R&A Shorts: Uncanny Valley

The short films presented in the screening invite the audience to embrace freak-outs and throw themselves into weirdness. Not everything needs to be met with reason.

Astro is a comical story about Emily’s first workday in a call centre selling astrological lectures. Her moral compass is spinning, as she’s reading the pre-written script to the desperate callers underneath the oppressive fluorescent lamps of the open-plan office. Eventually she finds whole new dimensions within herself.

Stone of Destiny is a thrilling mini-musical based on director-animator Julie Černá’s previously published comic book trilogy of the same name. The star of the animation is an anthropomorphic stone that sings about its life, insecurities, and longing for freedom. There’s also a horse involved!

Quiet guides lead hikers through the boiling Arrábida Natural Park. The Moving Garden is like a dreamy botanical trip, on which there is lots of oddness to experience.

The Exploding Girl is a story about Candice, whose fate is to literally explode again and again, day after day. The film is full of colourful pop culture imagery; at its core, however, it is a wistful portrayal of heartbreak. Behind the film is France’s probably coolest directing duo, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel (Eat the Night, R&A 2025), whose original style has made them superstars, especially in the short film scene.

Pirateland exemplarily represents the Greek Weird Wave in short form. The film is an almost intolerable discomfort-causing, White Lotus echoing portrayal of cultural and class distinctions. The tourist season has just ended in Crete, but a Scandi family has travelled to the island to get as authentic an experience as possible. As the guests’ wishes keep getting more and more peculiar, the local family running the bed & breakfast find themselves in a difficult situation.

Annu Suvanto (translated by Vilja Hynynen)