Game of Chance

Are our decisions causally defined by a purpose, a scheme, a plan, or casually shaped by world’s chaos, unpredictability or someone else’s will? Is the perceived influence over our own life just entirely a game of chance?

This delicate coming of age story unceasingly overlaps characters, lives and stories, where sense of place and belonging mixes with an incessant feeling of threat, and the unpredictable and commingling sequence of events displayed on screen seems standing  right in between pure casualty and astral order.

This finely crafted animated short takes us into a dystopian world dominated by external forces, which alter the concepts of roots, home and freedom. Provided your house and few possessions might be hauled away at any given time, your life is constantly threatened by casualness, temporariness and transition.  

The film, which won the “Best Foreign Film” Student Academy Award and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live-Action Short, is a visual escalation of atonement and guilt, where innocent choices spiral out of control, slowly building tension towards an  emotionally powerful ending that is a definite detour from where it all begins. 

A show within a show that mixes psychology, perception and prediction, Secret Studio plays with control, manipulation and moral dilemmas, deconstructing the premise of truthfulness of a TV quiz. Blending and blurring the boundaries between fake and real, it  challenges the meaning of choices’ ownership and empowerment. 

This dark psychological thriller revolves around a single conversation where dark humour alternates with genuine tension. Building on truthfulness and deceiving, the film plays with the difference between making choices and suffer from someone else’s, enduring and reacting, feeling trapped in and being allowed a way out. 

Laika delves into the meaning of trust and disillusionment, as both being chosen and choosing hide dreadful dangers. Indeed, the film questions if an alternative has ever been possible, or instead if everything experienced on screen was just meant to be. 

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. Following Thoreau’s quote, the film examines the casualties of the UK benefits system’s rigid bureaucracy, and the extremes the rejected people can be pushed to when treated as nothing more than a number on a screen. Then, the line between choices and casualties dramatically blur.  

Partly observational and partly impressionistic, China's Wild West describes a day in the life of a miners’ community hoping to strike it rich. The film uncovers hopes and expectations of a group of faithfully optimistic people who give it up all to wander and toil a desolate, lunar landscape in search of an improbably lucky chance.