Tales are among the oldest ways we have made sense of the world. They shape how we remember origins, explain the inexplicable and how we carry forward the lessons of those who came before. ‘Tales as Old as Time’ (Shorts Program 9 – the last to play among the shorts programs and the middle program during this Red Friday) collects films that draw from myth, folklore, fable and personal histories. They are placed within landscapes, both ancient and contemporary. Each short carries with it the resonance of tales told long ago, refracted into present issues.
 

‘Abora’ opens the program as a lyrical meditation on creation, tracing the birth of the universe, the forming of an island and the delicate thread connecting humanity and the forces of nature. Its movement from genesis to modernity warns us of how brittle harmony is once disrupted. Echoes of consequence continue in ‘Passengers’, a film that serves as an act of passage to human transience. The young girl’s journey with a solitary ghost unfolds like a dream of transit. Can this be an initiation into mystery? Even further consequences in ‘Oysters’, where Marta’s quiet sacrifices reflect the persistence of mythic endurance within the smallest acts of daily life.
 

The fantastic takes on a corporeal form in ‘Fish Please!’ in which an expectant father’s theft is answered by a transformation that is a punishment and, quite strangely, a parable too. ‘The Nothing’, drawn from Leonid Andreiev, presents the figure of a devil who comes with a final proposition at the edge of death.

The realm of fable and fairy tales reappears in ‘Fiabexit’. The tales are deconstructed though as Alice and Pinocchio stumble into the toxicity of the contemporary world. Their presence in familiar yet estranged surroundings reveals how myths refuse to fade even when uprooted from their original contexts. ‘Cassandra Insköld’s Last Word’ continues this thread of inheritance by entwining the story of a modern woman with that of a flapper wronged a century earlier. The past intrudes into the present, demanding that voices that were silenced long ago, should finally be given attention to.
 

The program closes with ‘Edge’, a dance piece that questions power. It shows that the invisible walls that divide us are made stark through bodies and movement. The struggle against limits becomes a story, one told through movements, gestures, urging audiences to break free. A proper end to a fantastic festival run.

Tales endure because they are never still. They oddly resurface in oysters and gasping fish, in gothic necklaces and glass walls, in devils who whisper at the moment of death. Tales as Old as Time clearly tells its audience that we all live in stories whether we choose to or not.