For weeks now, billions of people around the world have been quarantined at home, many confined to a routine of cleaning and scrubbing, checking the news and exercising to workout videos. It’s hardly the stuff of great cinema. And yet a group of filmmakers, including some prominent international names, has been making movies about the lockdown experience.

Eight directors from Greece and 14 others from the rest of the world have been commissioned by the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece to produce three-minute shorts, filmed entirely in lockdown. Participants include the award-winning directors Denis Côté, Albert Serra, and Jia Zhangke, who have presented movies at big international film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and Toronto.

Some of the shorts are elaborately shot in black and white, and make poetic or literary references; others are deliberately humdrum and hastily filmed with a cellphone. Either way, the images are of messy interiors, masks and hand sanitizer, wet floors and dripping ceilings, toilet bowls and television screens.

The shorts aim to “show the victory of life: that no matter how difficult the situation, the human mind can still breathe freely through cinema,” Jia said in an email exchange from Beijing, where he spent weeks in quarantine. “At an extremely trying time, we need each other’s words and ideas through cinema, most importantly to emphasize the connections.”