Day Will Fall

Director: Jake Astbury

Year: 2010

Ex Stasis is a short film based on the recount from an unknown source of a traumatic memory told through fragmented image and text. The film is framed within the confines of a domestic interior, revealed through motion, progressive frames and broken text to tell this dark narrative of an external threat that invades the home of a couple and their cats. The story is constructed in monochromatic and colour images, producing a foreboding domestic interior of disaccord, frightened cats and human panic.

Director: Jake Astbury

Year: 2014

The last hour of Faustus. Adapted from: 'The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus' by Christopher Marlowe

Director: Lilyana Torres, Carlos Morales

Year: 2027

When filmmaker Lilyana Torres learns that her grandfather hired hitmen to nearly kill her father, she sets out to confront him in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and force an apology. The attack left her father with cracked ribs, a broken nose, and loose teeth. Its architect was his own father. Like much of Lilyana’s family history, nobody spoke of it again. So she begins planning his murder. In darkly comic fictional reenactments, Lilyana trains for revenge with the help of a retired detective. Some methods are efficient, others grotesque, all adapted to an ageing man. Against these fantasies, family home videos reveal a more unsettling contradiction: birthday parties, tenderness, and a grandfather who once appeared devoted to his son and granddaughter. How could a parent put their own child’s life at risk? Before Lilyana reaches him, her grandfather dies peacefully in bed, taking every explanation with him. Determined to complete the film, she casts an actor named Perfecto to play him and kills him on screen, again and again. But the performance exposes the question she cannot escape: what does revenge actually resolve? Lilyana confronts the possibility that the violence she wants to destroy may already live inside her.