A brutish man fastens his goggles before jumping into a swimming pool with a tiny girl.

Once underwater, he clings tightly to the girl’s hand and sinks to the bottom. At first, she holds on, treading blissfully through the liquid. But it isn’t long until she realizes—he’s not letting go.

She flails and kicks to get to the surface, but can’t escape his unyielding grip. As her lifeless body floats in the water, the man finally rises from his sedentary state and swims off.

This brief, but excruciating film, “When We Were Big” generated the strongest and most vocal reaction at “Bliss and Ignorance,” an eclectic array of experimental shorts shown at San Francisco’s 50th International Film Festival (SFIFF) this week.

“That was weirdest shit I’ve ever seen!” said Mason Richards, 23. “How’d that get into the festival?”

The Dutch film and seven others, including four produced in the Bay Area, are competing in “New Visions” category of the Golden Gate Awards, an award that honors the divergent, the eclectic and the unusual.

“It was extremely thought provoking and I have not been able to get it out of my mind," said Deborah Fiennes, 44.

The collection, a seemingly small ingredient out of a 200-film event, takes the audience through an array of emotions to counteract what many filmmakers call “the mainstream.” From pleasure and dreams, to pain and nightmares, the experimental shorts mesh the comfortable with the uneasy.

“My work is very pure, intense, and raw,” said SF-based director Sandra Davis after a screening of her film “Ignorance Before Malice” on Monday.

Senior theatre major Sage Olsen has attended the festival for the past 3 years and is impressed by the importance of the small, the off-beat and atypical slate of works in the “sea mass production and cookie-cutter sequels.”

“It’s nice to know that movies can be made outside the Hollywood realm,” said Olsen, 22.

“It’s all a pedagogical process,” said Bay Area director and 2005 New Visions awardee Kerry Laitala.

“It’s about re-teaching people how to watch films, to understand the marriage between images, texture, light and sound,” she said.

“[The SFIFF] provides filmmakers with the opportunity to showcase their works to a larger audience who has never seen such work before and gives everyone a venue to network, learn, and share ideas with one another,” said 2003 SF State alumnus Cassandra Fung, 23.

But other students, like senior cinema major Jon Ho disagree, claiming that the experimental films are a reflection of the "lack of quality dispersed at the festival."

“If we were talking baseball, the festival would be in the minor leagues, with the major hitters being Sundance, Tribeca, and Cannes,” said Ho, 32.

“Even though [The SFIFF] been around for 50 years doesn’t mean anything. It still reflects the bottom of the heap, the lowest of the low,” said Ho, who volunteered for the Sundance Film Festival this January.

The Golden Gate Awards Ceremony will be held on May 9 with film showings running until May 10.