Pandemic

Showcase programme from Glasgow Short Film Festival. Features compulsive body-popping and flying lighthouse-keepers.

A pestilence is sweeping southwards from Glasgow. Suspected source: diseased space-monkeys. Symptoms: compulsive body-popping, flicker-vision, hearing disembodied voices from cinema history. Hitchhikers, headless bodies and flying lighthouse-keepers are to be avoided at all costs.  Possibly the worst case of 21st century addiction ever to hit Birmingham. The Magic Lantern, Scotland’s premiere short film exhibitor, is the last line of defence.  This showcase programme from Glasgow Short Film Festival represents your only hope.  You have it in your power to turn the tide. Join us.

Johanna Wagner / UK / 2009 / 10min Comforted by his analogue radios, his memories and his loving wife, Peter is left yearning for the old days.

LIFT Nathan Rae / UK / 2009 / 10min A unique portrait of Britain on the move, told from the perspectives of a hitchhiker and the strangers who invite him into their cars and lives. Fred Worden / USA / 2008 / 13min A kind of specialized playground in which highly representational images are freed from their duties to refer to things outside of themselves. Evelyn Lee / USA / 2008 / 8min A man is shot and can only survive as a head and a body who exist independently from one another. Javier Chillon / Spain / 2008 / 10min The Fifties, a Soviet space shuttle crashes in West Germany. The only passenger, a cosmonaut chimpanzee, spreads a deadly virus all over the country... Brent King / USA / 2009 / 23min A story of addiction to the 21st century. A group of eleven come together to try a new experimental medication and get the devils out. Vladimir Leschiov / Latvia / 2009 / 6min A former pilot looks back over his life - everything that took place on the journey from an airstrip to an abandoned boathouse. Louis Paxton / UK / 2009 / 10min The story of Hector’s journey into dance hell as Glasgow is overwhelmed by a hysterical body-popping plague.