Historias Breves I: Downhill

A man searches for his father, Pedro Páramo, in a town doomed by violence and the fury of a frustrated love.

In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.

The year is 1955, and a great flood is coming to Northfork, Montana. A new hydroelectric dam is about to be installed in the mountains above the town, ready to submerge the valley in the name of progress. It is the responsibility of a six-man Evacuation Committee to relocate the townsfolk to higher ground. Most have duly departed, but a few stubborn stragglers remain – among them a priest caring for a sickly orphan, a boy whose fevered visions are leading him to believe he is a member of a roaming band of lost angels desperately searching for a way home.

Evangelist Carlton Pearson is ostracized by his church for preaching that there is no Hell.

The legendary Roberto Duran and his equally legendary trainer Ray Arcel change each other's lives.

A disturbed and institutionalized 16-year-old girl struggles between fantasy and reality.

A psychic's ominous reading sends a man into a tailspin.

A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

A young man with a bright future suffers a near-fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend.

An aimless young man who is scalping tickets, gambling and drinking, agrees to coach a Little League team from the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago as a condition of getting a loan from a friend.

On the French island of Mont Saint-Michel, Jack, a failed presidential candidate, Tom, a poet and Sonia, a physicist, engage in an intellectual conversation about politics, philosophy and life over the course of a single day.

When immense pressure threatens a ballerina in a new lead role, she and another dancer escape into a friendship that isolates them from the real world.

A psychotherapist helps a law student cope with schizophrenia in one of five interconnected tales dealing with mental illness.

A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.

A successful "house tuner" in New York City, who calibrates the sound in people's homes in order to adjust their moods, meets a client with a problem he can't solve.

Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.

An ex-felon returns home from prison and must confront the demons of his past.

A woman who works in a meat packing plant is continuously preyed upon by lecherous men.

A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.

Rory is an ambitious entrepreneur who brings his American wife and kids to his native country, England, to explore new business opportunities. After abandoning the sanctuary of their safe American suburban surroundings, the family is plunged into the despair of an archaic '80s Britain and their unaffordable new life in an English manor house threatens to destroy the family.

Yeda, the green-faced woman, sells homemade bread to support the house where she lives with her sick husband. Through the context of green-faced people, we know the reality of those who live on the fringes of a purple-faced society.

Yuri leaves Ryo with mysterious words. Ryo goes to Hokkaido knowing that his doppelganger magician is missing. Ryo realizes Yuri was also the magician’s lover and he learns magic. The story that crosses over two identities, illusion and magic.

A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.

A mother who writes children’s storybooks, ironically, doesn’t have enough time to create stories for her own son. The restless child finds a chance to create his own stories when his grandfather, comes up with a game. They fill an old milk can with pieces of paper, each containing a word which will be a “story-starter”. Tales of heroes and villains, magic and places fill up the child’s imagination. But the child’s made-up story is in need of a happy ending. Now, it depends on the storyteller mother to create the greatest ending of them all.

Short film spinoff of CONFESSIONAL featuring one of the minor characters.

Through a series of auditions, a young actor in New York City struggles with his identity.

Treasonous courtiers plot to assassinate Cardinal Richelieu and overthrow King Louis XIII, manipulating Chevalier DeMauprat into joining the scheme. The Cardinal unmasks the deception and fakes his own death to trap the conspirators. He dramatically returns to the throne room with a secret dispatch proving the villains' treason, leading to their arrest and the reunion of the young lovers

It's a classic boy-meets-girl story, boy-loses-girl, boy gets mistaken for an escaped convict and ruthlessly chased by armies of cops across the countryside in a thrill-packed stunt-addled climax.

An alcohol/drug abuser re-examines his life until he nearly dies from an overdose. Then a friend convinces him to join a self-help group which turns out to be demonic.

A young man's struggle with his sexuality overtakes his life, driving him deep into his subconscious where guilt and fears of physicality chase him still further. Cornered by an intangible terror, he realises he must either break out or break down.

A reflection on love and identity with detours towards magical realism, which winks at the oral tradition of coastal populations and introduces us to Leo, a young 21-year-old sailor who revisits his relationship with Jimena after his great-aunt reminds him of his favorite myth from when he was a child: the story of the nereids.

During a wedding party, according to tradition, hide-and-seek is played in a local abandoned castle. The bride falls into a hidden corridor. As she enters a room, the door falls shut behind her. Inside, she finds a dead woman and a book that says she cannot get out of here. However, a cat taking her scarf outside is her salvation. The cat puts the searchers on the right track, and the groom finds his bride.

Oscar got caught spraying graffiti. Now doing community service at a nursing home, he meets Isabel who is suffering from dementia. At 84 years old, Isabel may be a little old school, but soon the entire block is covered with her pink tag.

Charlie Simms is a student at a private preparatory school who comes from a poor family. To earn the money for his flight home to Gresham, Oregon for Christmas, Charlie takes a job over Thanksgiving looking after retired U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a cantankerous middle-aged man who lives with his niece and her family.

Jack's lavish, fast-paced lifestyle changes one Christmas night when he stumbles into a grocery store holdup and disarms the gunman. The next morning he wakes up in bed lying next to Kate, his college sweetheart he left in order to pursue his career, and to the horrifying discovery that his former life no longer exists. As he stumbles through this alternate suburban universe, Jack finds himself at a crossroad where he must choose between his high-power career and the woman he loves.

During a game of hide and seek, a new bride hides in a chest and remains undiscovered until a strange visitation thirty years later.

Guided by a queer deity, a closeted man is forced to confront his parents as he tries to regain his lost sense of identity.

Santa, an eight-year-old girl from the desolate Bolivian Altiplano, embarks on a rollercoaster journey to take her mother from a life of misery into paradise. The two of them made a pact: when her mother passes, the girl would follow the stars and carry her body across the desert toward heaven, a place they are certain is physically real. Crossing the wilderness, Santa encounters a group of female wrestlers that help her on her way. Also, a gruff policeman who arrests Santa but soon suspects she has magical powers. He decides that to achieve his own salvation he must join Santa on her quest beyond the horizon.