Marta, a middle-aged woman married to a small town doctor who doesn’t know about her terminal illness. Marta searches for happiness in the arms of a much younger man, Bogus. Their relationship is as innocent and fresh as the smell of the sweet rush that grows in the river where Marta and Bogus swam on their first date. But, just when everything seems to be going well for them, everything is put to an end by a sudden and cruel twist of fate: it is Bogus who dies first, he drowns, entangled in the roots of sweet rush he was trying to pick for Marta. Based on a short novel by one of Poland’s most acclaimed writers, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, the story could have ended at this point. But the director confronts fiction with reality, intertwining the fictitious story with heart-rending monologues from his main actor Krystyna Janda about the death of her real-life husband, the acclaimed cinematographer Edward Klosinski, to whom the film is dedicated.

A grieving couple retreats to their cabin ‘Eden’ in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.

When Wendy, an alienated Indiana woman, realizes that there’s nothing keeping her in her home state, she makes the decision to relocate to Alaska and seek out work at the local fish cannery. Her four-legged friend Lucy in the passenger seat next to her, Wendy stops off to get some rest in a small Oregon town. The following morning, when Wendy attempts to start her car, the engine fails to respond. But this is only the first in a series of snowballing events, because as Wendy waits for the local garage to open she heads to the supermarket to pick up some dog food for Lucy. Opting to shoplift the puppy chow since she doesn’t have much cash to speak of, Wendy subsequently finds herself in the local jail thanks to an overzealous employee. By the time Wendy pays her fine and gets back to the supermarket, Lucy is gone. Unfortunately the dog pound doesn’t open until the following morning, and after receiving some help from a kindly local Wendy gets some particularly bad news about her car.

Olga is 25 years old. She lives in a delapidated apartment, in an anonymous city in Holland. By day she works in her dad’s luxurious clothes boutique, by night she mostly passes her time in the clubhouse of her soccer team. Apart from smoking cigarettes and drinking beer there’s not much to do, but it’s a better option than being at home alone. In a bid to escape the loneliness, Olga regularly takes one of her teammates to her apartment. The routine is predictable. After she’s had sex and a cigarette, Olga goes out to get some French fries. And at night, even the small diner proves to be a good place to pick up people for a one night stand. Having sex, smoking and eating seem to be the only things that make sense in life. Without really giving resistance to the blandness of her existence, Olga keeps observing her fellow earthlings, wondering where all this eating, fucking and smoking will end. And it will end, though not in a way anyone could expect.

Two blond teenage girls have affected chats, take pictures of sexy photos and get drunk, a group of young men experiment with sex, a young teacher tries to resolve the problem of a student being bullied by another teacher, and a group of passengers are held prisoner by a bus driver. Involuntary interweaves several parallel plotlines that are otherwise linked together only by the theme of herd mentality and the urge or determination to overstep taboo. In the end, it is all about lessons to learn, lectures to give and lines not to cross.

In Rome, at dawn, when everyone is asleep, there’s one man who isn’t sleeping. That man is called Giulio Andreotti. Calm, ambiguous, inscrutable, Andreotti is synonym of power in Italy for over four decades. At the beginning of the nineties, without arrogance or humility, immobile, ambiguous and reassuring, he advances relentlessly towards his seventh mandate as Prime Minister. Nearing seventy, Andreotti is a gerontocrat who equipped like God, fears nobody and doesn’t know what fear is: used as he is to seeing this fear painted on the faces of his interlocutors. He remains passive and the same as ever before everything. Until the strongest counter power in the country, the Mafia, decides to declare war against him.

Guy Maddin’s contribution to Cinema16: World Short Films features his unique signature. In this seven-minute film a diva played by Isabella Rossellini is tied to a wooden ‘lectric chair. The power is slowly increased, sparks fly playfully, smoke curls upwards. The star becomes ecstatic. Her petite mort rêverie produces excitingly strange images from objects of desire to melancholy flashbacks.

Condemned to six years in prison, Malik El Djebena cannot read nor write. Arriving at the jail entirely alone, he appears younger and more fragile than the other convicts. He is 19 years old. Cornered by the leader of the Corsican gang who rules the prison, he is given a number of “missions” to carry out, toughening him up and gaining the gang leader’s confidence in the process. But Malik is brave and a fast learner, daring to secretly develop his own plans...

The Eternity Man is a film opera about Arthur Stace, reformed petty criminal, World War 1 veteran and recovering alcoholic, who haunted Sydney’s seedy bars and brothels until a revelation one night in a soup kitchen chapel. Stace then spent nearly forty years chalking a timeless message on the city’s streets: the single word, written in copper-plate, Eternity. During his journey of self-discovery he wrote his word almost 500,000 times; it was his mission to traverse the city to its furthest reaches in order to spread his message. Now more than 30 years after his death, this mission has a powerful resonance, to the point where Sydney’s millennium celebrations were crowned with his word lighting up the Harbour Bridge in neon, sending his evocative message out from Sydney and across the world.