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2015 · 4m · Germany
Directed by David Gesslbauer
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
"Routine or vicious cycle? An unknown girl breaks out of her daily grind by undergoing an intense audio-visual trip."
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The circular frame is clever enough, but it feels like a premise that got mistaken for a film—the surrealism lands soft when it should be genuinely disorienting, and the hamster wheel metaphor is so on-the-nose it circles back to boring.
Gesslbauer and Lange have constructed a rigorous formal argument where the frame itself becomes syntax, situating the circular constraint within a lineage of geometric cinema while the recurring motif builds with architectural precision across four minutes.
The decision to hold everything within that circumscribed circle transforms what could've been standard surrealist imagery into something formally coherent—every visual choice now exists in dialogue with the constraint itself, and that discipline is what makes the cyclical metaphor actually *feel* inescapable.
Reviews
it's the novel approach to storytelling that makes it such a distinct and watchable short
Festivals
- Toronto International Film Festival 2014
- First Steps / Short Tiger Award 2014, Short Tiger Award
- CineMAiubit International Student Film Festival 2014, Best Experimental Short