The Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF) announces its SHORT RIGA: Festival Darlings selection of five short films with distinctive artistic styles and selected by at least fifty international film festivals during the last two years. These masterpieces, exploring the everyday experience in all its perplexity, are a must-see!

Is the world just a place where our bodies live? What is it like to have a body and how is it related to what we feel? In the film A Dialogue with Cyberspace a digital entity starts to admire our capacity to perceive. The director Brian den Hartog shows admirable taste for editing and the aesthetics of the film. This film is the director’s graduation work at RITCS – Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound. He researches the conception of self in a more and more technological society.

In Leonor Teles’ Batrachian’s Ballad we see the human’s nature exposed in its tendency to deride other human beings. Specifically, she looks at the Portuguese tradition of placing ceramic frogs in the doorways to ward off gypsies. Anything but a passive observer, Teles consciously decides to participate and take up position. Being a Romani of Portugal herself, in this work she decides to establish an active role for herself and to integrate it in the narrative of the film.

In Copa-Loca, an abandoned Greek summer resort, a young woman lives in a paradise that has fallen apart. This seemed like the ‘promised land’ of adulthood: the Greece of never-ending summer and burning under a hedonistic sun.

The boredom and existential anxiety are not problems exclusive to fallen paradise — it looms the metropolis too. In Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s dark musical The Burden the employees of various commercial venues fend of the blues by performing cheerful musical turns. Curiously, here the apocalypse is a tempting liberator. Director views her works as modern fables, exploring human relations through the filter of animality.

The mistakes and failures they lead to are inevitable part of the everyday. So much so that these mistakes could have been the inspiration for Nikita Diakur’s relentless pursuit towards depiction of reality via meticulously constructed machinery of error, balancing on the verge of destruction. The extraordinary 3D animation film Ugly combines puppeteering and dynamic computer simulation to produce results that are unexpected, realistic, broken and personal.