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  Albatross soup

  

  aeon.co

  A man gets off a boat, walks into a restaurant, orders albatross soup, takes one bite, and pulls out a gun and kills himself. Why did he do it? The classic riddle (from the family of lateral thinking puzzles) gets a trippy animated adaptation in this inventive and darkly delightful short, which features 50 disembodied voices attempting to make sense of the story. After the guessers ask a question, a riddler lets them know if their questions are making any progress with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and the grim details gradually reveal themselves. With its excellently executed mix of visual whimsy and gallows humour, the Brooklyn-based filmmaker Winnie Cheung’s short is still very much worth a watch even if you already know what makes the albatross soup so deadly.By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

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More like this (2)

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  Heavy is the 11-year-old head that wears the crown at an Argentinian beauty pageant | Aeon Videos

  

  aeon.co

  ‘It gets heavier and heavier by the minute. Until the callus forms. Right, Memi?’With an unflinching...

  ‘It gets heavier and heavier by the minute. Until the callus forms. Right, Memi?’With an unflinching focus, the Argentinian filmmaker Manuel Abramovich traces the boredom, annoyance and pain – and perhaps confusion – that pass across the face of María Emilia Frocalassi ('Memi') as her mother fits her with a lavish, heavy headpiece. The 11-year-old has recently won a beauty pageant and will be competing in another held as part of carnival celebrations in rural Argentina. Intercutting the pageant preparations with Memi's tennis and swimming lessons, Abramovich binds the whole spectacle together with a soundtrack of adults relentlessly dispensing directions and expectations. When Memi finally starts to crack, it's perhaps not just under the weight of her enormous headdress. A winner of dozens of film-festival accolades since its 2013 release, the critically acclaimed short La Reina (The Queen) is a strikingly original and confronting exploration of adolescence, tradition and the dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship. By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

  
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  Gargantuan

  

  aeon.co

  Originally broadcast on BBC2’s The Late Show in 1992, this delightfully simple and clever short from...

  Originally broadcast on BBC2’s The Late Show in 1992, this delightfully simple and clever short from the UK artist John Smith deploys a camera, an amphibian and an alarm clock to show how the chasm between ‘gargantuan’ and ‘minute’ is all in the framing.By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon