Introduced by João Luiz Vieira The contemporary short film has developed over the last few years as the most visible and successful strategy of resistance to the crisis of Brazilian cinema. The complexity of the urban setting at the end of the century appears to serve as the richest source of inspiration for contemporary Brazilian short films. Wholes, for example, allows for a multiplicity of possible interpretations of the unusual angles that show urban chaos from the "point of view" of the hundreds of potholes that characterize the metropolis and wreak havoc with its inhabitants. Ave, on the other hand, plays a rougher game, dramatizing the unusual and bloody encounter between a young man and a chicken in the basement of a warehouse in the city. Suburban Route investigates the heirs to the first boom of the Brazilian automobile industry living on the periphery of São Paulo. Just Livin' chronicles the daily tribulations of a young Afro-Brazilian office-boy in São Paulo. Juvenile sexuality is the subject treated in Red Card. Flying Geraldo succeeds in producing an x-ray of urban violence in Rio de Janeiro. Jorge Furtado's This Is Not Your Life contributes his reflections on the nature of the documentary.-João Luis Vieira, Curator, Brazilian short films. The program concludes with The Elevator, from Chile. João Luis Vieira is a film critic and curator. He teaches in the Department of Cinema and Video at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro. He is currently a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Media Arts Program of The University of New Mexico.