Tickets available at: https://spokanefilmfestival.org/event/world-shorts-6/

Sponsored by Eastern Washington University.

World / 84 min / Short Films
Various languages with English subtitles

A selection of the finest short films from around the world. With English subtitles.

Shadow

China / 5 min

Directed by Lei Lei

This film tells about a girl who had been followed and abused sexually suffered secondary injuries which were all from different treatments of people around her.

The Mandarin Tree

Germany / 18 min / Turkish with English Subtitles

Directed by Cengiz Akaygün

After her father is arrested for political reasons by the Turkish government, little Sirin is finally allowed to visit him in prison for the first time. When a prison official interprets her painting of a bird as an anarchistic symbol and confiscates it, the girl is devastated, but her father encourages her to believe in the freedom of thought. For her second visit, she paints a “harmless” mandarin tree. – Will her hidden message be discovered?

Motherland

Armenia / 20 min / Armenian with English Subtitles

Directed by Emily Mkritchian and Jesse Soursourian

What if fighting for your country meant going against some of its most traditional values? Motherland is a documentary about the women who shake tradition to rid their country of landmines leftover from a devastating ethnic war. Individually outcast; together, a collective – the deminers support each other as they take on the dangerous role of breaking stereotypes and securing the future of their war-torn republic.

Saving Pooh

Israel / 3 min / Animation / Russian with English Subtitles

Directed by Julia Trachtenberg

An almost forgotten memory of grandma “Matrushka” when she was a little girl. A young lonely girl that has only one thing in the whole wide world, her best friend, Winnie-pooh. The girl watches him on the television while her grandma making her “borscht” soup and she’s facing daily with the chance she might lose him.

Fugue

Greece / 17 min / Greek with English Subtitles

Directed by Laura Neri

No two losses are alike, yet grieving can create its own sort of kinship.

Sometimes, He Paints Bathrooms

UK / 5 min

Directed by Laura Neri

An exploration and rationalization of an HIV diagnosis.

The First Day of April

Israel / 16 min / Hebrew with English subtitles

Directed by Shauly Melamed

Guli wakes up in the middle of the night and finds her father, Uri, preparing a prank for April Fools’ Day (April 1st), which begins that next morning. When she awakens in the morning she is surprised to hear that her father died during his morning jog at the kibbutz where they live. While her family is busy with the funeral preparations, Guli finds clues that maybe her father is playing a practical joke on everyone.