Our Berlin partners present a best of shorts compilation from their amazing festival.
Final Girls Berlin Film Festival showcases horror cinema that’s directed, written, or produced by women and non-binary filmmakers. They are committed to creating space for female voices and visions, whether monstrous, heroic or some messy combination of the two, in the horror genre. We've seen more than enough representations of women as beautified victims and constructions of male fantasies or anxieties, and that is why they are working towards the primacy of women as subjects and storytellers in horror.
The “final girl” horror trope refers to the last woman standing in a horror film, who manages to escape or defeat the film’s villain/monster. While “final girl” is an ambivalently feminist figure in film criticism, often desexualized and tainted with the male director’s moralization and punishment of other female characters’ behaviour, the festival utilises this figure as a starting point for carving out space for new and undiscovered positions of power for women in horror, not only in front of but also behind the camera.
Films
Possibly in Michigan
A musical murder story about two girls who are followed home by a cannibal. There the victims become the aggressors.
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Earworm
A lonely man battles with a tune that he just cannot get out of his head.
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Monsterdyke
This transgressive portrait of desire shot on 16mm, examines trans-lesbian love and longing with humour, heat, puppetry and a subversive twist.
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MOUSE
Fueled by coke, a desperate couple attempts to capitalize on an unlikely opportunity.
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Allen Anders
The fever dream of a 1980s standup comic who is either having a nervous breakdown or having the best set of his life.
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Entropia
Loneliness and an obsession with vanity have pushed one woman to take unconventional measures to find happiness. Symbols of birth, death and rebirth grace the film and asks the audience to ponder the question: How far would you go to turn back time?
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hair wolf
In a black hair salon in gentrifying Brooklyn, the local residents fend off a strange new monster: white women intent on sucking the lifeblood from black culture.
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Creswick
Sam's fear of her childhood home is brought to light when her ageing father claims there is another presence in the house.
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Metamorphosis
A woman in 1990s Hong Kong accidentally kills her alcoholic husband in self-defense, and finds a unique way to dispose of the evidence.