Kiss/Crash (UK) by Adam Cole

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Synopsis: What destruction is triggered by romance? What pleasure is there in a car crash? Kiss/Crash is a provocative short film that uses AI-generated imagery to explore the theme of desire and the expanding gap between real experience and artificial representation in the digital age. Here, an AI repeatedly and lovingly translates a car crash into a kiss, increasing in intensity with every collision. The piece creates a compelling metaphor between two seemingly unrelated Hollywood images: the violent car crash and the romantic kiss. Drawing on a familiar cinematic language, this piece also connects AI imagery to a long history of image-production technologies meant to incite and homogenize our desires through artificial representations. Running time: 00:01:10.

Coyote (Canada) by Katherine Jerkovic

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Synopsis: A cook in his heyday, Camilo is now a worn-out fifty-year-old who works for a cleaning company. We can guess a personal failure in the past of this solitary Mexican living in Montreal. However, Camilo wants to get back on track and an opportunity to recover his culinary passion finally presents itself. Everything is in place for this new beginning when Camilo receives a visit from his daughter Tania, with whom he had cut ties because of her drug addiction. She tells him that he is a grandfather and asks him to take care of the child while she undergoes her umpteenth rehab. The arrival of this grandson will upset Camilo’s plans. There will be a new beginning for him, certainly, but not as he imagined it. Running time: 01:29:00.

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