unusual rules

Director: Heidi Stokes

Year: 2021

'I invite you into the world of my weekly planner.' Premiere at the 19th (2022) IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival

Director: Heidi Stokes

Year: 2018

In our turbulent times, silence seems like a necessary escape. This animated film evaluates this concept, looking in particular at one important figure in history who used this in an astonishing way to evaluate the world we live in. Official Selection VIS, Vienna Shorts Film Festival 2019

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.