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Mubi is again partnering with the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, one of the premiere venues for celebrating the art of the short film, to show in most countries around the world a selection of the best films from the International Competition of the 2017 festival.Earthly (Opposite to the Sky) Each year, the German city of Oberhausen hosts one of the longest-lived (if not the longest) short film festivals in the world. Alongside Clermont-Ferrand, Kraków Film Festival, Tempere and the Odense International Film Festival, Oberhausen is among the high-ranking film festivals in which solely short films are showcased. Even though there’s a distinct attention paid to local German cinema, particularly in both their German Competition and in their Nrw (North Rhine-Westphalia) Competition, the festival prides itself for having been in the forefront of the international festival scene for nearly six decades and for their broad diversity in programing. Initially...

PALM SPRINGS -- Austria's submission for the foreign-language Academy Award is a well-observed, if not always emotionally engaging, set of three interlinked dramas revolving around residents of a Vienna apartment complex. The setting is reminiscent of Kieslowski's Warsaw housing block in "Decalogue", but writer-director Gotz Spielmann is interested less in transcendent themes than the psychology of desire. Unspooling at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, "Antares", which is named after the star at the center of the constellation Scorpius, starts out strong, but its impact diminishes.

The first chapter is an explicit depiction of an adulterous affair. Eva (Petra Morze, superb), a nurse who works night shifts, has nothing to say to her mild-mannered husband, who frets over misplaced Schubert CDs. They and their adolescent daughter are three planets in separate orbits, crossing paths but never quite touching. Eva doesn't have much more to say to Tomas (Andreas Patton), whose last name she doesn't know, but she comes alive in his presence, and there's a powerful erotic charge to their explorations -- especially in her discovery of exhibitionist thrills during their rendezvous in a business hotel.

The second and least interesting story focuses on supermarket clerk Sonja (Susanne Wuest) and her Yugoslavian boyfriend, Marco (Dennis Cubic). She's pathologically jealous -- which is not to say that he's not cheating on her. He takes their dog for nighttime walks through the complex as a cover for his romps with single mom Nicole (Martina Zinner). She and her ex-husband (Andreas Kiendl) are the focus of the third tale. In a brutally accurate portrait of personality disorder passing as love, he's a menacingly needy, swaggering creep -- the kind of guy who orders a romantically named Del Amore pizza after he's hit Nicole and tied her to a chair. He's also the real estate agent who cancels an appointment with Eva and her husband in the first chapter.

Blackouts separate the chapters, and Spielmann revisits certain scenes so they unfold from different points of view. But the intertwining, however clever, has little cumulative effect, and nothing matches the raw force and provocative insights of the initial scenario.