Places are often understood as containers: settings in which stories unfold, backdrops for action, or spaces we pass through. The places in this film program are active forces — intimate, seductive, and sometimes predatory. They shape bodies, behaviour, and perception, slowly consuming those who inhabit them.
Across homes, balconies, digital environments, landscapes, and imagined worlds, the familiar turns strange. Spaces associated with safety and routine reveal hidden violence, emotional pressure, or quiet absurdity. What first provokes unease, disgust, or distance begins to attract our gaze, holding us in a state of ambivalence: repelled, yet unable to look away.
These films explore place on multiple scales — from enclosed domestic interiors to vast, virtual terrains — and across different tones, from playful and grotesque to dark and unsettling.
Places That Devour You invites us to reconsider our relationship to the spaces we occupy. Not as passive environments, but as living systems that absorb us, reshape us, and sometimes feed on us — until the boundary between place and self begins to dissolve.
Program:
Unicorn Blood/ Sangre de unicornio, dir. Alberto Vázquez, Spain 2013, 8’46’’
Two bears go hunting unicorns, their favourite prey. Uncorns have soft flesh and blood flavoured like delicious blueberries, that bears need to stay beautiful.
Flut / Flood, dir. Malte Stein, Germany 2018, 9’55’’
A dirty lake bursts its banks and begins to flood the town. At last there´s a good reason to keep the son at home. But in isolation, nightmarish associations start to mix with reality.
Lovestreams, dir. Sean Buckelew, USA 2016, 9'39''
Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never seen or met? LOVESTREAMS is a confessionary tale of two strangers in an online chat room one lonely night in 2002; a love story from the early days of the Internet. Passing through a mysterious portal and arriving at a ballroom masquerade of morphing avatars where they can be whoever they choose, the net-cross’d lovers get to spend one magical night together before the real world comes crashing back in.
Goodbye Rabbit, Hop Hop, dir. Caleb Wood, USA, Japan 2013, 4'7''
A mind in the city looks inward, and escapes into the rabbit's domain.
Uncanny Valley, dir. Paul Wenninger, Austria, France 2015, 13'31''
In Uncanny Valley, we are at once bombarded by the psychological and physical intensity of a battle fought between desperate soldiers during the First World War. Each frame of this animated live action piece reveals its own painful yet detailed moment, resistant to the synthetic image of history.
House of Existence/ Jon-Jae-Ui Jib, dir. Yumi Joung, South Korea 2022, 8'30''
There is a house. The house starts falling apart. Roof and wall collapses, slowly revealing belongings inside the house. They too collapse and break and disappear. When all goes away, a person appears, left alone in the remains.
Balcony, dir. David Dell'Edera, Hungary 2016, 6'13''
An old fella shows up from nowhere and shakes up the neighbourhood.
Get real!, dir. Evert de Beijer, Netherlands 2010, 12'13''
A schoolboy finds himself addicted to a computer game in which he acts as a bodyguard to a superstar. Not only is the singer gorgeous to look at, she is also exposed to all kinds of deadly dangers. And the only one who can save her is her clever bodyguard. The schoolboy’s homework soon suffers on account of his digital exploits and before long he begins to lose his grip on reality. But then a girl in his class decides to intervene.
Screening curated by Daniel Šuljić
Daniel Šuljić is an animation film director and a musician. Born in Zagreb, then lived in Vienna, and from 2011 on he has been living and working in both cities. He studied painting and animation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he graduated. He was a lecturer of classical animation at the Institute for Media Design at the University of Art and Design in Linz, and in 2006 he was given the title of honorary professor at Jilin College of the Arts Animation School in Changchun, China. He served as an artistic consultant for animated film at the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, and was a member of City of Zagreb artistic council for film. His films were shown at several hundred international and national film festivals, different TV channels across Europe and earned different international awards. He was a member of many festival juries and had several retrospectives. Since 2018 he is an associate professor at the Department of Animation and New Media, Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb and from 2024 Head of Department. He was the Croatian ambassador of the European Animation Awards and is a member of the board of the Award. He is a member of the Academy of motion picture arts and sciences. Since 2011 he has been the artistic director of the World Festival of Animated Film - Animafest Zagreb.
Filmography:
- Evening Star (1993)
- The Cake (1997)
- Sun, Salt and Sea (1997)
- Ich kann es mir sehr gut vorstellen (I Can Imagine It Very Well, 2004)
- Transparency (2015)
- From Under Which Rock Did They Crawl Out (2018)
