Risk

Once Upon a Time We are first presented a cobweb castle, filled with the haunting doubts of the young protagonist. Spirits appear on the screen and are heard on the soundtrack. Gradually a female guide emerges and escorts the young man into an antechamber to another (and possibly higher) world.

Orb A compact, full-color cut-out animation as ephemeral as the colors swimming on the surface of a soap bubble. The eternal round shape, the orb (sun, moon, symbol of the whole self) balloons its inimitable and joyous course through scene after scene of celestial delight, fixing at last as the mystical globe encasing the lovers whose course it has paralleled throughout the film.

Revolt of the Praetorian... Rome chafes under the rule of the Emperor Domitian and his Egyptian mistress, Artamne. A mysterious champion arises to fight against the Emperor -- a masked man known as the Red Wolf. In fact, the Red Wolf is Valerius Rufus, one of the Emperor's trusted centurions who's aided by none other than the Emperor's court jester, the diminutive Elpidion. Rebels in league with Valerius kidnap Artamne, planning to exchange her for two of their imprisoned colleagues, but Artamne escapes and soon both Valerius, (now exposed as the Red Wolf), and his fiancee, Lucilla, are sentenced to be immersed in a cauldron of molten lead. Valerius's friends, however, rise up to rescue him and to liberate Rome.

A Trip to Karabakh 3 Las... After 16 years of imprisonment, 40-years-old Gogliko is released from jail. He doesn't exactly know what he did that deserved 16 years of jail time. A free man, a changed country awaits him. His personal life has drastically altered. His parents have passed and most of his friends have died during the Civil War period. Gogliko realizes that he will not be able to find his place in this "new" Georgia, only thing he has to do is to care about his passed friend's 16-years-old son.

Rich Hall's California S... Rich Hall takes the viewer on a skewed but keenly-eyed journey to the Land of Dreams.

We Will Forget Robert Fitzpatrick spent $140,000 of his own money on subway ads that warned of the apocalypse. A true story.

The Dead Dance A video installation that Takashi Ito exhibited in January 2009 in Kyoto.

Venus "In the early afternoon, a mother holding her child stands still in the park of a housing project. The kind of sight that is a symbol of beauty and love. Be as that may be, they have no face. The camera is aimed persistently at the spot from which they have vanished as if to find something. A work that began out of the search to understand the relation between the family and the self." - Takashi Ito

Picnic in Topola The two young men roam through the night. One of them proposes a girl he just met in a supermarket for a fun. However, the wedding actually comes true a few days later at a river canal near the small town. Influenced by booze and boredom, the old problems emerge.

The Mummy's Dream The filmic version of a city in which all surface beauty has rotted away. In order to find images of death like landscapes of the city from which people have vanished, and buildings from which the decorations have been stripped away and the inner organs exposed, I walked all over Tokyo taking photographs, then animated them. (T.I.)