Synopsis

CineYouth is Cinema/Chicago’s annual festival for filmmakers aged 22 and younger. This “best of fest” program showcases eight award-winning shorts from CineYouth 2024, and includes surrealist comedies, touching dramas, and boldly crafted stories from young people with impressive visions. Featuring work by Caroline Bates, April Aquino, Mitch Davila Armendano, Roso Pérez Bueno, Raine Yung, Nathan William Frost, Olivia Huilin Gao, and Ángel Villahermosa.

A group of friends come to terms with the end of childhood in a dying tourist town in Space Coast (United States). In Trigonometry’s Ultimate Method to Putting the Fun Back in Your Own Funeral (United States), a character’s untimely death inspires him to go out with one last hurrah by crashing his own funeral. Mitch, Jaden, and Stevie, three students with visual impairments at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, detail common misconceptions and their struggles for accurate representation in Blind Sighted (United States). As a toxic substance slowly ravages a celebrity’s body, he has to decide how far he will go for the advertising money in Too Much Sand (Sweden). I Can No Longer See (United States) is a self-portrait of trauma, objectification, and relief told through a collection of experimental shorts. Artist On The Go! (DS Advanced Unreleased Gameplay) (United States) is a surreal, nightmarish game in which the player (or viewer) is charged with completing abstract and frightening tasks. In The Damp Season (United States), a young girl comes across the teenaged version of her estranged immigrant mother. And as Pablo falls in love with altar boy Sebastián, he finds that God is obstructing their relationship in more ways than one in Body of Christ (Mi primera comunión) (Spain).

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Synopsis

As a toxic substance slowly ravages a celebrity’s body, the question left to ask is, how far would you go for the advertising money?

This film screens as part of the Best of CineYouth 2024 program.

Synopsis

Over the past decade sculptor and animator Niki Lindroth von Bahr has utilized stop motion animation to breathe life into anthropomorphised animal puppets. From pigeons singing in a zoo in Something to Remember to a pedantic spa manager in Bath House to the delightful rabbit and fox neighbors Tord and Tord to the existential marketplace musical The Burden, this showcase of her work conjures hilarious, bizarre, and even profoundly moving worlds where human and animal merge.

Synopsis

Navigating the rollercoaster of highschool while caring for her clinically depressed father has Joanna feeling scattered. Making matters worse, her ADHD medication is running out with no money for a refill. Enter Audrey–a cool, confident new classmate. Joanna is smitten. Now with a full heart on top of a buzzing brain, she must get creative to make ends meet. This charming tale of self-discovery and young love sparkles against the backdrop of seaside Gothenburg.

Synopsis

Newly single, twentysomething aspiring journalist Hanna leaves Stockholm to move back in with her parents in her small hometown. Already feeling adrift, her world is turned upside-down when her father, a respected priest, informs his family that he wants to come out as Marianne. How can Hanna, who hardly believes in herself, accept her father for who she really is? Charming and heartbreaking, the film is inspired by award-winning writer Ester Roxberg’s 2014 autobiographical novel.