Kaboom Animation Festival 2023 On Tour - English subtitled

The films (A-Z):

Backflip
Nikita Diakur, France 2022, 12 min., French spoken, English subtitles.
Practice makes perfect. Does that also apply to an avatar? Nikita Diakur wants to learn a backflip, but that’s not exactly safe. You can break your neck, or land on your head, or hurt your wrists. So, he let his avatar learn the trick. Practicing on a 6-core processor, Fake Nikita makes thousands of attempts to do a backflip with the help of Machine Learning. Highly entertaining and equally hilarious, this experimental film mixes age-old slapstick routines with modern tech.

Freedom Swimmer
Olivia Martin-McGuire, Australia & France 2021, 15 min,, Cantonese spoken, English subtitles.
Exploring the effect of past trauma, FREEDOM SWIMMER documents a mass migration story from the twentieth century, which is relatively untold in the Western world. Director Olivia Martin-McGuire parallels a grandfather’s journey to safety from China with his granddaughter’s fight for freedom in Hong Kong today. A timely, captivating story of the search for a better life.

Fur
Zhen Li, United States 2022, 7 min., no dialogue.
Somewhere between the paintings of Egon Schiele and the eeriness of David Cronenberg lies this mysterious student film. Starting in a science class with a girl who has a crush, the film rapidly descends into a mouldy, furry, wet-dreamlike experiment.

Garrano
David Doutel & Vasco Sá, Portugal & Lithuania 2022, 14 min., Portuguese spoken, English subtitles.
GARRANO is the inexorable and moody story of the loss of innocence of a young boy, inspired by the forest fires in Portugal in 2018. A Garrano horse is forced to pull a heavy load under a blazing sun while the young boy discovers a man who is about to set a forest on fire. An intense and disheartening tale set in a majestic place where tragedy strikes.

Goodbye, Jérôme!
Adam Sillard, Gabrielle Selnet & Chloé Farr, France 2021, 7 min., French spoken, English subtitles.
Reminiscent of the whimsical Beatles-inspired YELLOW SUBMARINE and filled with bizarre, unorthodox characters, this short animation traces a trip through paradise. Jérôme sets out to find his wife Maryline. During his search, he sinks into a surreal and colourful world in which no one seems to be able to help him.

How Many
Bianca Scali, Germany 2021, 3 min., English spoken, no subtitles.
Mathieu is weighed down by many questions. When he gives in to his sadness, the rain becomes tears and his tears become rain. This beautiful symbiosis of music and visuals is a music video for a song by French singer-songwriter Mathieu Boogaerts. It was produced by using the cyanotype photographic printing process, giving the short film a very soft textured and wonderful analogue look and feel.

Questbound: Forbidden Ventures of the Undead Soul
Owen Buckley & Alexander Bierling, Netherlands 2022, 8 min., English spoken, no subtitles.
Nothing could excite the great king, but then along came a noble knight ... But is the undead king flirting? Infused with delightful humour and some welcome nerdiness, QUESTBOUND… is a medieval fantasy story embracing the idea that even undead kings have primal needs.

Skinned
Joachim Herisse, France 2022, 15 min., French spoken, English subtitles.
‘The pleasure of love lasts but a moment.’ Encounter the right amount of creepiness and anxiety with this tale of two swamp women, Siamese twins by one leg. At night the Flayed has terrifying nightmares in which she sees her sister’s flesh covering her own body. With echoes of Cronenberg and Julia Ducournau, SKINNED is a powerful stop-motion film about an abusive relationship that deeply affects the boundaries between the other and the self.