Italy!!

Thrilled to announce that three short films from the Mailuki Films catalogue have been selected for the 2026 Chiaroscuro International Film Festival:

Vagabond, by Philippe Woodtli/ Switzerland
Miazel, by George Dogaru/ Romania
Memories of an Empty House, by Bruno Carnide/ Portugal, Spain

The screenings and awards ceremony will take place on 28, 29 and 30 September at the spectacular Cinema Conca Verde in Bergamo.

Philippe Woodtli about VAGABOND:

What I wanted to tell with this story comes from my fascination with gambling schemes, cons, and the art of misdirection. I’ve always been drawn to the idea that someone can spend years mastering a skill, not to win fairly, but to outsmart the system and take money from a mark with precision. That world has always captivated me, and it’s the kind of story I love watching. With Vagabond, I wanted to show how I would approach a con like this. Not just how to pull it off, but why the con itself is often the easy part. It’s the getaway that really decides everything.

I’m drawn to the gangster world because in that space, only one thing truly matters: trust. Who is really on your side, and who isn’t. The same is true for a card mechanic’s team at the poker table. You need total preparation. You need to know every angle. And most importantly, you need the right partner. If you don’t, things go bad fast.

That’s what I wanted to explore. The precision, the pressure, and the betrayal behind the illusion.

George Dogaru about MIAZEL:

MIAZEL means “confusion” in some Romani dialects — a word that speaks to the heart of this story.

We live in times where human rights are too often taken for granted, as if they were permanent fixtures of modern life. But history shows us otherwise: freedom is not a given — it is fragile, and must be defended constantly, even in so-called civilized societies.

This film was born out of a growing fear that authoritarianism no longer wears the face of monsters, but of polite bureaucracy, moral panic and cultural silence. I wanted to explore what happens when someone who has everything to lose — social status, comfort, a sense of identity — is suddenly marked as “other.” Not because of what they’ve done, but because of who they supposedly are.

MIAZEL is not a historical film, though its roots are tangled in the past. It’s a warning, not a reenactment. A fictional Romania of the near future, where civil liberties have eroded step by step, until people forget they were ever free. The confusion — miazel — is not just in the streets, but in people’s minds. That, I believe, is the most dangerous form of control.

This is a story about fear, complicity, and the desperate search for clarity when the system turns its gaze on you.

Bruno Carnide about Memories of an Empty House:

Our experiences make us who we are, and are nothing more than just memories that we keep and that cease to be real as soon as they happen.
The memories of what we lived are different for each of us, even though we all lived exactly the same. As soon as they become memories, they are the perception of what each one had at each moment, and this is fascinating. So fascinating that I try to explore it to the fullest in my cinema, a cinema that works with memories in all the narrative aspects of the story.
The images, the voices, the sounds, the music, the feelings. Everything a film is capable of conveying. And even the memory that we keep of a film, it transforms in each one of us depending on the memories that we have previously lived.
None of us knows what the first memory of his life was, and possibly no one remembers it anymore, but it was the most important, because from it, all the perception of the rest was modified one after the other.
But if our memory is so important for us to know who we are or where we come from, what strength and impact does someone else’s memory have in our lives?