Manhattan 4.33pm

Director: Lizzie Oxby

Year: 2008

Full of absurd humor, the film is a poetic story of a sailor lost in the waves and a woman waiting for him in a small house by the sea. Will the boat reach the coast safely? This atmospheric film blends miniature stop-motion worlds with CGI animation and live-action.

Director: Lizzie Oxby

Year: 2004

Orman is having a fruitless conversation on his mobile phone. He is running back to his office but getting nowhere. If he could just get through to Mr Langley everything will be resolved but someone (or something) is intercepting his calls.   The film uses an innovative blend of atmospheric stop-frame animation, live action performance and digital effects to create a dark world of uncertain reality.

Director: Tatiana Collet Apraxine

Year: 2028

You awaken on a fog-shrouded shoreline and meet Echo, a strange child with a hole in their stomach. Together you cross a lantern festival where the veil between worlds is thinnest, sail into an ocean that opens beneath you, and descend through a portal into the Underworld. The Underworld moves through different facets of grief: a rave where silhouettes dance in slow motion, indifferent to Echo's attempts to reach them; a frozen sea where giant statues crack open to release a buried memory of a lost mother; a shadow theatre where an anger monster is unleashed, reducing everything to embers. From the embers, a boat carries you into a vast darkness, where Mother appears, and they are finally reunited. You sail together to the Tree of Life, a bioluminescent, cosmic jungle. Echo begs her to return to the World of the Living, but ancestors appear and surround you. She cannot come back - the journey was never about bringing her back. Echo, revealed to be your own child self, dissolves around you as the hole fills with light.