2026 TIDF Award-Winning List
Asian Vision Competition
Grand Prize
Until the Orchid Blooms
Polen LY｜Cambodia
For its holistic balance between subject and form, the film not only exposes the issue of the loss of native land to corporate takeover but also brings us into the lives and culture of its people, the beauty of nature, and childhood innocence and wonder, offering a wistful evocation of time and place that even flood waters cannot erase.
Jury Prize
CycleMahesh
Suhel BANERJEE｜India
Deeply textured, the film moves among documentary, fiction, and myth, blurring lived experience with reconstruction to form an immersive cinematic language. Its inventive camerawork places viewers within the motion of travel, where landscapes and fleeting encounters carry quiet symbolic weight. A journey toward home folds back on itself, revealing a cycle shaped by hardship and wonder. Through its circular structure, the film reflects not only one man’s path but the emotional toll of migration and the forces shaping it, offering a powerful meditation on resilience and the important but fragile promise of change.
Special Prize
Writing Hawa
Najiba NOORI, Rasul NOORI｜Afghanistan, France, Netherlands, Qatar
For its hopefulness in the face of despair, the film shows three generations of women, who in spite of oppressive patriarchy continue to educate themselves, initiate businesses, make independent life choices, and pass on the struggle for independence to successive generations of daughters. The lives of these mothers and daughters leave us an indelible memory of resistance.
Special Mention
Compact Disc
Rico WONG｜Hong Kong, United Kingdom
In the aftermath of 2019, dissenting voices from civil society were forcibly erased, yet the scars left by those who once bled for democracy and freedom did not disappear; they remain inscribed in the bodies of young students, becoming part of their very being. The director documents close friends who took to the streets, using their glitched personal footage and graffiti actions that can never be brought into the light of day, to bear witness for this generation of Hongkongers—an era in which voices were silenced, yet memory endures, indelibly etched in time.
International Competition
Grand Prize
Hair, Paper, Water…
TRƯƠNG Minh Quý, Nicolas GRAUX｜Belgium, France, Vietnam
A poetic ethnography woven from fragments of sound and image, this film gazes at how language, education, and modernisation quietly rewrite ethnic identity. It also traces the trajectory of culture’s journey as it moves from embodied memory and institutional inscription, ultimately toward a state of fluidity and dissipation. Even as languages vanish within state systems, culture endures and is reborn through acts of translation. Guided by narrative, sound, and text, perception and memory flow gently, turning the everyday into a site where preservation and loss intertwine. The film looks not merely at the ethnic group itself but at the irreversible variations of culture across time.
Jury Prize
Nocturnes
Anupama SRINIVASAN, Anirban DUTTA｜India, United States
This is not merely a conventional ecological documentary but a quiet probe into the act of ‘seeing’. Within the slow flow of time, repeated scientific observation transforms into an almost ritualistic practice. Light is no longer merely illumination but a shimmering field that summons moths into presence. Amid the layered interweaving of sound and darkness, the true subject emerges, as humans quietly recede to the edges of perception. The film seeks to challenge the anthropocentric gaze, guiding viewers to behold nature, dwell within it, and, as the senses awaken, rediscover their place among all beings.
Special Mention
Kabul, Between Prayers
Aboozar AMINI｜Belgium, Netherlands
What centre holds amid precarity? Set against the transition between a 20-year US-controlled government to the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, this film weaves an intimate landscape of the hopes and dreams of young Taliban fighters prepared for the inevitability of martyrdom. In the same vista, the woman appears in fragments. The film’s evocation of continuity under an internationally unrecognised regime simultaneously charts a gendered absence, where the persistence of tradition is inseparable from the erasure it sustains.
Taiwan Competition
Grand Prize
Scenes from Departure
Ray Kam-hei CHAN｜Hong Kong, Taiwan
What is a personal film? Why make a personal film at this time? This film starts small—a recorded video call, a grumpy dad inside his apartment. It’s a portrait of family relations, but one that doesn’t revolve around the voice and the internal conflicts of the filmmaker. Combining footage and images taken on different generations of devices within scattered fragments of time, it gradually reveals a father and son trying to live around loss, separation, and circumstances beyond a family’s control. It becomes a portrait of change made with modest means. Its quiet assurance, capacity to surprise, and subtle suggestion of an affinity between personal filmmaking and the mundane, everyday process of transformation leave a lasting impression.
Jury Prize
Colour Ideology Sampling.mov
CHAN Cheuk-sze, Kathy WONG｜Hong Kong, Taiwan
The act of ‘reaching across the aisle’ is never easy. As borders imposed by historical divisions of nation-states calcify worldwide, this film cleverly cloaks its media analysis, personal inquiry, and observational insights in a humorous investigatory mode—a ‘Trojan horse’ that goes beyond its labels. But the civic duty of its protagonist, the film’s diagrammatic precision, and the question it asks of a possibility of a future shared reality are taken very seriously. Mixing together vérité footage of debates that occur in private and public spaces with mixed media interstices, this film creatively locates the contradictions of political participation within our communities and potentially our own selves.
TIDF Visionary Award
Grand Prize
Compact Disc
Rico WONG｜Hong Kong, United Kingdom
A documentary that turns into a brilliant act of resistance against oblivion and erasure of the history of a city. A body, a physical medium that was thought to be obsolete, and even a sewage pipe function as counter-archive. This is a highly sophisticated work by a young filmmaker. It’s also a quiet celebration in the resilience of youth, finding a way to move on even as it manages not to forget.
Special Jury Prize
XiXi
WU Fan｜Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan
An intimate exploration of East Asian womanhood, one that celebrates the freedom of young women while honestly confronting the cost of challenging traditions. The story of its protagonist resonates deeply, mirroring the filmmaker’s own journey to discover her identity and place within generations of women who have made progress yet still struggle within patriarchy. We are inspired by the filmmaker’s openness towards its character’s eccentric personality—never with judgment, always with love. Furthermore, the director's presence in the film simultaneously shows her vulnerability and bravery.
Taiwan Film Critics Society Prize
Xiangzidian Village: The Stage
HU Sanshou｜China
With a documentarian's distinct patience, Hu Sanshou reclaims the lived experience of his hometown while relentlessly probing the edges of paradox. He charts a course from objectivity to intimacy, from this world to the next, and from landscape to stage. Over a decade of filming has not dulled his curiosity but distilled it into an alchemy of enigmas. Whether the Shaanxi village stands or falls, so long as a trace remains, his inquiry knows no bounds.
Next Generation Award
Colour Ideology Sampling.mov
CHAN Cheuk-sze, Kathy WONG｜Hong Kong, Taiwan
This film illustrates a lesson on political aesthetics through a whiteboard and a colour wheel, analyzing the rigid interpretations of colour in politics while giving viewers a new perspective on this topic through mimicking the scanning process. This documentary guides viewers to reposition subjectivity amidst colour changes, examining personal feelings and judgments toward political figures. Notably, neutrality is not the emphasis of this film. Rather, it breaks down the ideological barriers of politics through editing techniques, encouraging the viewers to subconsciously be open to diverse voices. In a society where politics is largely manipulated by media and public opinion, this film creates a lighthearted opportunity to visually acknowledge and reflect, acting as a doorway for teenagers to explore politics while also reminding us not to fall into arbitrary or singular frameworks of thought.
Audience Award
LA PALOMA
LU Yuan-chi｜Taiwan
Outstanding Contribution Award
Viewpoint
