International Competition 4

The last competition block features one of the most peculiar films of this year’s selection, the Portuguese film The Artificial Humors, an unexpected combination of a sci-fi, romantic comedy, and an anthropological documentary. The British film Real Gods Require Blood will have us feeling completely different emotions as we unravel a dark mystery before reaching its horror-like ending, and the suspense won’t go away when the French short Les Misérables takes us to a Parisian suburb that feels like a pressure cooker about to blow up as a police patrol drives through its streets. A relief will come in the forms of last year’s winner of Sundance, the Japanese film And So We Put Gold Fish in the Pool, a whirlwind of inventive imagery with playfulness bordering on anarchy, and the Dutch film A Man Falls from the Sky, an almost Kafkaesque anecdote and a brilliant metaphor of our times packed with absurd humour and biting irony.