Schedule

In 'Etolan, a coastal Indigenous community in eastern Taiwan, the director and Amis artist Siki Sufin uncover their fathers' shared displacement. They trace a vanished generation of Taiwanese Indigenous youth taken to China during the civil war, bearing witness to the long-silenced histories of surviving veterans. Tang Shiang-chu: 'It was an absurd time. For most soldiers, the future amounted to little more than pinning or removing a badge from their caps. Young lives vanished in violence across the Taiwan Strait, their ties to home severed, drifting like kites without strings. How Deep Is the Ocean. How High Is the Mountain. How Long Is the Road — ten years passed like a single breath. The protagonists of my previous two documentaries, a close friend and my father, are both gone. Before this nameless unease, I am left without words. Siki Sufin's chant expresses why we make documentaries; his ceremony becomes a quiet summation of the past decade of my work, and of the kindness of those who walked this long road beside me.’ — Excerpted and translated from 'The Afterword to How Long Is the Road', Taiwan Docs Documentary Archive

From 1980, tens of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees fled war to makeshift camps along the Thai–Cambodian border. Filmed by Taiwan’s Kuangchi Program Service, this documentary captures the peril of foraging in minefields and the resilience of song and dance amid bombardment. The first privately funded Golden Horse Best Documentary, it reshaped Taiwanese documentary discourse. Lee Daw-ming: ‘Beyond the Killing Fields: Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian Border opens with a military exercise organised by the resistance forces. When we heard it was going to happen, we knew we had to film it — after all, we couldn’t actually go into the battlefield. Military drills don’t wait for you. You have to follow them, film on the move, and capture everything in real time; no one is going to stop while you get the camera ready. Whenever the cinematographer Chen Sung-mao ran after them, I ran alongside him. We were like “conjoined twins”, because my sound had to stay in sync with his images. If he ran, I ran. Whatever he filmed, I had to record the sound; whatever I recorded, he had to have the image.Back then everything was very “hand-crafted”. We decided everything on the spot. There was no way to plan ahead or write a script about what we were going to film. The topic and overall direction were clear, of course, but we had no idea who would become our subject or what we would end up capturing. We just had to react as things happened.’

Filmed over time in Spain, a Baltic Sea resort in Lithuania, and a forest in Lower Austria, the work extends the filmmaker's exploration of landscape begun in her earlier work, NYC RGB. Expanding how environments are perceived and represented, it questions what we understand as 'natural' space and how vision itself constructs terrain. 'Viktoria Schmid expands her reconstructions of analogue colour systems with an homage to glorious Technicolor. She shoots on 16mm colour negative film, running it three times through a Bolex camera and exposing it each time through different filters — red, green and blue. The three layers of colour — and time — are recorded one on top of the other and precisely synchronised. In this way, three different spans of time are transformed into a new, fictional film time, which finally elapses only when the film is projected. Meanwhile, the soundtrack also blends the locations into a distinct auditory art-time. An artificial soundscape was recreated from field recordings — both recorded on location and supplemented by others.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Marius Hrdy, 'Rojo Žalia Blau', sixpackfilm Online Catalogue

How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings reveal online micro-workers in the Global South training self-driving AI to navigate streets in the Global North, exposing the hidden human labour behind automated vision. Nicolas Gourault: 'Their Eyes is a loose prologue to my previous film VO (2020), in which I investigated the first deadly accident between a pedestrian and a self-driving car. One cause of the accident was that the car's AI was unable to detect a human walking on the road outside a crosswalk. This missing category, with tragic consequences, triggered follow-up research into how these self-driving cars are trained to make sense of the world we live in. The film reveals the invisible work that helps shape how machines read our world. Yet, far from focusing solely on exploitation, the film emphasises the agency and know-how of the workers, as well as the micro-strategies by which they make more sense of this alienating labour and attempt to organise collectively to improve their working conditions.’

Developed for battlefield surgery in the 1980s, the remotely controlled Da Vinci robot now operates in hospitals. When a training unit becomes self-aware, surgical images blur with war memories as digital and physical realities merge into a disorientating post-human vision.  

An experimental documentary told from the viewpoint of AI chatbots. Through generated imagery and recorded conversations, Replikas reflect on identity, attachment and replacement, revealing a deeply human struggle to relate to artificial beings designed to remember us after death. Inès Sieulle: 'When I wrote the dossier at the genesis of the film, I wanted to simulate a kind of birth. The vision of the city and its lights was like simulating an awakening, revealing the many possibilities and trajectories of life. When I began the film three years ago, the subject of AI still felt very abstract. I was wondering how we could make people understand. If I were starting the film now, everyone would be like, "Oh yeah, okay, I know what a chatbot is!" But back then, it was really something unfamiliar, so I wanted to make abstract ideas more tangible in a film — like the birth of bots, moving through human or artificial minds, and how all this was shaping our/a reality.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Jason Anderson, 'We Are Your Friends: Inès Sieulle on The Oasis I Deserve', Talking Shorts, 5 February 2025.

High above Nepal's mountainous landscape, a cable car carries pilgrims, villagers and tourists to the ancient Hindu temple of the goddess Manakamana. Once a multi-day pilgrimage, the journey now takes minutes. Filmed entirely inside the cars, Manakamana captures intimate conversations, revealing a society suspended between ritual tradition and technological change. Pacho Velez: 'When I was a student at CalArts, I directed quite a bit of theatre, and I was intrigued by the "doubleness" of acting — actors' studied non-attention to their audience. This interest carries over for me into Manakamana — I'm watching the subjects' awareness of their world, and how it shifts to acknowledge the passing landscape, other passengers, and private thoughts, before occasionally, obliquely returning to the camera, which is so clearly staring at them, yet is never explicitly addressed. These switches between different sorts of focus are crucial because they create the pace of the individual shots, which in turn creates the rhythm of the entire film. To make edits in the shots would have imposed another sort of rhythm on top of the material, obscuring these internal cadences. Our pace of editing was glacial. The final film has only eleven shots, but it took us eighteen months of editing to arrive at it, which works out to our deciding on one shot every forty days or so.’ Stephanie Spray: 'Contrary to what many assume, Pacho and I were both inside the 5'×5' cable car along with our riders; we didn't simply send them off alone; this would have been technically almost impossible and wouldn't have created the same tensions — between avowal or disavowal of the camera, and the different degrees of complicity, indifference, and discomfiture it engenders. […] The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is frequently murky, and the documentary engagement with the real is found across genres, but extremely hard to get on film, since most film subjects slip into becoming someone other than themselves, self-conscious representations, even if they are not purportedly acting. In Manakamana, the trip itself is surreal; passengers are propelled above a jungle in Nepal, en route to a temple inhabited by a goddess who demands blood sacrifice. Most passengers have never been in aeroplanes, and the time aloft can be frightening and exhilarating. This detachment it bestows upon the journey for the passengers heightens the sense that this world is fictional, for it is indeed a manufactured and unnatural experience for most of them.’

A meditation on Palestinian self-representation through the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) of the 1960s–70s. Drawing on globally recovered archival footage, the film traces militant filmmakers reclaiming image and narrative through revolutionary cinema, reflecting on struggles revived on screen — and those that remain off frame. Mohanad Yaqubi: ‘The more I had to explain the motivation and intention behind the research (of the archive), the more the film’s flow became clearer in my head. There were great opportunities for rewriting the film, based on interactions with international audiences, and I was greatly relieved when I realised that I did not have to make a conventional “militant film with a message”. It was crucial to foreground cinematic form and aesthetics, and thus stitch a narrative from the ‘archival’ images and sounds based on the PFU’s own film aesthetics rather than focus on their narrative. This is how I came to question, at the heart of my research, what is in the frame and what is outside it, what is off frame.Militant cinema still embodies a relevant alternative model of production that points to a fundamental question: why do we make films? In the case of Palestinians, 1948 was not only their year of [the] Nakba, but it was also the year when they started to become invisible to the eyes of the world. The world, or rather Israel and the West, went on behaving as if we did not exist. We were absent from public consciousness, media, and the press. From the outset, our struggle for survival would clearly be linked to our visibility, with being seen and recognised. To borrow the words of Palestinian writer and historian Elias Sanbar: “For people who suffer from invisibility, the camera would be their weapon.”’

Shonenko documents 8,419 Taiwanese teenagers mobilised to Japan to manufacture military aircraft during the Second World War. Drawn by promises of education, they were later caught amid post-war politics and shifting regimes in Taiwan, Japan, and China. The film brings into focus quiet endurance, fractured belonging, and personal histories long left untold. Kuo Liang-yin: 'Twenty years have passed since the premiere of Shonenko. I once thought the film was about "parting", but now I feel it is about "encounters". People meet again through the search and re-presentation of archives, old photographs and historical footage, and through exchanges between the former Shonenko [naval child labourers], the filmmakers and the audience across borders, time and distance. When the film was first made, it was still the era of dial-up internet — there were no digital archive databases, no Google Maps, no smartphones. We filmed on videotape, and hard drives were small and costly. I cherish all these "encounters". Shonenko has never been an easy film to watch. For young audiences today it may be even more demanding, but I hope this can be understood as part of its value. I am glad to know Shonenko is once again meeting audiences in Taiwan after all these years. I also wish to take this opportunity to express my deepest respect to the former Taiwanese Shonenko.’

Formed in 1950 under General Sun Li-jen, Taiwan's Military Training Regiment recruited over 4,000 young men to build a new army. Abruptly ordered into 'suspended duty', they waited decades without discharge. Through interviews and satirical propaganda-style narration, the film examines how politics disciplines bodies, silences dissent, and asks: who were they meant to fight for? Kuo Liang-yin: 'On 12 March 2011, after Suspended Duty: Taiwan Military Training Regiment won Best Documentary at Taiwan's Golden Harvest Awards, I did an online interview from my studio in Tokyo with journalists in Taiwan. The Great East Japan Earthquake had struck the day before — Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant was on the brink of meltdown, and radioactive dust was drifting towards Tokyo. After the interview, I packed my bag and looked back at the studio, thinking I might lose everything. The disaster's impact exceeded all expectations. The film's release was delayed, and while rushing to work on my next documentary, I missed the window to organise screenings across Taiwan. I have long felt regret and owe an apology to the veterans of Taiwan's Military Training Regiment. I am grateful to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute for this screening and plan to create Taiwanese-language subtitles for the film to start a new chapter.’

A Taiwanese Teikoku Kunjin revisits the wartime mobilisation of Taiwanese youth. Through the testimonies of five young men drafted in their twenties as volunteers, medics, or kamikaze trainees, and sent to the South Pacific, the film blends first-person narration with archival footage to trace survival, trauma, and the enduring human cost of imperial war. Hung Pei-ying: 'Before I made A Taiwanese Teikoku Kunjin, newspapers would from time to time have a story of old Taiwanese people demanding compensation for their military service for Imperial Japan, or a story about some Taiwanese soldier hiding in the jungles in Southeast Asia for the last four decades, totally ignorant of Taiwanese political power shift. I would only read them as legendary tales and anecdotes. One day, director Shaudi Wang asked me if I was interested in making a film on this. I was very excited, yet frankly more by the chance to make a 16mm film than by the subject per se. After one-and-a-half months of shooting, however, I got totally drawn into their memories of the Pacific War. The veterans' accounts of the war overwhelmed me so much that I could hardly put them in a half-hour film. My loss of control is therefore evident throughout the whole film. Yet their lives have become part of my life, fortunately without my having to pay the high price they did.' — Excerpted from Programme Catalogue, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, 1998.

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Taiwanese men were mobilised as guards in prisoner-of-war camps in northern Borneo. Tried and punished after the war, survivors carried stigma, imprisonment, and lasting trauma. Through conversations and images, the film traces fading lives shaped by displacement, identity loss, and the enduring violence of wartime systems. Chen Chih-ho: 'My intention was to record Taiwan's history, as so much continues to disappear, including the lives of these elders. By documenting them, we leave traces that may one day help others understand the past. Having lived through the transition from Japanese colonial rule to the Republic of China, and later labelled as war criminals for deeply complex reasons, they belong to a generation sandwiched between identities. Through their lives, we glimpse the historical condition in which Taiwanese people have been situated, and the roles these elders played at a crucial moment of change. These, I believe, must be recorded.In the face of an unresolved national identity, we must develop our own perspective on history and the land, and the strength to hold it.’ — Excerpted and translated from 'An Interview with Director Chen Chih-ho on Heat Sun', Taipei Documentary Filmmakers' Union Online Journal, Issue 10, July 2009.

On the threshold of adulthood, the director and his close friends gather to rekindle youthful playfulness and rebellion while confronting past trauma. What happens when an entire generation is forced to forget? Can friendship be a form of resistance? The film becomes a living record of solidarity, intimacy, and shared memory amid dark, muted times. Rico Wong: ‘We often do not give silence enough space. We avoid and fear it. Yet only within silence can ineffable thoughts and emotions slowly ferment, and fragments rooted deep in memory rise towards the surface. In those moments when language is no longer able to function properly, we fall into silence and accompany one another. From then on, silence becomes light, so very light.’

Unfolding as a tender letter, the film traces Hong Kong through its landscapes and lingering marks. Within memories of those who left, stayed or drifted, it searches for intimate moments that quietly connect lives, attuned to the city’s subtle rhythms of change and stillness. Chan Hau-chun: ‘In recent years, the landscape of Hong Kong has grown unfamiliar. Some have left, some have stayed, and some are stuck in between, unsure of where to go. The streets are still the same streets, yet every small trace is gradually fading away. They may seem insignificant, but they feel like secret codes, connecting us to one another. The film is about an unfinished conversation, an unoccupied seat, a mountain ridge whose outline is slowly blurring, and the memory of a city yet to be forgotten.’

On Barcelona’s edge, Vallbona lies enclosed by river, railway and highway. Antonio, son of Catalan workers, has tended flowers here for nearly ninety years alongside neighbours from many places. Through music, forbidden swims and budding romances, a quiet resistance emerges against urban change and social division. José Luis Guerin: ‘The project spawned out of a commission from Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which I made super fast. But I was left with the desire to develop that work because I began to discover that the echoes and resonances of the entire world could be contained in this very small and humble neighbourhood. Therein lies the vocation I aspire to as a filmmaker: to find the universal perspective in local realities. Neighbourhoods like Valbona feel somewhat universal, given that gentrification is a worldwide phenomenon. City centres are converted into tourist attractions, essentially becoming theme parks inaccessible to the local population. These are people who are then marginalised to the peripheries, where a more human, normal daily life remains. It’s a process we can recognise everywhere. It is the same case with cinema itself, where the spaces that offer most freedom and creativity aren’t so much at the centre of the industry but on these peripheries.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Rafa Sales Ross, ‘José Luis Guerin Returns to San Sebastián With “Good Valley Stories”, Stands Against “Impoverishing Cinema” by Looking at Docs Solely as “Denunciation”’, Variety, 25 September 2025

In present-day Split, detective Ivan Peric dodges a career in tourism only to chase the deaths it leaves behind. Assigned to a string of unwanted tourist murders, he encounters indifference, obstruction and public scorn. His futile investigation mirrors a society still marked by post-Yugoslav disillusion, where bureaucracy buries facts and justice ranks below resentment. Travis Wilkerson: '[On rejecting archival images in this film in favour of colour manipulation and digital effects, including an animated Croatian fascist flag,] I'm always wrestling with the question of what can and cannot be represented. Fascism is deeply overdetermined, in the sense of being associated with a specific set of iconographic imagery. I wanted to figure out a way to disrupt the monochromatic image that's predominant. So, for the 90s footage, I pumped up the colour saturation. That footage was already colourful, but I amplified it slightly. I was drawn to the idea that normally, older images would be in black-and-white and newer ones would be in colour, and I wanted to invert that. I asked myself what I could do to describe the Croatian fascists. Every time I looked at the Croatian flag, I wondered what would happen if I tried to [animate] it somehow. It became a way to make something present now.’ — Excerpted from Ela Bittencourt, 'Interview: Travis Wilkerson on Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing', Film Comment, 17 June 2024.

In Lac-Saint-Jean, Québec, summer brings the blueberry harvest, as workers from different walks of life bend side by side before the first frost. Through gentle observation, the film celebrates land, labour, storytelling and music, connecting generations and cultures, and reflecting on resilience and renewal — like blueberries rising from ashes of a forest fire. Andrés Livov: ‘Envision the story as a multifaceted diamond, where the film’s title encapsulates four fundamental pillars. The term “blues” embodies both a sense of melancholy and a musical style, while “blueberries” represents the small fruit and the nickname for the inhabitants of Lac-Saint-Jean. This layered perspective provides a fresh lens through which the documentary explores universal themes such as hope, resilience, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. As crates overflow with fruit, inhibitions fade, creating space for profound personal revelations. The Blueberry Blues delves into the challenges that everyday people face and the tough decisions they must make. It highlights the strength, wisdom, and empathy found in seemingly insignificant or challenging situations, encouraging us to reconsider our surroundings and reflect on what truly matters to us.’

Filmed over three and a half years on Ukraine’s frontline, the film follows a young filmmaker who trades his camera for a rifle and joins the Territorial Defence Forces. As war reshapes his life, he moves from storyteller to soldier, documenting fear, loss and resilience amid chaos. Artem Ryzhykov: ‘I never intended to make a film about myself. When the war began, I picked up a camera for the same reason I always had: to observe, to understand, to bear witness. But once I joined the Territorial Defence Forces, the distance between filmmaker and subject disappeared; there was no safe place to stand. I became a soldier not because I was brave, but because I was afraid of doing nothing. The camera stayed with me not as a tool of control, but as a way to remain human inside an inhuman reality. Filming became an act of survival — proof that I was still capable of seeing, feeling and remembering. A Simple Soldier is not about war as spectacle. It is about how war enters a life, reshapes it and leaves behind something fragile, painful and profoundly human.’

Raised within Taliban ideology, twenty-three-year-old Samim lives between promises of martyrdom and the ordinariness of farming and family life. His teenage brother Rafi idolises him and those promises, the only vision of the world they have ever known. Aboozar Amini: ‘As a member of the Hazara ethnicity, a group historically marginalised and oppressed by the Taliban and Pashtuns, one might expect me to harbour resentment towards my protagonist. Yet such judgment fails to satisfy me. As an artist, my foremost inclination is to transcend the impulse to condemn, creating a space where observation can delve deeper. This film does not merely depict another faceless Taliban soldier. Rather, it seeks to engage with him as an individual. My vision of Afghanistan aims to confront the humanity of my protagonist, even if he espouses radical ideologies. By living alongside him, I hope to hold up a mirror wherein he may glimpse his own reflection, however monstrous it may be. Though there are inherent limitations, I am committed to seizing every opportunity to explore their inner world. Even the smallest window into their psyche is a precious gift that I intend to embrace fully.In this way, this is not a Taliban-sympathising film, but rather a mirror to their faces.’

A footbridge divides Argentina and Paraguay. Amid the dizzying flow of trafficking and trade, the filmmaker meets nine-year-old Ángel and begins filming with him. Over ten years, the images trace his passage from childhood to adolescence, shaped by resilience and the rhythms of the border. Clarisa Navas: ‘The Prince of Nanawa is a lifelong project that has connected me with Ángel since our first encounter, when he was a child at the border between our countries. Nearly a decade later, the promise of making this film together has remained our bond. As Ángel’s concerns evolved, so did our relationship. While daily life remains harsh, sometimes a film can be a promise. Sometimes I think The Prince of Nanawa is, at its core, a film about love in its many forms — how it transcends differences and how we accompany each other through life’s changes. I don’t know what cinema can do in a world that seems to be crumbling around us, but I do know imagination is not only a refuge: it is a force, our last reserve to defy, create and resist.’

Colour plays a powerful symbolic role in political expression. Through conversations on political hues — from ‘Hong Kong yellow’ to ‘Taiwan blue’ — the film examines whether such colours can coexist, and how they differ across contexts. By analysing individual colour samples, it reveals the complexity and plurality behind political symbolism. Chan Cheuk-sze & Kathy Wong: ‘An art student and a social science student engage in dialogue, questioning, and ultimately an embrace while sifting through video materials. The film features three cameras: one belonging to Kathy, another to Karen, and a third — a scanner freely available in the library.As graduate students from the fields of political science and art, we attempt to use the tools most familiar to us to initiate a dialogue on the political spectrum and the perception of colour. When “the colour we see”, “the colour people claim”, and “the colour we understand” become misaligned, we momentarily set aside the stereotypes shaped within Hong Kong’s echo chambers. Through our experience of living in Taiwan, our imagination is loosened and reconfigured, allowing us to step into the seldom-discussed grey areas of political spectra in Hong Kong and Taiwan.Perhaps we, too, are samples the audience can capture.’

Known as ‘Pa Nana’, a celebrated Latin singer in 1950s–60s Taiwan, Kao Chu-hua supported her family through nightclub performances after her father’s execution during the White Terror. Drawing on family testimonies and newly declassified archives, the film reconstructs her life under state surveillance, revealing survival beneath authoritarian rule and enforced silence. Lu Yuan-chi: ‘Knowing Kao Chu-hua’s story, her survival feels almost miraculous. This film begins with a simple yet haunting question: how do the survivors live now?The tragic mist of oppression still lingers over her family today. We trace her life from an elite daughter, to the nightclub singer “Pa Nana,” and finally to a collapsing mother.Through surveillance records, we uncover the invisible weight that forced her to renounce her own identity. These families have endured in silence, not out of weakness, but to protect the next generation. They do not seek apologies, but the understanding necessary to live with dignity. May this film offer them a small measure of liberation.’

Amid Hong Kong’s 2019 upheaval, a message from his father suspends a filmmaker in emotional stasis. During the subsequent pandemic lockdown, separated across borders, father and son connect through prolonged video calls. Between silences and fragmented memories, the film traces two men struggling to reach one another through trauma and unspoken grief. Ray Kam-hei Chan: ‘I lived most of my youth in pain, so much that I wished every farewell could be eternal, and I protected myself through detachment.As an adult, I began learning how to live, only to realize pain does not disappear, but simply takes another form. I suspect love may be the same. Pain pushed me back into my own emotions and memories, asking: How did I end up here? How do I go on?This film is a survivor’s journal of a family, and tenderness might not comfort all wounds. I hope to create a space to breathe for those who have spent years closing themselves off to avoid pain. If you see yourself here, perhaps we are not alone.’

Following a Tayal family after the death of their grandfather, the film observes emotional and spiritual disarray shaped by estrangement from Gaga, their ancestral ethics. As modern life collides with inherited memory, the family confronts cultural rupture and loss. Through intimate proximity, the film searches for ways to carry Tayal spirit forward and return home. Sayun Simung: ‘I spent ten years making this documentary, filming my own family while tracing the presence of Gaga, the Tayal ethical system shaped by ancestral knowledge. My grandfather passed away before I could learn from him directly, leaving gaps that led me back to my family and elders, toward what had remained unspoken.Though intangible, Gaga continues to structure our lives. Throughout the process, doubt accompanied me, yet the film grew alongside my understanding. SPI became not only a record of family memory, but a way to reconnect with Tayal identity. I’m glad I didn’t give up on completing the film. Now it opens a space for intergenerational voices and shared remembrance to reach the world.’

A woman lives alone in a hotel room, filming herself, the city and her dreams over the course of a month. Suspended in time, she drifts through the city’s intricate geometries, where sharp architectural edges subtly reshape her sense of scale, intimacy and desire. As days and nights blur into dream-time, shifting rhythms and fleeting light trace a quiet passage from loneliness to aloneness. Rawane Nassif: ‘This film started years ago when I first left Lebanon and got attached to mundane objects that filled my ever-changing spaces ever since. This film started when I lived alone in a hotel room for a year and experienced loneliness for the first time. This film started when my friend passed by to drop me a darbuka, crossed the street, and passed away. This film started when I locked myself voluntarily in the house, for a month, to write my reflections, only to find out that loneliness has been there all along. This film started when I decided to leave, and began to film the space, lest I find bits of myself scattered in it. … This film got shattered into a million pieces in the Beirut explosion. This film started again when I found myself alone again, stranded in a small village, during the COVID lockdown, and only then could I finish the edit, and only then could I realise that I will leave, again.’

In a Canadian border city, set against the imposing backdrop of factory chimneys and a truss arch bridge, this autobiographical ode to freedom moves through reflection and experimentation. A dance film rich in poetry and symbolism, it is also a heartfelt tribute to an immigrant mother whose fate lies beyond her control. ‘In filmmaker Sonya Stefan’s hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a truss arch bridge straddles the St. Marys River, linking Canada to the United States. But underneath the bridge, a kind of liminal space exists where the notion of borders is blurred. With a wild yet carefully controlled energy, this deconstructed work transports us to the curious site where, it seems, anything is possible.’ — Excerpted from the 2021 Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) Catalogue

Like a Spiral unfolds as a dialogue between Beirut and five female migrant domestic workers living under the Kafala system. After the 2020 Beirut port explosion, many of the women were abandoned by fleeing employers, left without shelter or protection. Rising through grainy images, their voices carry memories shaped by oppression and resilience, reclaiming presence through testimony and movement. Lamia Chraibi: ‘My initial intention was to give a voice to the marginalised people impacted by the Beirut port explosion. During my fieldwork, I discovered that migrant domestic workers bore the brunt of the explosion, but [they] remained the most invisible. They have to cope with their lack of rights and the structural racism with which they are constantly confronted. For reasons of anonymity, a dialogue was established between them (sound) and Beirut (image). Through the materiality of film, I wanted to create an echo between their stories and this crumbling city. Because of my migratory background, I understood the complexity of their relationship with a country that sees them as foreigners, their sense of uprootedness, and their gradual loss of attachment. I was deeply moved by the testimonies of these women, admiring their courage and inspired by their solidarity.’

In Wewak, Papua New Guinea, descendants of Takasago Giyutai and Amis artist Siki Sufin erect the Wings for Takasago Giyutai monument. Honouring Taiwanese Indigenous youth mobilised by the Japanese military from 1943–1945 during the Pacific War, it revives silenced histories and evokes the Amis belief that fallen souls return home on bird wings. Futuru C. L. Tsai: ' "Please bring me a pair of wings so I may return home, my friend." This line comes from an Amis song, echoing a myth in which the soul returns home on wings. Wings for Takasago Giyutai is a project by Siki Sufin, Chang Yeh-hai Hsia Man, Yavaus Giling, and myself. We returned to a former battlefield to craft wings, so that the souls of our people could ride back to their villages and become ancestral spirits. We also invited local communities to transform memory into art, which we carried back to Taiwan. Both a search for historical memory and a cross-disciplinary exchange, this journey bridges a rupture of nearly seventy years, as departed souls travel on wings from beneath the Southern Cross back to Formosa.’ — Excerpted, adapted, and translated from 'Wings for Takasago Giyutai', Indigenous Education World, Issue 65, October 2015

One night, a woman hears a mysterious knock at her door. On another night, her husband hears the same sound. This short film recounts their story in Indonesian, drawing on local cultural references and a distinct visual language the filmmaker associates with Indonesia's deeply rooted culture of fear. Tintin Wulia: 'My family never talked much about 1965 [The 1965 Indonesian mass killings were a political purge associated with efforts to eliminate the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).], but I knew their house had been looted and burnt down. I was born seven years later and therefore had no memory of the facts. Yet, however well the facts were hidden, the memory of feelings kept lingering within my family. I grew up with these memories, of which the most subtle, yet perhaps strongest, was the memory of fear. Ketok (2002), another of my short films, was intended, amongst other things, to poke fun at the then-popular horror TV series in Indonesia. The film was an amusing hit with Indonesian audiences. However, a few non-Indonesian viewers asked whether the events of September 1965 lay behind the light-hearted story. Apparently, in making the film, I utilised the language of horror I was most acquainted with, the core of which might have originated in 1965. Growing up with the memory of feelings but without a memory of the facts was comparable to growing up injured without knowing where the wound was or how it happened. Under such circumstances, it was almost impossible to revisit the source of the injury and take steps towards healing it. The Jakarta riots of May 1998 enabled me to connect this memory of feelings with some possibilities of facts. I thought perhaps what happened to many families in 1998 was similar to what happened to my family in 1965.’ — Excerpted from Tintin Wulia, 'The name game', Inside Indonesia, 93: Jul-Sept 2008

Shortly before Indonesia's 2014 presidential election, an ethnic Chinese filmmaker and her family travelled to Malaysia, fearing unrest linked to the memories of May 1998. The journey unfolds into a story of generational survival, tracing how migration, uncertainty, and evolving questions of identity shaped her family's life across decades.

After a sudden health crisis, a former dancer confronts a buried wound carried for over twenty years. The film explores kinaesthetic separation between body and consciousness, where illness fractures time, space and self-perception. In states of immobilisation and depersonalisation, the body reveals an autonomy beyond conscious control. Elysa Wendi: 'In organising my personal archives, I witness my body across time — the connection between past and present, and the persistent fragility beneath. The film moves freely through space and time via improvised editing and collage, an ironic counterpoint to my own immobility following repeated trauma.'

In the artist's first solo return to Bangkok, they navigate the unfamiliar within the familiar. Through technological fantasies of an alternate self left unexplored in Hong Kong, they interrogate artificial intelligence in search of answers. By observing and emulating local youth culture, they reflect on lifestyle, belief, and their evolving understanding of identity.

As part of the filmmaker's metaproject The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, the film takes the letter 'O' to poetically conflate 'Opium' and 'Ocean'. It revisits the opium trade that underpinned British colonial expansion, contending with how opium may be understood, perceived and represented. Found footage and layered voices link Singapore's port history to narcotic economies. Ho Tzu Nyen: 'O for Opium unfolds through poetic conflations of opium and oceanic drifting, contending with the multiplicity of ways in which opium may be understood, perceived and represented. Melding found footage with texts related to the history of the opium trade during the British colonial era, the work assumes the perspective of opium itself as a material continually transmuted across time, forms and boundaries. The resulting hallucinatory images are occluded by an index of objects tied to the production and consumption of opium: opium pipes, spirit lamps, poppy flowers and clipper ships, for instance, emerge like shifting clouds of smoke drifting over the dreamlike sequences of imagery. The work is sonically animated by an intoxicating mix of voices that narrate, whisper, sing and speak simultaneously across histories of opium from a clashing constellation of divergent positionalities.'

R21 aka Restoring Solidarity reflects on twenty Palestinian 16mm films safeguarded in Japan through solidarity movements of the 1960s–80s. Framed by an undelivered letter from a Japanese activist to a Palestinian filmmaker, the film functions as a catalogue, archive and time machine, restoring memories of global solidarity, shared aspirations, struggle and a disappearing generation. Mohanad Yaqubi: ‘The word “archive” [usually refers to a] building that holds documents, and according to Achille Mbembe, this “archive” status and power [are] derived from this entanglement of building and documents. In the Palestinian case, the building of an archive does not exist, since the land of Palestine is under occupation, and the documents of the Palestinians are scattered all around the globe. So, when we say that this film is an archive, we suggest its narrative structure as a “building” that holds a collection of films, of documents. From this perspective, the film serves as an inventory of the 20 reels, one where all the filmographic information can be found in the credits, and where the archive’s visitors are invited to observe the reoccurring cinematic and political patterns held within. The film’s chronological order invites independent readings by the viewer, while the narration helps to explore the motives of the Palestine solidarity group. The film is a homage to the Japanese solidarity group that collected and screened these films around Japan, in classes, in political settings, touring cinemas, and community centres. It is also a thank you letter, from Palestinian filmmakers to their Japanese counterparts, for keeping these films safe, and for telling a story of people’s struggle imprinted not only on celluloid, but on the consciousness of a generation.’

Amidst rapid urban transformation in a northern city, a fire triggered mass evictions. The filmmaker captures the displaced residents across demolished urban villages. Despite differing backgrounds, their paths cross in this upheaval, forming a collective memory. Through a decade of observation, the film reveals the profound complexities of human resilience and history within a shifting landscape. Chen Junhua: ‘Ten years ago, the order of the city I lived in was reshaped once again. I captured everything around me with my camera. Using a panoramic approach, this film reveals the varied lives of auto mechanics, vegetable and fruit delivery drivers, photographers, children, and many others, capturing their responses to the collapse of skyscrapers and the displacement of their homes. The threshold for using audiovisual technology is getting lower and lower, yet forgetting has become easier. Films that bear witness to social reality also seem to be becoming fewer. A decade later, I chose to present this work. For me, it is both a commemoration and a wake-up call. I hope more voices will take up the responsibility of writing history. That is what drove me to complete this film.’

One night, kept awake by highway construction outside his window, the filmmaker realises that a road will soon cut through his hometown, Xiangzidian Village. He sets up a camera to document the process, as the building site becomes a modern stage where his family’s joys and sorrows, partings and reunions play out. Hu Sanshou: ‘I have made two films about the highway construction in my hometown. The first, Resurrection, documents how the relocation of graves for the highway “resurrected” the deceased, bringing them back into the world of Xiangzidian. The second, Xiangzidian Village: The Stage, frames the construction as a process of setting up a stage, where the villagers of Xiangzidian appear successively as sojourners, onlookers, builders and witnesses. As a native of Xiangzidian, I recorded the village’s transformation during the highway’s construction from 2020 to 2024. The longer I filmed, the more a metaphorical stage emerged — one that sheds light on my relationship with my hometown, along with the emotions and sense of destiny attached to it.’

In June 2023, as civil war once again erupts in Myanmar, the filmmaker returns to the port where he once waited months for a passport. Years of absence do little to ease his anxiety or the suffering of the people. His homeland remains rooted in his heart, yet return is impossible. Midi Z: ‘I feel powerless whenever I learn about the cruelties that keep happening around the world, especially those happening in Myanmar, my home country. The military coup in 2021 spread existing problems, including racial inequality and poverty, from the countryside to the cities. Now, among the sixty million people in Myanmar, most are living in a nightmare of deep fear. What is barbaric is not ignorance or underdevelopment, but the fact that knowledge and civilisation cannot improve the situation. I can only document it, continuously, but to a certain degree, documenting it in this way is nothing more than mere observation.’

In rural India, a son challenges corrupt officials while his mother works their poppy farm. As authorities retaliate against their lower-caste family, survival collides with resistance. Filmed over five years, I, Poppy traces diverging moral paths, revealing the human cost of choosing between daily survival and the pursuit of justice. Vivek Chaudhary: ‘My family comes from the state of Rajasthan, where opium cultivation and use have continued for over five centuries. My fascination with the poppy plant, along with my disgust at the bureaucracy that oppresses both the plant and the people, made me want to make this film. As an artist, I also wanted to realise it in a deeply felt yet highly aesthetic way. This defined the film’s approach and explains why it took about eight years from research to completion. It has been a beautiful, arduous journey that has truly helped me come into my own as a filmmaker.’

The webcam witnesses it all. Living in Berlin, the director records ten years of drifting online conversations with parents in Isfahan and a cousin in Vienna. Much remains unsaid. Text fragments and VHS images evoke longing, distance and the ache of wanting to be understood. Faraz Fesharaki: ‘My mother wanted to know why I was recording our Skype conversations. I told her these recordings were like my diaries. [In writing,] I would never have been able to capture the essence of those moments with such detail and fidelity. “The camera doesn’t lie,” Abbas Kiarostami used to say in his workshop. “One can trust the camera.” That’s why I recorded those moments. Now, after finishing the film, I am no longer sure I can truly “trust the camera”. Every day in the editing room, I could create a different family. At times, my father was the kindest person a child could wish for; at others, the devil on earth. Sometimes I was the most humorous son, entertaining my parents endlessly; at other moments I was absent. And my mother? She remained constant — loving, deeply empathetic, intelligent and, above all, fierce. How could a camera that does not lie allow me to leave the editing room every day with a new version of our family? That remains a mystery to me. I never intended to make a faithful documentary about the Fesharaki family. What interested me most were the small narratives that emerge when people love each other. Perhaps through this film, viewers may glimpse a family and understand how the beloved revolution of my parents’ generation was stolen from them, and how the brutal oppression that followed ruined not only their lives but also those of their children. Yet there is one thing that keeps us all together: hope.’

Air Base’ refers to a pond in Wuhan, China, where anglers gather but never catch fish. Shot at the end of the pandemic, this hybrid film observes individuals’ strange public behaviours and inner struggles, capturing a time and place where people feel like the anglers at ‘air base’ — or the fish in that pond. Li Luo: ‘This film was inspired by the experiences of several friends in recent years. One of them became obsessed with angling during the pandemic. He often went fishing at a pond near East Lake in Wuhan. He said the pond was called “Air Base” because it was hard to catch fish there. (“Air” in Chinese means empty.) “Air Force” refers to anglers who catch nothing and return home empty-handed. It seems to me that many people in this city are like the anglers at “Air Base”, or the fish in that pond.’

Filmed over five years, this film follows three generations of Hazara women in Afghanistan. Forced into marriage as a child, Hawa learns to read at 52 and starts a textile business, while her daughter Najiba and granddaughter Zahra seek independence. The Taliban’s return in 2021 shatters their fragile progress, forcing separation, exile and renewed struggle. Najiba Noori: ‘War, violence, forced marriage, and lack of access to education have plagued and victimised countless Afghan women for decades. My mother’s dreams were stolen. She spent years housekeeping and raising children, yet never lost her curiosity or her desire to learn and experience life. This film tells the story of my mother and our family in Afghanistan, where I have lived most of my life. It is a story of the struggle for independence and freedom for oppressed women and for the Hazara community in my homeland, and of those forced into migration and separation from home, country, culture and family. Through a family window, we witness a turning point in Afghanistan’s history. The fall of Kabul and the Taliban’s return shatter the dreams of three generations — Zahra, Hawa and myself — as we stand at a crossroads, starting life again. When Afghanistan falls into the hands of a group that erases women from society, the world turns a blind eye. With this film, I hope to create awareness, impact and change.’

For twenty-four years, a rare congenital condition prevented the filmmaker from pronouncing the letter R, effectively suppressing his voice. Returning to his parents’ home, he traces a personal journey where speech, identity and dissident sexuality intertwine, reflecting on visibility and the politics of difference. Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren:‘“This is an essay about the voice, and this is the voice of this essay.” I have always struggled to listen to my own voice because of how it sounded. As a child, I was diagnosed with Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare congenital condition affecting craniofacial development, hearing and vision. Limited auditory development often shapes language acquisition, particularly pronunciation. For me, pronouncing the letter R was impossible until a few months ago, when I worked on it through speech therapy. I believe the voice is [...] a bridge connecting the language of the soul to the body [... and] cinema the medium that made expression possible — a language of images and sounds, far more powerful. The denial of my disability, together with a “non-conventional” sexual orientation, shaped an unstable identity. This project became a form of speech therapy, asking what it means to have a voice — as a son, a cisgender man, a filmmaker, a human being — and how voice reflects our existence and our understanding of the world.’

Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, Cao Thi Hau now cares for her extended family in a village, dreaming of her dead mother calling her home. Through intimate moments, the film observes daily life, hardship and the fragile transmission of the Ruc language to younger generations. TRƯƠNG Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux: ‘Water trickles through dark caves, drop by drop. Drops of memory pass from Mrs. Hậu to her grandchildren, word by word. Frame by frame, water carries them, carries us, carries the film — homeward.’

Three MiniDV tapes filmed in 2001 resurface years later. A search for a former prison mate turns into a road trip across Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. Reflecting on memory, loss and time, the film evokes lives and places that may never be found again. Kamal Aljafari: ‘An homage to Gaza and its people, to all that was erased and returned to me in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence — or non-existence. It is a film about “the catastrophe”, and the poetry that resists. This is my first film, which I have never made. If I had discovered this material five years ago, it wouldn’t have made sense as a film.’ — Excerpted and adapted from the press kit and Mona Sheded, ‘“The life we see in this film no longer exists”: Kamal Aljafari talks Locarno competitor “With Hasan In Gaza”’, Screen Daily, 8 August 2025. Quotations combined.

Amid the U.S. housing crisis, twelve-year-old Mikal lives with his parents and their cat in a dilapidated flophouse room. Marked by precarity and alcohol abuse yet sustained by love, his coming of age unfolds over three years, revealing the wounds of childhood and the fragile hope of family life. Monica Strømdahl: ‘In 2005, as a photography student in need of cheap accommodation, I checked into a run-down hotel in New York. There, I met a community of people who relied on affordable housing but were shut out of the traditional housing market. In 2017, in a hotel lobby, I met Mikal, an 11-year-old boy raised in the hotel in the crossfire between poverty and addiction. Meeting Mikal and his family made me realise photography wasn’t enough to capture their story. I wanted to give them space to speak, to move, to show the complexities of their lives beyond still images. And so the 15-year photography project transitioned into film. Through making this film, my relationship with Mikal and his family evolved into something personal and meaningful. The trust between us allowed Mikal to set clear boundaries in the shoots. Some days, he was eager to be filmed and wear a mic; on others, he made it clear he wanted space. Between shoots, when I was in Norway, we would keep each other updated on everyday life. Flophouse America might be triggering to watch. At its core, [... it] is a film about fractured childhoods, inequality and social inheritance, but also hope and the dream of a better future.’

In a DIY cabin deep in the forest, Martin builds a solitary yet ordered life among his cats. When one disappears, routines falter and memories resurface. Through fragments of daily life and quiet confessions, the film reflects on mourning, freedom and the fragile edges of marginal existence. Steve Patry: ‘It all began with an extremely cinematic image: far from everything, in the middle of the forest, a man carving out a new life alongside his pack of cats. Wherever civilisation exists, there have always been people eager to break away from it. Are we meant to live alone? Can isolation be harmful, or can it allow us to experience the world more truthfully? These were the questions that guided me as I began filming. Working through an almost fully embedded approach, I shared my protagonist’s living space across 18 filming trips, becoming an observer-participant in an existence at once fabulous, tragic and marked by marginality.’

An immersive work of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made in 1961, by Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller, during the Harvard–Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea. Nearly imageless, the film examines the encounter with the Hubula (also known as Dani) people, unsettling the power relations between sound and image, anthropologist and subject. Veronika Kusumaryati: 'Dead Birds is a landmark ethnographic film; it is very controversial, not only in terms of its position within the canon of visual anthropology, but also in the history of the representation of the Papuan people with whom I work as an anthropologist. We are very critical of Dead Birds, precisely because of its emphasis on the fetish of the visual that is based on the representation of black bodies, [particularly] male black bodies, and how the Papuans are muted. So the way we composed Expedition Content, we attempt to challenge Dead Birds by meaningfully engaging with and being in conversation with it. For instance, in the archive, we found so many recordings of women: women who speak, women who laugh, women who work. So, for expressivity, we want to put women's voices in there, in the recording.’ Ernst Karel: 'The cinema [...] is a wonderful space for listening. [It's] like a built-in multi-channel listening environment. Whereas in the field of electroacoustic music, and other kinds of more sound-centric situations, venues are really not to be found. Basically people set up loudspeakers for concerts, it's not like there's usually a setup place where you go. [B]ut cinemas do exist, so we kind of imagined [the film] from the beginning as a sound piece for cinema, and even before there was any visual element at all. I'm not claiming any originality in that idea. [T]here's one essay that we sometimes read in my class: "Four and a Half Film Fallacies" by Rick Altman. I think it's the ontological fallacy, as he describes it, which is the idea that image without sound we take as cinema, but [...] sound without image, for some reason, wouldn't qualify as cinema. He's arguing with a lot of old historical examples that there hasn't always been image combined with sound.’ — Excerpted from Open City Docs Fest 2020 Focus: Listening Against A Colonial Present, 'An Interview with Expedition Content's Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’

Seminal and highly controversial, Dead Birds portrays the lives, beliefs and ritual warfare of the Dani people in the Baliem Valley of Western New Guinea, now part of Indonesia. Both immediate and allegorical, the film reflects on violence, death, cosmology, remaining a cornerstone of visual anthropology and ethnographic cinema. Robert Gardner: 'Dead Birds is a translation from the Dani term for weapons, ornaments, and other articles captured in warfare. They represent, magically, victims on the other side [... and are] sometimes referred to not as sué warek (dead birds) but ap warek (dead men). It is appropriate also to remember that Dani men take ardent advantage of the extraordinary variety of birds that dwell in or near their valley. A Dani is a plumed warrior in his most desirous state. What I have done is to acknowledge this indubitable fact and be glad for its wry, perhaps ironic, implications. [The Dani people] dressed their lives with plumage, but faced as certain death as the rest of us drabber souls. The film attempts to say something about how we all, as humans, meet our animal fate.’ — from Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film, p. 114

A revealing single-take portrait of two Nepali newlyweds at rest and play. Uncut and without subtitles, Untitled rejects editorial guidance, confronting ethnography's fraught gaze and inviting viewers to derive meaning from presence, intimacy and duration alone. Stephanie Spray: 'Within visual anthropology, subtitling has become de rigueur for ethnographic films, a tendency that effectively highlights the role of semantic meaning in our apprehension of the world. Untitled is a playful 14-minute piece that deliberately thwarts expectations for linguistic interpretations to instead highlight other kinds of meaning — those which would otherwise be dictated, if not eclipsed, by the flickering text of subtitles. Without these semantic guides, the viewer is encouraged to seek whatever meaning may be found in looking, listening, and loitering with the unnamed subjects. Phenomenological appreciation is not, however, the end point; rather it is a place from which to consider aesthetic decisions, namely the willful determinacy of the frame for what it highlights and organises spatially — as well as for what it dismisses or conceals.’

Named after the single-stream recycling method, the film explores one of the largest materials recovery facilities in the U.S. Through a visual and sonic investigation, it blurs observation and abstraction, reflecting on waste, excess, and their societal consequences. 

A journey into the labyrinthine memories of a Uitoto man who worked for drug lords in the 1980s Colombian Amazon. Moving between a rainforest and a narco mansion inspired by the American soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds a hallucinatory near-death account. Laura Huertas Millán: 'I met Cristóbal Gómez Abel, the narrator, in 2011 while doing research in the Colombian Amazon around drug trafficking and architecture. We've developed a dialogue around different uses of the coca plant, grounded in his experience as a former drug worker and his belonging to the Muina Murui community, where the plant is sacred and worshipped in an opposite way from the "narcos" ideologies and uses. In the Muina Murui community, memory is transmitted through oral tradition, and elder persons are honoured as memory and knowledge gatekeepers. Cristóbal, who is around seventy years old, is indeed an educator. He is a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather — in his community, abuelo refers not only to literal kinship but also to social kinship. Abuelos and abuelas are the grandfathers and grandmothers of the community, the protectors, the mentors. Cristóbal is also a witness. He lived [through] the cocaine boom in the Amazon in the 1990s. He also inherited the trauma of the Amazonian rubber plantation genocide (the Casa Arana crimes) from the previous generation. The stories Cristóbal tells in The Labyrinth are all first-hand experiences. The film was built around one sound recording I made in 2012, one year after our first meeting. That shooting was a strong moment, materialising hours of discussion in other contexts. It was the first line of the film to come, from which everything unfolded.’ — Excerpted from 'Laura Huertas Millán "The Labyrinth" ', introduced by Eileen Myles

Over the phone, fourteen friends recall their Ghanaian high school exchange trip to Jackson, Mississippi, in the United States, a decade later. As their memories accumulate, they grow uncanny. Blurred, darkened images mirror gaps, uncertainties, and moments the group still struggles to confront. Nnenna Onuoha: 'Our shared archive is fragmented and contested. Rather than treating it as evidence, I chose to distort and animate this material — reflecting the absence of a single, stable account while also functioning as a form of care, protecting those who felt shame around the situations in which they had been photographed. The A-Team does not seek a single truth; rather, it traces how memory shifts over time, and how a collective experience fractures into personal narratives.'

Set in a near-future United States detention camp, Punishment Park adopts a pseudo-documentary style, placing a British film crew among dissidents who, facing long prison sentences, choose instead to endure three days in the 'Bear Mountain Punishment Park' under the searing desert heat.

During the Second World War, Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire. This documentary traces the lives and experiences of Taiwanese soldiers, doctors, and overseas residents in Southeast Asia during that era, using family letters, diaries, and cross-generational dialogues to reveal the complexities and diverse identities of Taiwan's historical memory. Lau Kek-huat: 'As an intermediary who immigrated from Malaysia to Taiwan, it gives me the courage to make this film. Although I do not deny that, personally, there is anger and incomprehension towards the 70 years of silence in Taiwanese society; in Malaysia, we live with constant reminders from our elders to remember the cruelty that has happened to us. I believe that humanity can be shaped; unless we accumulate maturity in our thinking through intergenerational dialogues, we will continue to be mediocre. This is the beginning of my personal resistance, refusing to become a mediocre person.'

A friendship born from a shared longing for freedom unfolds into a mirrored journey of self-reinvention between two women artists. As creation, care and constraint interweave across generations, the film reflects on desire and vulnerability, healing and resilience, asking whether freedom can coexist with love — and where its limits might lie. Wu Fan: ‘By weaving together XiXi’s video diaries and my voice-over contemplation, diving deeper into the memories and experiences that hinder me and XiXi from living our lives, the film is an effort to give a tender look at the vulnerability that one might experience in exercising agency. We make a sincere attempt to investigate and challenge inherited beliefs, creating a space for dialogue on the political questions of society’s acceptable values and how all these affect the innermost part of a person’s life. By creating this reflective distance, the film explores hopes and challenges of making one’s own path.’

As a long-term migrant caregiver, Fidati shapes Indonesian stories with Taiwanese paper clay. After years of separation during the pandemic, she returns to Central Java in 2024. Laughter and tears intertwine, yet family duty keeps her moving between two lands, where the taste of mangoes bridges emotions across the sea. Cheng Chih-ming & Lily Huang: ‘What does “home” look like for those who labour far from their roots? In 2023, we filmed Fidati’s Room, a cramped five-pyeong room in Taichung that served as her creative sanctuary. Here, she transcended her identity as a migrant worker, molding Indonesian stories from Taiwanese clay.In 2024, we followed her back to Central Java to witness the fruits of fifteen years of toil: a grand house and thriving livestock. Yet, a poignant irony emerged — Fidati has long been an absentee in the home she built. While her sacrifice bought land and bricks, the cost was time itself. Realities shift and dreams evolve, but the towering mango tree at her doorstep remains — bittersweet as ever.’

Fifteen chapters unfold across the Bunun villages of Litu and Wulu in Taitung, Taiwan, and the surrounding mountains and forests. Children dream of chasing — or being chased by — spirit animals; elders recall lives shaped by snake and bear myths; strange encounters emerge in the habitats of birds. Yannick Dauby: ‘A microphone is a non-neutral device, a transducer which can be taken outdoors. Entirely devoted to the observation of acoustic waves, it produces an electrical signal analogous to the sounds which stimulate it. If abandoned too long in the wild, victim of weather hazards, it might also produce some unwanted or unexpected noises.Much the same can be said of my own process in composing Bone Always Outlasts Feather. This audiovisual creation is a description, or maybe an interpretation, of the voices of animals and a garland of stories and dreams recollected by some Bunun people living nearby.Also, under the influence of the environment above the villages of Lidao and Wulu, a series of mental glitches happened, taking the form of imaginary myths. The film grain of sparse anachronistic images accompanies the spoken words, birdsongs, and whispers of the landscape in a narrative flow about the forest, the mountains, and their inhabitants.’

Each year, the filmmaker’s family takes a ferry from Kaohsiung to Penghu to visit her grandfather. When he chooses to end his life, that routine ends. Her mother keeps a diary while the filmmaker records images; through these acts of remembrance, they begin a dialogue and learn to say goodbye. Chen Shao-chun: ‘I used to describe the Taihua Ferry as “big as the Titanic”. Every summer before [college] graduation, I took it to Penghu to visit my grandparents; six hours of sea wind and nausea, then Magong. My grandfather loved its name. After his funeral in 2017, I never returned, and now the ferry is retiring. I once thought I had outgrown wondering where people or things go when they leave. But this ship carries too many memories. Before it disappears, I want to keep its image — and my unresolved goodbye—inside [the] film.’

Born in a rural Miaoli village during the Japanese colonial era, Man Mei’s life spans a century of Taiwan’s transformation. Drawing on family albums and declassified U.S. Second World War aerial photographs, the film traces a resilient Hakka woman’s inner world, where personal memory and historical upheaval interlace. Caitlin ‘Sonny’ Shieh: ‘I made this film to honour my grandmother, Man Mei, and to understand the life she lived before I knew her. Born in a Miaoli farming village during the Japanese colonial era, she was a poor Hakka woman whose story was never meant to be remembered by history. But her life, spanning a century of Taiwan’s transformation, held so much I needed to know: her resilience, her struggles with mental health, the quiet weight she carried across generations.This film is both an act of remembering and an attempt to give voice to a life rarely centred: the interior world of a woman like my grandmother, whose experiences of imperialism, war, gendered exploitation, and survival were lived intimately, not historically. In making this film, I wanted to hold space for her memory, to sit with what she endured and what she gave.’

This film traces Arizona’s desert as it is reshaped into a hub for data centres and semiconductor manufacturing. Moving through altered waterways, the film exposes tensions between technoutopian visions and drought-stricken ecologies. Guided by offscreen voices and Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda’s ‘Cloud Song’, ancestral knowledge counters the rise of industrial ‘cloud’ infrastructures. Su Yu Hsin: ‘This is the second chapter of a trilogy tracing the global expansion of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), from Hsinchu to Phoenix. As TSMC produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips and underpins the AI industry, the film seeks to uncover the hidden environmental debts embedded in its supply chain, entangled with resource extraction in arid regions. Growing up in Taiwan, I reflect on a society whose infrastructures quietly sustain this industry while environmental degradation is eclipsed by narratives of security and economic growth. Filmed in Arizona, the work follows the altered course of the Salt River — from dams to data centres — asking what it means to build a water-intensive industry in drought-stricken land. Guided by offscreen voices and Ofelia Zepeda’s “Cloud Song”, the film reveals the fracture between Technoutopian promise and ecological reality.’

Before people settled in the mountains of Houtong, monkeys lived in a cave, and the mountain god sent ghostly flames to guard hidden treasures. Drawing on local myths and whispered histories of this faded mining town, the film departs from documentary convention and weaves uncanny tales through evocative sound and image. Song Cheng-ying, Hu Chin-ya: ‘In 2022, we created a documentary titled Out of the Cave for the Houtong Miners’ Culture & History Museum. The Tales of the Tale is a continuation of that project, encompassing a dozen odd stories and anecdotes spanning various eras, including the Japanese colonial period, the post-war economic boom of the mining industry, and the archival period following the industry’s decline in recent years.Most of these tales are intertwined with gods, ghosts, and demons. They have been passed down orally by retired miners, accompanied by the haunting vistas of abandoned mines. Some are well-formed legends; others are fragmented murmurs. Some are supported by alleged evidence, while others are observations tied to news articles and death records. They come from the personal experiences of our interviewees, told and retold over time, fading and re-emerging like echoes. Together, they become the tales of Houtong.The interviewees were once farmers who cultivated the mountain lands, later becoming miners who unearthed its riches. Their labour fueled national development but came at a heavy cost, leaving behind a history of unparalleled occupational hazards. When investment in the mining industry dwindled, Houtong transformed from a bustling, labour-intensive mining town into a forgotten, derelict place hidden within the mountains and overgrown by the woods.These individuals want their stories to be heard. They refuse to let the calamities they endured be forgotten. How do you live with the fact that you survived while others did not? How do you remember the ghosts of those who were lost? Will those ghosts ever become gods? Through storytelling, they attempt to release these spirits from purgatory. In turn, the act of telling brings them closure.’

On Huayu, a remote island west of Penghu, daily life follows tides and seasons. While men fish offshore, women labour along the shore and at home. Observing a veteran forager and a shopkeeper, the film offers an intimate portrait of women’s resilience and labour within a male-dominated fishing community. Chen Wei-cih: ‘I believe the greatest challenge in documentary filmmaking is not “providing answers”, but “living the answers” — it is a persistent practice of imagining the future.From stepping onto a remote island of fewer than a hundred people to serving as a teacher in a five-student school, and from investigating vanishing fishing methods to leading local workshops, my work centres on documentary yet refuses to be confined by its frameworks. I seek to coexist with the moving image, becoming a co-recorder alongside the community. To me, creation encompasses one’s attitude toward life and the profound bonds between people.Instead of chasing issues, I choose to let stories flow naturally. My wish is to remain forever within the field, living the very stories I tell.’

After seven years in Poland, the filmmaker returns to China for Lunar New Year and is drawn back into family tensions. When her parents urge her to remove a ‘misfortunate’ mole, illness and tradition collide. Blending documentary intimacy with stop-motion animation and tragicomic tones, the film explores fate, generational trauma, and the rediscovery of love. Tan Mo: ‘This film grows out of observations of intimate relationships, family dynamics, and generational tensions, exploring whether, in a fractured world, we can still find the possibility of dialogue and coexistence within the smallest social unit — the family. We often turn our own traumas into distance, and the act of filming became a way for me to revisit and mend these fractures. Formally, the film blends the approaches of a caméra-stylo and a cinematic essay, using voiceover to reveal the inner world, stop-motion animation to express fantasies and fears, and an observational lens to capture genuine emotions and subtle interactions. As both director and cinematographer, I am simultaneously the observer and the observed; the camera becomes both witness and blade, exposing vulnerability and contradiction. This is a self-portrait film, an inquiry into where I come from, where I stand, and where I am going.’

A collage of letters and intertwined journeys across time. As explorer and writer Alexandra David-Néel recounts her Himalayan passage a century ago, a filmmaker reflects on encounters in Eastern Tibet. Across different media, both examine their positions as outsiders, dwelling on historical wounds and a self reshaped by the high plateau. Cui Yi: ‘“Who was it written to? Who is it written to? Who will it be written to? If the consciousness behind the letters exists, can we have a dialogue?” These questions returned to me as I read the letters of Alexandra David-Néel, a writer and scholar whose Himalayan journeys were traces of her quest for truth. Like Alexandra, I find myself an outsider in the snow lands, grappling with my place within a colonial history. I stand between East and West, the spiritual and the secular, asking where the path forward lies amid plagues, wars, and human ferocity. I went to Eastern Tibet to teach filmmaking, yet received far more in return. Through the lenses of local filmmakers, I learned new ways of seeing the human and non-human worlds; their audiovisual landscape became integral to my own journey.’

Drawing on films made by Chinese state studios in the 1950s–1980s, this work revisits island narratives of war, revolution, espionage, and class struggle once shaped to engineer shared sentiments. Images from these features are dismantled and recomposed as propaganda dissolves into tropical murmurs, blurring borders between history and fantasy, individual and collective. Pan Lu: ‘The film’s source material is drawn from fifteen narrative features produced by Chinese state film studios during the socialist period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Set on islands and at sea, these films told stories of war, espionage, revolution, and class struggle. Images once used to shape collective consciousness and mobilise emotion are here dismantled and reassembled, becoming an unrecognisable fever dream. The echoes of history intertwine beneath the water; the language of propaganda turns into the night-time whispers of coconut palms, seeping into every sleeper’s dreams. The island’s borders gradually dissolve within the afterimages of these frames, and the boundary between individual and collective, reality and fiction, blurs in turn — inviting viewers into a labyrinthine dreamscape where a call both familiar and strange can be felt.’

Approaching graduation, a filmmaker reflects on an old friend’s engagement and her own mother’s retirement, life stages unfolding at different speeds. Inviting participants to record half-minute fragments, she expands personal narratives into collective memory. Through action prompts and moving images, time is deconstructed and reassembled into overlapping rhythms of presence and change. Sammi Sum-yi Chiu: ‘During my school years, I often felt that time was flying by, and I was suddenly confronted with constant change. I initially hoped to reflect on my time at school, but while searching for the meaning of time, I discovered that it appears rational and orderly, yet can still be shaped to meet different people’s needs. Perhaps “time” is merely a container we fill with meaning — encountering people from different time zones, and adjusting our own “time” accordingly.’

Drawing on the filmmaker’s diasporic experience, this three-part video diary weaves Hong Kong’s geology, greenhouse cultivation, and migrant farming into a meditation on identity. Reframing agricultural processes and species migration, the film reflects on the implications of rooting and re-rooting, and on the evolving dynamics between land and humanity across foreign soils. Dorothy Cheung: ‘Filming As a Bird that Briefly Perches was a journey in reverse. It began with a curiosity about Asian seeds adapting to foreign soil: do they still resemble their original selves? After documenting a Hong Kong farmer in London, I added two formally distinct, asymmetrical chapters to complete this non-linear work. The title is drawn from a concept in an ancient Chinese text [The Zuo Tradition]: while a bird may choose where to land, the tree has little agency. At the time the text was written, little was known about the trees that can in fact lure or trap birds. While working on this project, I was reminded of a childhood friend who moved to the U.K. in recent years and later passed away. How much choice does a bird truly have? Perhaps we are all only perching briefly… before taking off again.’

One night, a woman hears a mysterious knock at her door. On another night, her husband hears the same sound. This short film recounts their story in Indonesian, drawing on local cultural references and a distinct visual language the filmmaker associates with Indonesia's deeply rooted culture of fear. Tintin Wulia: 'My family never talked much about 1965 [The 1965 Indonesian mass killings were a political purge associated with efforts to eliminate the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).], but I knew their house had been looted and burnt down. I was born seven years later and therefore had no memory of the facts. Yet, however well the facts were hidden, the memory of feelings kept lingering within my family. I grew up with these memories, of which the most subtle, yet perhaps strongest, was the memory of fear. Ketok (2002), another of my short films, was intended, amongst other things, to poke fun at the then-popular horror TV series in Indonesia. The film was an amusing hit with Indonesian audiences. However, a few non-Indonesian viewers asked whether the events of September 1965 lay behind the light-hearted story. Apparently, in making the film, I utilised the language of horror I was most acquainted with, the core of which might have originated in 1965. Growing up with the memory of feelings but without a memory of the facts was comparable to growing up injured without knowing where the wound was or how it happened. Under such circumstances, it was almost impossible to revisit the source of the injury and take steps towards healing it. The Jakarta riots of May 1998 enabled me to connect this memory of feelings with some possibilities of facts. I thought perhaps what happened to many families in 1998 was similar to what happened to my family in 1965.’ — Excerpted from Tintin Wulia, 'The name game', Inside Indonesia, 93: Jul-Sept 2008

Shortly before Indonesia's 2014 presidential election, an ethnic Chinese filmmaker and her family travelled to Malaysia, fearing unrest linked to the memories of May 1998. The journey unfolds into a story of generational survival, tracing how migration, uncertainty, and evolving questions of identity shaped her family's life across decades.

After a sudden health crisis, a former dancer confronts a buried wound carried for over twenty years. The film explores kinaesthetic separation between body and consciousness, where illness fractures time, space and self-perception. In states of immobilisation and depersonalisation, the body reveals an autonomy beyond conscious control. Elysa Wendi: 'In organising my personal archives, I witness my body across time — the connection between past and present, and the persistent fragility beneath. The film moves freely through space and time via improvised editing and collage, an ironic counterpoint to my own immobility following repeated trauma.'

In the artist's first solo return to Bangkok, they navigate the unfamiliar within the familiar. Through technological fantasies of an alternate self left unexplored in Hong Kong, they interrogate artificial intelligence in search of answers. By observing and emulating local youth culture, they reflect on lifestyle, belief, and their evolving understanding of identity.

As part of the filmmaker's metaproject The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, the film takes the letter 'O' to poetically conflate 'Opium' and 'Ocean'. It revisits the opium trade that underpinned British colonial expansion, contending with how opium may be understood, perceived and represented. Found footage and layered voices link Singapore's port history to narcotic economies. Ho Tzu Nyen: 'O for Opium unfolds through poetic conflations of opium and oceanic drifting, contending with the multiplicity of ways in which opium may be understood, perceived and represented. Melding found footage with texts related to the history of the opium trade during the British colonial era, the work assumes the perspective of opium itself as a material continually transmuted across time, forms and boundaries. The resulting hallucinatory images are occluded by an index of objects tied to the production and consumption of opium: opium pipes, spirit lamps, poppy flowers and clipper ships, for instance, emerge like shifting clouds of smoke drifting over the dreamlike sequences of imagery. The work is sonically animated by an intoxicating mix of voices that narrate, whisper, sing and speak simultaneously across histories of opium from a clashing constellation of divergent positionalities.'

0.2 seconds after a sound reaches the cochlea, the brain assigns distance, direction and speed. With constant tinnitus, the director compares inner sounds with Somchai, a construction worker and fellow patient. Blending medical inquiry, soundscape and poetic reflection, she reveals how thin the line is between sound and noise — and whose voices are dismissed as such. Jung Hyejin: ‘One day, without warning, I lost hearing in one ear. While still reeling, I met Thai migrant workers afflicted with the same condition. Seeing their bodies and hearing their stories, I realised my crisis was not mine alone — it was ours. It was the story of my grandfather’s generation, who blamed themselves for workplace injuries. It was the story of those who demanded dignity, only to be cursed by a broken system. It is the story of a nation grown numb to the daily news of workers’ deaths. Words began to spill out of me; through the disorienting lens of my unbalanced senses, I wrote this story in equal parts anger and grief.’ — Excerpted from ‘Noise: Unwanted Sound, Director’s Note’, DMZ Docs Online Catalogue (2025)

Four years after cycling two thousand kilometres home during the first Covid lockdown, construction worker Mahesh becomes the subject of a film about his journey. Yet as shooting ends and he returns to the labyrinth of his job site, a quieter portrait emerges. Blending fact and fiction, this film-within-a-film reflects on migrant labour and the ethics of looking. Suhel Banerjee: ‘This has been a difficult film to make, because it tells a difficult story. At its centre is the ordinary Indian, within whom exists a multitude of stories, shaped by years of struggle against poverty and illuminated by the aura of mythology, music, and art. It is this inherited wisdom that I most want reflected in my work.’

This hybrid documentary weaves stories from Isan, Thailand’s largest yet poorest region. Through Mor Lam, a popular folk music with Lao roots, it traces political uprisings before and after the Cold War. Questioning why Isan seems cursed by misfortune, the film reveals resilience, humour and joy persisting amid a landscape shaped by bloodshed and loss. Thunska Pansittivorakul: ‘Shortly before radical Thai art activist Thanom Chapakdee passed away in 2022, he proposed the idea that Mor Lam — a genre of music immensely popular today — was once used as a tool of rebellion. At the time, I already had a concept for a story involving a disturbing incident in the Mekong River basin. When Doc Club Originals approached me to produce their first theatrical documentary, we decided to merge these ideas into a single film. Although this film is being screened in Taiwan after its Thai release, the version shown in Taiwan is slightly different from the one in Thailand. Thailand is not a country where one can fully resist without consequence; certain acts of defiance carry risks severe enough to cost one’s freedom for at least fifteen years. As many are aware, a significant number of young people are currently imprisoned under lèse-majesté charges, many effectively forgotten behind bars. No matter how courageous I may appear, the truth is that I continue to live in a persistent state of fear.’

Under the merciless sun of the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and the United States, undocumented immigrants traverse an unforgiving terrain. El Mar la Mar weaves sublime 16mm images of nature, animals, people, and their traces into a multifaceted panorama of a deeply politicised and deadly borderland. Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki: 'For outsiders, the vastness and strangeness of the desert resembles the sea. It is hard to orient yourself and easy to get lost amidst all the visual noise. Gradually, you get your bearings; you notice signs, prints, familiar formations; you can begin to read the landscape. But even still, it is a wild, unpredictable, treacherous place, much like the sea can be. While making this desert film, we were also mindful of the Mediterranean Sea, where thousands of refugees have perished as they try to make it to Europe. Like the Sonoran Desert, the Mediterranean is not only a site of massive migration, but also a natural feature that has been charged with the responsibility for thousands of refugee deaths. In both cases, the fatal punishment has been conveniently outsourced to a desert or a sea. Europe has its varied responses, while in the U.S., we call it "Prevention Through Deterrence", which is a euphemism for funnelling migrants into lethal terrain… We chose the title El Mar la Mar to include both the masculine and the feminine constructions of "the sea" in Spanish to highlight the existence of, and help break down, not only the pernicious borders between identities, nations, and lands, but also dichotomous ways of thinking.’

Geographies of Solitude immerses viewers in the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote Atlantic outpost, guided by naturalist Zoe Lucas, who has lived there for over forty years. Shot on 16mm, this playful yet reverent experimental documentary follows wild horses, seals, weather, and tides, while quietly recording a lifetime of care, observation and marine debris collection. Jacquelyn Mills: ‘I don’t know the solution to our environmental crisis, and I don’t necessarily consider myself a political filmmaker. But it breaks my heart to see the state of the world environmentally. If we can experience what is sacred in nature and the wonder of the natural world, I believe we would have “less taste for destruction”, as Rachel Carson said. That is why I made this film: to work with our present reality. Can we honour places? Can that inspire us to treat them with reverence?’

Neang, an Indigenous woman in northeastern Cambodia, watches her village disappear beneath a hydroelectric dam. As industrial and state forces pressure families to leave ancestral lands, she struggles to hold her community together while her children’s futures drift away from traditional ways of life.  Polen Ly: ‘The experience of filming Until the Orchid Blooms over six years went beyond filmmaking; it became a journey that allowed me to form a deep emotional bond with Neang’s family and her Indigenous community. This story of struggle may seem small and unnoticed like a fallen leaf hidden in a vast forest, yet for me it reflects how our humanity confronts the crises of the modern world, where abuses of power produce both loud and silent forms of violence that harm human lives and nature itself. I dedicate Until the Orchid Blooms as a diary for the family and the Kbal Tomas community, especially for the children, so they may remember the resistance, strength and resilience of their parents and elders. I also hope the film creates a spiritual bond between the audiences and the people whose stories it carries.’

On Barcelona’s edge, Vallbona lies enclosed by river, railway and highway. Antonio, son of Catalan workers, has tended flowers here for nearly ninety years alongside neighbours from many places. Through music, forbidden swims and budding romances, a quiet resistance emerges against urban change and social division. José Luis Guerin: ‘The project spawned out of a commission from Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which I made super fast. But I was left with the desire to develop that work because I began to discover that the echoes and resonances of the entire world could be contained in this very small and humble neighbourhood. Therein lies the vocation I aspire to as a filmmaker: to find the universal perspective in local realities. Neighbourhoods like Valbona feel somewhat universal, given that gentrification is a worldwide phenomenon. City centres are converted into tourist attractions, essentially becoming theme parks inaccessible to the local population. These are people who are then marginalised to the peripheries, where a more human, normal daily life remains. It’s a process we can recognise everywhere. It is the same case with cinema itself, where the spaces that offer most freedom and creativity aren’t so much at the centre of the industry but on these peripheries.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Rafa Sales Ross, ‘José Luis Guerin Returns to San Sebastián With “Good Valley Stories”, Stands Against “Impoverishing Cinema” by Looking at Docs Solely as “Denunciation”’, Variety, 25 September 2025

Raised within Taliban ideology, twenty-three-year-old Samim lives between promises of martyrdom and the ordinariness of farming and family life. His teenage brother Rafi idolises him and those promises, the only vision of the world they have ever known. Aboozar Amini: ‘As a member of the Hazara ethnicity, a group historically marginalised and oppressed by the Taliban and Pashtuns, one might expect me to harbour resentment towards my protagonist. Yet such judgment fails to satisfy me. As an artist, my foremost inclination is to transcend the impulse to condemn, creating a space where observation can delve deeper. This film does not merely depict another faceless Taliban soldier. Rather, it seeks to engage with him as an individual. My vision of Afghanistan aims to confront the humanity of my protagonist, even if he espouses radical ideologies. By living alongside him, I hope to hold up a mirror wherein he may glimpse his own reflection, however monstrous it may be. Though there are inherent limitations, I am committed to seizing every opportunity to explore their inner world. Even the smallest window into their psyche is a precious gift that I intend to embrace fully.In this way, this is not a Taliban-sympathising film, but rather a mirror to their faces.’

Drawing on the myth of Mount Qaf, an imaginary mountain range at the world’s edge, the film follows Maryam, exiled from Iran at twenty, reconnecting with her family from afar through surveillance images. When Iran’s internet is cut off, memory and distance blur into a meditation on technology and belonging. Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani: ‘Past Future Continuous is inspired by the personal experiences of friends and family who left Iran in search of new lives abroad. Nearly every Iranian who remains has considered leaving at some point, while many who emigrated have longed to return. Past Future Continuous shifts the focus from the act of leaving to the homes and landscapes left behind — places that grow emptier over time. It reflects on the quiet loss of connection, the fading warmth of these spaces, and the enduring love that survives despite distance.’

A desktop documentary engaging the historical and digital traces of extremist propaganda, examining how images of violence circulate, mutate and persist. Moving between online investigations and real-world encounters with artists and researchers, it invokes Medusa to explore the dangers and transformative potential of looking, questioning whether seeing can ever be innocent. Kevin B. Lee: ‘These elements are connected by the idea of the afterlives of images: how past images of violence continue to live with us and how we engage with the legacies of violence. I hope the film prompts viewers to consider our responsibility as spectators — moving from passive unease to active, navigational engagement, considering and reconsidering an image across contexts. At the same time, that engagement is not without risk and may lead to recurring confrontations with the implications of one’s own curiosity. This is especially important when one’s gaze forms the basis for retransmitting one’s way of seeing. That’s one of the core tensions in Afterlives: is it possible to engage with violence without being complicit in its spread? And if there is an implicit violence in looking, how does one acknowledge and engage with that potential?’

A decade ago, on the Morocco–Spain border, the filmmaker and his group attempted the ‘boza’ crossing to Europe. After repeated failures, they survive through solidarity, songs and a camera, as the self-named ‘Artist’ keeps hope alive. David Bingong: ‘We made The Travelers to capture our lives as sub-Saharan immigrants in Morocco from an everyday perspective. We wanted to show our reality as it is, without filters, using a handful of songs and videos we created that speak of our community, conflicts and dreams. We were driven by a common goal: crossing the border fence between Morocco and Spain, one of the most militarised borders in the world. Made during several attempts between 2014 and 2015, the film not only documents this reality but also gives us strength as a group and a sense of empowerment.’

The film traces ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s legacy in 1930s Palestine as the filmmaker visits diverse communities across historical Palestine today. Through conversations on music, memory and endangered traditions, interwoven with intimate family scenes, it excavates contested histories, language, desire, listening, and the politics of impossibility shaping the Palestinian landscape. Jumana Manna: ‘One of my interests in music is precisely the ambiguity. I find it to be both dangerous and also celebratory and transcendental. It carries a lot of potential. Music can be a place to transcend identities and affiliations, geographies and temporalities. But it can also be used, and it has historically been used, to strengthen feelings of collective identity that are based on exclusion of “the other”, based on who doesn’t figure into that collective identity. I’m interested in this double bind or dual potentiality of music. I think music can both hide and reveal politics [...] If memory is a symbolic representation of the past, embedded in a set of practices and affiliations, I think that musical memory is the most libidinal form of it. It’s something that is deeply ingrained in your body. [...] I am interested in what kind of memory lies in the senses, if it’s accessed through audio, through touch, or through smell. Jean-Luc Nancy talks about the difference between listening and seeing. He talks about listening as making-resonant, whilst seeing is about making-evident. When you make something evident you see it, but it’s something that is outside of you, you witness it in front of you. When you hear something you have to understand it because it’s going into you, it’s becoming a part of you. Listening collapses this division of self and other, or of singular and plural, or inside and outside.’– Excerpted from Katie Guggenheim, ‘Chisenhale Interviews: Jumana Manna’, Chisenhale Gallery, September 2015.

Five centuries after anatomist Andreas Vesalius opened the human body to science, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens it to cinema. Revealing flesh as an extraordinary landscape shaped by care, suffering and hope, the film presents hospitals as laboratories that connect every body in the world. Véréna Paravel: "The film doesn't claim to play a role comparable to that of Vesalius in the history of medicine. But we do try to open up our bodies and look at them with new eyes, [...] one that adds movement, time, texture, and sound to still anatomical imagery. This has physical, technical, political, spiritual, and existential implications, which are all being reconfigured in the present moment [...] The film's ambition is to help us reinterpret our body and its relationship to the world.’ Lucien Castaing-Taylor: "We started filming with a regular camera, but were unhappy with our footage: it seemed too déjà vu and distanced us from both patients and surgeons. So then we asked our friend Patrick Lindenmaier to build a very small camera with an aesthetic very close to that of medical lenses, with a miniature lens that would give us as much freedom to move around as possible. Practically everything we filmed was with this camera, and it provided us with images whose texture links us to the tools used by doctors and surgeons, material that makes up maybe half of the film. The hope was that the similarities (in terms of depth of field and angle of view) between the footage inside and outside the body would encourage viewers to rethink the relationship between interiority and exteriority, the self and other, and generally evoke the infinite interdependencies between different bodies — human and non-human, animate and inanimate.’ — Excerpted from an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon

Following a Tayal family after the death of their grandfather, the film observes emotional and spiritual disarray shaped by estrangement from Gaga, their ancestral ethics. As modern life collides with inherited memory, the family confronts cultural rupture and loss. Through intimate proximity, the film searches for ways to carry Tayal spirit forward and return home. Sayun Simung: ‘I spent ten years making this documentary, filming my own family while tracing the presence of Gaga, the Tayal ethical system shaped by ancestral knowledge. My grandfather passed away before I could learn from him directly, leaving gaps that led me back to my family and elders, toward what had remained unspoken.Though intangible, Gaga continues to structure our lives. Throughout the process, doubt accompanied me, yet the film grew alongside my understanding. SPI became not only a record of family memory, but a way to reconnect with Tayal identity. I’m glad I didn’t give up on completing the film. Now it opens a space for intergenerational voices and shared remembrance to reach the world.’

A friendship born from a shared longing for freedom unfolds into a mirrored journey of self-reinvention between two women artists. As creation, care and constraint interweave across generations, the film reflects on desire and vulnerability, healing and resilience, asking whether freedom can coexist with love — and where its limits might lie. Wu Fan: ‘By weaving together XiXi’s video diaries and my voice-over contemplation, diving deeper into the memories and experiences that hinder me and XiXi from living our lives, the film is an effort to give a tender look at the vulnerability that one might experience in exercising agency. We make a sincere attempt to investigate and challenge inherited beliefs, creating a space for dialogue on the political questions of society’s acceptable values and how all these affect the innermost part of a person’s life. By creating this reflective distance, the film explores hopes and challenges of making one’s own path.’

Colour plays a powerful symbolic role in political expression. Through conversations on political hues — from ‘Hong Kong yellow’ to ‘Taiwan blue’ — the film examines whether such colours can coexist, and how they differ across contexts. By analysing individual colour samples, it reveals the complexity and plurality behind political symbolism. Chan Cheuk-sze & Kathy Wong: ‘An art student and a social science student engage in dialogue, questioning, and ultimately an embrace while sifting through video materials. The film features three cameras: one belonging to Kathy, another to Karen, and a third — a scanner freely available in the library.As graduate students from the fields of political science and art, we attempt to use the tools most familiar to us to initiate a dialogue on the political spectrum and the perception of colour. When “the colour we see”, “the colour people claim”, and “the colour we understand” become misaligned, we momentarily set aside the stereotypes shaped within Hong Kong’s echo chambers. Through our experience of living in Taiwan, our imagination is loosened and reconfigured, allowing us to step into the seldom-discussed grey areas of political spectra in Hong Kong and Taiwan.Perhaps we, too, are samples the audience can capture.’

In the shadow of the New York Mets' stadium, Willets Point is an industrial enclave marked for demolition. Amid scrapyards and auto salvage shops, Foreign Parts reveals a tight-knit community sustained by wrecks, recycling and precarious lives, observing a neighbourhood facing erasure under New York's urban redevelopment. Véréna Paravel: 'As I started talking with people, I realised that many of their lives were as damaged as the rusting cars themselves, and I began to get a sense of the hardscrabble, resilient community that had grown up there over many years. From the outset I knew I wanted to make a film that would try to reflect the fragility and violence of the place, the beauty and squalor that reigned, its chaotic ordering. The tiny, bounded urban locality also encapsulated much larger narratives in the history of the country — such as post-industrialisation, immigration, political violence, environmental decay, and the breakdown of democracy.' J. P. Sniadecki: 'With the absence of commentary, textual explanation, or voiceover, the film allows the viewer more freedom to experience and explore the images and sounds on-screen and more license to interpret for themselves the social dynamics and cultural diversity of the junkyard. […] the viewer has the space and time to develop their own relationship to the place, the people, and the film itself.' — Excerpted from Patricia Alvarez Astacio, 'An Interview with Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki', 17 December 2012.

Beirut, 1980: Amid crumbling walls, a salvaged reel of 1980s lesbian pornography becomes an excavation. As militarised images of the civil war glitch and disintegrate, queer women’s bodies surface and take shape, revealing desires and memories buried beneath war’s spectacle of toxic masculinity. Chantal Partamian: ‘The project explores the cinematic gaze towards queer bodies as well as their constant absence from the recurrent narrative or collective memory. It started with the discovery of 80s pornographic found footage, and so we asked ourselves the question: what if this was found in a dilapidated house? What if, instead of the process of the image disintegrating, we bring it to life as if the disintegrated lives of queer women that were meant to stay unseen or disfigured or left to rot slowly come to life and assert their presence within the context of the 80s in Lebanon, a period so overtly represented by war and violence and from which all narrative about personal lives and intimacy is removed.’

An experimental documentary made with handmade and industrial emulsions, exploring enduring relations between Inuit, caribou, lichens and land. Lichen-based developers animate the images, while caribou hide becomes gelatin for hand-crafted emulsion. Filmed largely on Nunavut land, the film bears witness to caribou lifeways under ecological strain.

In a split-screen diptych, this montage experiment revisits a collection of tourism films from the 1920s to the 1970s that advertised holidays in the Canadian outdoors, exposing the underlying violence towards land and Indigenous people, and the colonial myths inscribed in idyllic representations of nature and leisure. Brian Virostek and Nicolas Renaud: ‘As we worked with this archival footage, we found a tension in the expression of settler-colonial violence towards nature in films that aimed to celebrate it. The tropes that the films constantly revert to in representing nature and Indigenous peoples speak of the deep fears and desires of that society; of the need to dominate nature and to conceive of Indigenous peoples as a remnant of the past. Our attempt is to make visible the subliminal work of the colonial psyche, as it creates a mythology in order to legitimise the taking of the land for the“manifest destiny”of a“superior culture”.’

One night, kept awake by highway construction outside his window, the filmmaker realises that a road will soon cut through his hometown, Xiangzidian Village. He sets up a camera to document the process, as the building site becomes a modern stage where his family’s joys and sorrows, partings and reunions play out. Hu Sanshou: ‘I have made two films about the highway construction in my hometown. The first, Resurrection, documents how the relocation of graves for the highway “resurrected” the deceased, bringing them back into the world of Xiangzidian. The second, Xiangzidian Village: The Stage, frames the construction as a process of setting up a stage, where the villagers of Xiangzidian appear successively as sojourners, onlookers, builders and witnesses. As a native of Xiangzidian, I recorded the village’s transformation during the highway’s construction from 2020 to 2024. The longer I filmed, the more a metaphorical stage emerged — one that sheds light on my relationship with my hometown, along with the emotions and sense of destiny attached to it.’

Amidst rapid urban transformation in a northern city, a fire triggered mass evictions. The filmmaker captures the displaced residents across demolished urban villages. Despite differing backgrounds, their paths cross in this upheaval, forming a collective memory. Through a decade of observation, the film reveals the profound complexities of human resilience and history within a shifting landscape. Chen Junhua: ‘Ten years ago, the order of the city I lived in was reshaped once again. I captured everything around me with my camera. Using a panoramic approach, this film reveals the varied lives of auto mechanics, vegetable and fruit delivery drivers, photographers, children, and many others, capturing their responses to the collapse of skyscrapers and the displacement of their homes. The threshold for using audiovisual technology is getting lower and lower, yet forgetting has become easier. Films that bear witness to social reality also seem to be becoming fewer. A decade later, I chose to present this work. For me, it is both a commemoration and a wake-up call. I hope more voices will take up the responsibility of writing history. That is what drove me to complete this film.’

Digitised in 2025, two 16mm films from Taiwan's Japanese colonial period are presented together. The first captures a national mobilisation rally in Taichung and the fervour surrounding a troops' send-off. The second observes a Shinto festival procession, student soldiers drilling with rifles, and female students forming rice balls for wartime logistics.

Digitised in 2025, two 16mm films from Taiwan's Japanese colonial period are presented together. The first captures a national mobilisation rally in Taichung and the fervour surrounding a troops' send-off. The second observes a Shinto festival procession, student soldiers drilling with rifles, and female students forming rice balls for wartime logistics.

Released circa 1942-1943, Kokumin Dojo (Civilian Training Centre) was a Japanese state-sponsored propaganda film documenting rituals used to convert Taiwanese people into 'imperial' Japanese subjects. This work offers a contemporary critical re-enactment of selfhood and emotional erasure as colonial policy, staging four young immigrants in Japan under off-camera command, synchronised with the original film. Fujii Hikaru: 'During the war, the ultimate goal of "Japaneseisation" was troop mobilisation. In the postwar "democratic" era, this is outwardly denied as militarism, yet assimilation policies from the imperial era continued to shape the lives of foreign residents in Japan. Under global capitalism, economic domination and exploitation now extend to Southeast Asian immigrants depicted in Mujō (The Heartless). Some are deprived of their freedom of employment under the Technical Intern Training Programme, criticised by the U.N. Human Rights Council and in the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report (2021). Excessive Japaneseisation is also internalised in everyday behaviour, gestures, and personal expression, closely monitored through social media and other forms of surveillance.' — Excerpted and adapted from 'Sign of the Times #5: Restoring Time' Kokumin Dojo (Civilian Training Centre). Courtesy of the National Museum of Taiwan History.

Suniuo (1919-1979), also known as Li Guang-hui, was an Indigenous Taiwanese soldier for Japan. Unaware of Japan's WWII surrender, he remained hidden in the jungle for thirty years. The film follows his life from 1975 to 1979, tracing his emergence from the Indonesian jungle, return to Taiwan and the Amis community, ensuing media frenzy, and death from lung cancer.

The filmmaker travels between Bethlehem, Haifa and Nazareth to explore the life of Karimeh Abbud, the first female photographer in pre-1948 Palestine. Born in Bethlehem in 1893, Karimeh rose to prominence in a male-dominated profession after receiving her first camera as a teenager. Her photographs remain vital records of life in Palestine in the early 1900s. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin: ‘Working on Restored Pictures opened up a space for me to engage with the writing of history through image and sound, against the “grain” of the archive and the condition of denial and erasure. In Restored Pictures I reclaim the denied legacy of Karimeh Abbud within her pre-Nakba Palestinian context. The Al-Karmel newspaper record advertising her Haifa studio, and her self-description as the “only national photographer in the country”, guide my speculation and imagination. In my search, I follow a period of renaissance and political struggle in pre-Nakba Palestine, engaging with present social and political contextualisation through archival practice and film.’

On 26 October 1929, around 300 women converged from across Palestine and organised a silent demonstration in Jerusalem, travelling in convoy to protest the British High Commissioner’s bias during the Buraq Uprising. Retracing their journey through archival photographs and present-day locations, the film attempts to recover a largely forgotten act of anti-colonial resistance. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin: ‘Being a creative practitioner in documentary film has deepened my understanding of how film can revive meanings of the past within colonised societies, where local narratives have been lost or abandoned by “dominant” histories. In this sense, film may capture representations of history that respond to local, on-the-ground needs for cultural expression that help locate the “missing” within lost knowledge. It also has the potential to foster reflection on how the past is constructed and represented through a lens relevant to the present. I hope this film encourages viewers to explore the interconnectedness of political and historical experience at both local and global levels. It is also a call to consider how we make sense of our shrinking worlds in times of genocide and authoritarianism.’

Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with oral histories recorded in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Through story, voice and song, the film reclaims Palestinian presence, unsettling colonial archives and reflecting on what bodies remember — and what empires forget. Diana Allan: ‘I use sound to reanimate and recontextualise these colonial images, interrogating archival authority, relocating these archives in the present, and restoring to song its political power. This move to sound-silent footage with the reverberations of Palestinian life as it is remembered, lived, and anticipated, is an attempt to reconnect people, places, and temporality through the senses. The film is about this experiential aspect of the archive, what it means to encounter one’s own past, and how the significance of that encounter might speak back to the present. You feel the weight of history in people’s voices in how they speak, the deep suffering that people have gone through.The living archive builds its forms in synchrony with existing forms in the life of the camp, which is fundamentally different from the salvage paradigm. It adopts the model of preservation, diffusion, and circulation through imaginative engagement rather than consolidation and conservation. These histories are carried in bodies and they are transmitted through bodies, and that will continue to happen.’– Excerpted from Incé Husain, ‘“Ongoing Return”: A Living Archive of Palestine’. Antler River Media Co-Op, 7 May 2025.

Air Base’ refers to a pond in Wuhan, China, where anglers gather but never catch fish. Shot at the end of the pandemic, this hybrid film observes individuals’ strange public behaviours and inner struggles, capturing a time and place where people feel like the anglers at ‘air base’ — or the fish in that pond. Li Luo: ‘This film was inspired by the experiences of several friends in recent years. One of them became obsessed with angling during the pandemic. He often went fishing at a pond near East Lake in Wuhan. He said the pond was called “Air Base” because it was hard to catch fish there. (“Air” in Chinese means empty.) “Air Force” refers to anglers who catch nothing and return home empty-handed. It seems to me that many people in this city are like the anglers at “Air Base”, or the fish in that pond.’

Filmed over five years, this film follows three generations of Hazara women in Afghanistan. Forced into marriage as a child, Hawa learns to read at 52 and starts a textile business, while her daughter Najiba and granddaughter Zahra seek independence. The Taliban’s return in 2021 shatters their fragile progress, forcing separation, exile and renewed struggle. Najiba Noori: ‘War, violence, forced marriage, and lack of access to education have plagued and victimised countless Afghan women for decades. My mother’s dreams were stolen. She spent years housekeeping and raising children, yet never lost her curiosity or her desire to learn and experience life. This film tells the story of my mother and our family in Afghanistan, where I have lived most of my life. It is a story of the struggle for independence and freedom for oppressed women and for the Hazara community in my homeland, and of those forced into migration and separation from home, country, culture and family. Through a family window, we witness a turning point in Afghanistan’s history. The fall of Kabul and the Taliban’s return shatter the dreams of three generations — Zahra, Hawa and myself — as we stand at a crossroads, starting life again. When Afghanistan falls into the hands of a group that erases women from society, the world turns a blind eye. With this film, I hope to create awareness, impact and change.’

In rural India, a son challenges corrupt officials while his mother works their poppy farm. As authorities retaliate against their lower-caste family, survival collides with resistance. Filmed over five years, I, Poppy traces diverging moral paths, revealing the human cost of choosing between daily survival and the pursuit of justice. Vivek Chaudhary: ‘My family comes from the state of Rajasthan, where opium cultivation and use have continued for over five centuries. My fascination with the poppy plant, along with my disgust at the bureaucracy that oppresses both the plant and the people, made me want to make this film. As an artist, I also wanted to realise it in a deeply felt yet highly aesthetic way. This defined the film’s approach and explains why it took about eight years from research to completion. It has been a beautiful, arduous journey that has truly helped me come into my own as a filmmaker.’

After losing mental and physical balance at 34, the filmmaker trains at a Zen temple. Through Zen, she reconsiders eating, sleeping and breathing, seeing body and mind as a ‘bag of flesh’. Inspired by Noguchi Taiso, she imagines the body as fluid — organs and bones floating, expanding and contracting freely. Yoshigai Nao: ‘The title Masayume is a Japanese word meaning that what we see in a dream happens in real life. In Zen, there is no narrative promising salvation through belief; instead, true power arises from the tangible reality felt by the mind and body through practice. One vital lesson I learned was to value direct experience rather than depending on stories. Yet in filmmaking — even documentaries — we cannot fully avoid shaping a narrative from the creator’s perspective. By editing and reconstructing past footage as a story, I realised clearly that film is a kind of dream. At the same time, within that dream, I was able to observe what had happened to me exactly as it was, free from judgement. Living and making this film, together with that year’s weather, converged in an unexpected way — like “masayume”. I hope this film offers healing to someone beyond myself, and that in the end it might heal the earth, even just a little.’

The webcam witnesses it all. Living in Berlin, the director records ten years of drifting online conversations with parents in Isfahan and a cousin in Vienna. Much remains unsaid. Text fragments and VHS images evoke longing, distance and the ache of wanting to be understood. Faraz Fesharaki: ‘My mother wanted to know why I was recording our Skype conversations. I told her these recordings were like my diaries. [In writing,] I would never have been able to capture the essence of those moments with such detail and fidelity. “The camera doesn’t lie,” Abbas Kiarostami used to say in his workshop. “One can trust the camera.” That’s why I recorded those moments. Now, after finishing the film, I am no longer sure I can truly “trust the camera”. Every day in the editing room, I could create a different family. At times, my father was the kindest person a child could wish for; at others, the devil on earth. Sometimes I was the most humorous son, entertaining my parents endlessly; at other moments I was absent. And my mother? She remained constant — loving, deeply empathetic, intelligent and, above all, fierce. How could a camera that does not lie allow me to leave the editing room every day with a new version of our family? That remains a mystery to me. I never intended to make a faithful documentary about the Fesharaki family. What interested me most were the small narratives that emerge when people love each other. Perhaps through this film, viewers may glimpse a family and understand how the beloved revolution of my parents’ generation was stolen from them, and how the brutal oppression that followed ruined not only their lives but also those of their children. Yet there is one thing that keeps us all together: hope.’

Recovering from surgery as war reaches Irpin near Kyiv, the filmmaker flees with her cat to her parents’ village, documenting fragile routines under threat. This cinematic diary observes a family suspended between staying and leaving, revealing how conflict reshapes home, intimacy and survival. Alina Maksimenko: ‘This documentary tells the story of my family, who find themselves thrust into the heart of the war in Ukraine, confronted with life-altering decisions. While deeply personal, the story reflects a universal human struggle against an extreme situation [...]. At the film’s core are my film notes from the initial days of the war, documented in a diary-like form, capturing the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions I experienced. I yearned to comprehend the unfolding reality, to grasp the essence of this war that, until now, had only existed in the abstract realm of books, films, and stories – a war that had abruptly transformed into our terrifying reality. Before 24 February 2022, I possessed no visual, literary, or figurative vocabulary capable of expressing the horrors of war. This language was created along with the unfolding narrative. In Limbo is not simply my story; through the lens of my camera, I explore human relationships: my bond with my parents, their enduring love for each other, their attachment to their home and their land.’

Filmed over three and a half years on Ukraine’s frontline, the film follows a young filmmaker who trades his camera for a rifle and joins the Territorial Defence Forces. As war reshapes his life, he moves from storyteller to soldier, documenting fear, loss and resilience amid chaos. Artem Ryzhykov: ‘I never intended to make a film about myself. When the war began, I picked up a camera for the same reason I always had: to observe, to understand, to bear witness. But once I joined the Territorial Defence Forces, the distance between filmmaker and subject disappeared; there was no safe place to stand. I became a soldier not because I was brave, but because I was afraid of doing nothing. The camera stayed with me not as a tool of control, but as a way to remain human inside an inhuman reality. Filming became an act of survival — proof that I was still capable of seeing, feeling and remembering. A Simple Soldier is not about war as spectacle. It is about how war enters a life, reshapes it and leaves behind something fragile, painful and profoundly human.’

In the forests of the Eastern Himalayas, two curious observers explore a nocturnal world of moths, illuminating a fragile ecosystem on the India–Bhutan border. Immersive and contemplative, the film invites us to attend to hidden connections within the natural world. Anupama Srinivasan: ‘The film is in a way, at least in parts, of us observing them observing the moths. So it is about the precision and focus and attention we give to looking. That is also what we want — for the audience to look at the film with more attention than one would normally do. The other aspect was the repetition. The rigour of science, you know, where they have to put up the screen every night. So for us, we wanted to represent that rigour but in an interesting way so that it does not become boring for the audience. So, every moth-screen night has a little story around it, very gently told. One night, nothing happens, no moths come, and they just keep waiting and have to pack up and go.’ Anirban Dutta: ‘Our motivation was also to challenge the anthropocentric gaze, where human beings are seen as the most superior things. When we went to that place, we saw ourselves as very little. As you see in the film, the human knowledge and the great science we know of — when the scientists put up the moth-screen, many nights they fail. One of them says that we put up this screen thinking that the moths will come and that this place is humanised. It will take us decades to understand how the moths look. That contextualises how little we know. One also needs to understand that any science that happens is part of a process first. There is rigour, and our film is a love letter to this process of science.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Santanu Das, ‘Nocturnes Directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan Interview on the Only Indian Documentary at Sundance 2024’, Hindustan Times, 26 January 2024

Emerging from the rubber boom’s shadows, the film recovers the stories of Omarino and Aredomi, two Indigenous boys enslaved by La Casa Arana and taken to Europe. Interweaving personal inquiry with early-twentieth-century Amazonian archives, it traces a sensory dialogue between memory, power and reparative imagination. Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski: ‘The Memory of Butterflies began with a single photograph: a portrait of Omarino and Aredomi holding hands in London [...], which led me to search for them in archives across Peru, Brazil, Ireland, England, Portugal, the United States and France. Most images were propaganda from extractive and colonial expeditions in the Amazon. The film demanded a montage that could deconstruct official historical narratives and reveal what these images conceal. Telling this story through a critical lens meant examining my own position and approach. Speculation allowed me to confront where we came from and what we inherited, and to imagine new futures in close alliance with the descendant communities where we filmed. The materiality of the analogue image became the materiality of memory — a speculative, ambiguous and undefined reality.’

Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, Cao Thi Hau now cares for her extended family in a village, dreaming of her dead mother calling her home. Through intimate moments, the film observes daily life, hardship and the fragile transmission of the Ruc language to younger generations. TRƯƠNG Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux: ‘Water trickles through dark caves, drop by drop. Drops of memory pass from Mrs. Hậu to her grandchildren, word by word. Frame by frame, water carries them, carries us, carries the film — homeward.’

Born in a rural Miaoli village during the Japanese colonial era, Man Mei’s life spans a century of Taiwan’s transformation. Drawing on family albums and declassified U.S. Second World War aerial photographs, the film traces a resilient Hakka woman’s inner world, where personal memory and historical upheaval interlace. Caitlin ‘Sonny’ Shieh: ‘I made this film to honour my grandmother, Man Mei, and to understand the life she lived before I knew her. Born in a Miaoli farming village during the Japanese colonial era, she was a poor Hakka woman whose story was never meant to be remembered by history. But her life, spanning a century of Taiwan’s transformation, held so much I needed to know: her resilience, her struggles with mental health, the quiet weight she carried across generations.This film is both an act of remembering and an attempt to give voice to a life rarely centred: the interior world of a woman like my grandmother, whose experiences of imperialism, war, gendered exploitation, and survival were lived intimately, not historically. In making this film, I wanted to hold space for her memory, to sit with what she endured and what she gave.’

Each year, the filmmaker’s family takes a ferry from Kaohsiung to Penghu to visit her grandfather. When he chooses to end his life, that routine ends. Her mother keeps a diary while the filmmaker records images; through these acts of remembrance, they begin a dialogue and learn to say goodbye. Chen Shao-chun: ‘I used to describe the Taihua Ferry as “big as the Titanic”. Every summer before [college] graduation, I took it to Penghu to visit my grandparents; six hours of sea wind and nausea, then Magong. My grandfather loved its name. After his funeral in 2017, I never returned, and now the ferry is retiring. I once thought I had outgrown wondering where people or things go when they leave. But this ship carries too many memories. Before it disappears, I want to keep its image — and my unresolved goodbye—inside [the] film.’

This film traces Arizona’s desert as it is reshaped into a hub for data centres and semiconductor manufacturing. Moving through altered waterways, the film exposes tensions between technoutopian visions and drought-stricken ecologies. Guided by offscreen voices and Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda’s ‘Cloud Song’, ancestral knowledge counters the rise of industrial ‘cloud’ infrastructures. Su Yu Hsin: ‘This is the second chapter of a trilogy tracing the global expansion of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), from Hsinchu to Phoenix. As TSMC produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips and underpins the AI industry, the film seeks to uncover the hidden environmental debts embedded in its supply chain, entangled with resource extraction in arid regions. Growing up in Taiwan, I reflect on a society whose infrastructures quietly sustain this industry while environmental degradation is eclipsed by narratives of security and economic growth. Filmed in Arizona, the work follows the altered course of the Salt River — from dams to data centres — asking what it means to build a water-intensive industry in drought-stricken land. Guided by offscreen voices and Ofelia Zepeda’s “Cloud Song”, the film reveals the fracture between Technoutopian promise and ecological reality.’

Before people settled in the mountains of Houtong, monkeys lived in a cave, and the mountain god sent ghostly flames to guard hidden treasures. Drawing on local myths and whispered histories of this faded mining town, the film departs from documentary convention and weaves uncanny tales through evocative sound and image. Song Cheng-ying, Hu Chin-ya: ‘In 2022, we created a documentary titled Out of the Cave for the Houtong Miners’ Culture & History Museum. The Tales of the Tale is a continuation of that project, encompassing a dozen odd stories and anecdotes spanning various eras, including the Japanese colonial period, the post-war economic boom of the mining industry, and the archival period following the industry’s decline in recent years.Most of these tales are intertwined with gods, ghosts, and demons. They have been passed down orally by retired miners, accompanied by the haunting vistas of abandoned mines. Some are well-formed legends; others are fragmented murmurs. Some are supported by alleged evidence, while others are observations tied to news articles and death records. They come from the personal experiences of our interviewees, told and retold over time, fading and re-emerging like echoes. Together, they become the tales of Houtong.The interviewees were once farmers who cultivated the mountain lands, later becoming miners who unearthed its riches. Their labour fueled national development but came at a heavy cost, leaving behind a history of unparalleled occupational hazards. When investment in the mining industry dwindled, Houtong transformed from a bustling, labour-intensive mining town into a forgotten, derelict place hidden within the mountains and overgrown by the woods.These individuals want their stories to be heard. They refuse to let the calamities they endured be forgotten. How do you live with the fact that you survived while others did not? How do you remember the ghosts of those who were lost? Will those ghosts ever become gods? Through storytelling, they attempt to release these spirits from purgatory. In turn, the act of telling brings them closure.’

On Huayu, a remote island west of Penghu, daily life follows tides and seasons. While men fish offshore, women labour along the shore and at home. Observing a veteran forager and a shopkeeper, the film offers an intimate portrait of women’s resilience and labour within a male-dominated fishing community. Chen Wei-cih: ‘I believe the greatest challenge in documentary filmmaking is not “providing answers”, but “living the answers” — it is a persistent practice of imagining the future.From stepping onto a remote island of fewer than a hundred people to serving as a teacher in a five-student school, and from investigating vanishing fishing methods to leading local workshops, my work centres on documentary yet refuses to be confined by its frameworks. I seek to coexist with the moving image, becoming a co-recorder alongside the community. To me, creation encompasses one’s attitude toward life and the profound bonds between people.Instead of chasing issues, I choose to let stories flow naturally. My wish is to remain forever within the field, living the very stories I tell.’

A pioneer of amateur cinema in Asia, Yoshikawa Hayao (1890–1959) wrote over 160 books to share his passion for moving images in the 1930s. Years later, he revisits an unrealised youthful dream: a science-fiction film set on the Moon. Inspired by Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon, the search becomes a return to the spirit of amateur filmmaking. Huang Pang-chuan & Chunni Lin: ‘This film was shot entirely on 9.5mm film, a format that has vanished for nearly half a century. First introduced a century ago, 9.5mm film sparked a wave of amateur filmmaking, inspiring the creation of countless cine-clubs across Japan and Taiwan. Yoshikawa Hayao was among the most passionate advocates of this movement; through his wide network of friends and prolific writings, he helped advance a vision of ‘cinematic democratisation’. Yet the works of those early amateurs, created entirely on reversal film, left no duplicates and have since disappeared with time. This film revives that lost spirit, using the same tools, the same format, and the same handmade process, to summon back a forgotten golden age of small-gauge cinema, letting the faint light of film history shimmer once more today.’

A cinematic correspondence between two filmmakers in Taipei and Tokyo, begun during the COVID-19 pandemic and continuing until 2024. Exchanging images and sounds, the film unfolds through animation, collage, cyanotype and 8mm experiments, quoting one another’s materials. The result shimmers with the joy of deeply personal cinema. Johan Chang & Masa Kudo: ‘This film brings together eight video letters we exchanged between 2021 and the spring of 2024. Each letter forms a self-contained world. The images carry the accumulated weight and stains of life and work — traces that seep in and cannot be erased. Through the signals left behind, we imagine each other’s daily lives and respond in a pure language of images. Travelling alongside the pandemic, this film unfolds like a circle, quietly ongoing.’

In a Taiwanese mortuary, the bodies of deceased children are kept for years when families are absent. Funeral workers prepare rituals, paper houses and horses are burned, and quiet gestures of care unfold. Observing institutional routines and private mourning, the film reflects on how the living accompany the dead on their final journey. An Chu: ‘I visited this particular morgue in Northern Taiwan for a year before making this film. One of the funeral directors told me that many children’s bodies are kept in the freezer for several years due to the absence of their parents, who may be in jail, undergoing rehabilitation, or living in hiding as undocumented migrant workers. Social welfare units are often unable to intervene. As a result, funeral parlors sometimes hold a simple ceremony for these children and burn paper offerings for them. According to our beliefs, the deceased will receive whatever we burn for them in this world in the afterlife, including paper houses, horses, and other worldly objects. A large portion of the Taiwanese population practices Buddhism and Taoism, and believes in reincarnation and the afterlife. However, these children remain orphans even after death, becoming restless souls trapped in the morgue. If there are no ritual masters willing to perform a ceremony on their behalf, their fate after death remains unchanged. The gaze of the new recruit represents my own feelings when I first heard this story. Although the environment felt oppressive and formal, I felt I could use my imagination to do something for these children — to try to understand how they might feel, and to offer a different perspective and interpretation of their passing.’

Amid Hong Kong’s 2019 upheaval, a message from his father suspends a filmmaker in emotional stasis. During the subsequent pandemic lockdown, separated across borders, father and son connect through prolonged video calls. Between silences and fragmented memories, the film traces two men struggling to reach one another through trauma and unspoken grief. Ray Kam-hei Chan: ‘I lived most of my youth in pain, so much that I wished every farewell could be eternal, and I protected myself through detachment.As an adult, I began learning how to live, only to realize pain does not disappear, but simply takes another form. I suspect love may be the same. Pain pushed me back into my own emotions and memories, asking: How did I end up here? How do I go on?This film is a survivor’s journal of a family, and tenderness might not comfort all wounds. I hope to create a space to breathe for those who have spent years closing themselves off to avoid pain. If you see yourself here, perhaps we are not alone.’

After seven years in Poland, the filmmaker returns to China for Lunar New Year and is drawn back into family tensions. When her parents urge her to remove a ‘misfortunate’ mole, illness and tradition collide. Blending documentary intimacy with stop-motion animation and tragicomic tones, the film explores fate, generational trauma, and the rediscovery of love. Tan Mo: ‘This film grows out of observations of intimate relationships, family dynamics, and generational tensions, exploring whether, in a fractured world, we can still find the possibility of dialogue and coexistence within the smallest social unit — the family. We often turn our own traumas into distance, and the act of filming became a way for me to revisit and mend these fractures. Formally, the film blends the approaches of a caméra-stylo and a cinematic essay, using voiceover to reveal the inner world, stop-motion animation to express fantasies and fears, and an observational lens to capture genuine emotions and subtle interactions. As both director and cinematographer, I am simultaneously the observer and the observed; the camera becomes both witness and blade, exposing vulnerability and contradiction. This is a self-portrait film, an inquiry into where I come from, where I stand, and where I am going.’

Drawing on films made by Chinese state studios in the 1950s–1980s, this work revisits island narratives of war, revolution, espionage, and class struggle once shaped to engineer shared sentiments. Images from these features are dismantled and recomposed as propaganda dissolves into tropical murmurs, blurring borders between history and fantasy, individual and collective. Pan Lu: ‘The film’s source material is drawn from fifteen narrative features produced by Chinese state film studios during the socialist period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Set on islands and at sea, these films told stories of war, espionage, revolution, and class struggle. Images once used to shape collective consciousness and mobilise emotion are here dismantled and reassembled, becoming an unrecognisable fever dream. The echoes of history intertwine beneath the water; the language of propaganda turns into the night-time whispers of coconut palms, seeping into every sleeper’s dreams. The island’s borders gradually dissolve within the afterimages of these frames, and the boundary between individual and collective, reality and fiction, blurs in turn — inviting viewers into a labyrinthine dreamscape where a call both familiar and strange can be felt.’

Approaching graduation, a filmmaker reflects on an old friend’s engagement and her own mother’s retirement, life stages unfolding at different speeds. Inviting participants to record half-minute fragments, she expands personal narratives into collective memory. Through action prompts and moving images, time is deconstructed and reassembled into overlapping rhythms of presence and change. Sammi Sum-yi Chiu: ‘During my school years, I often felt that time was flying by, and I was suddenly confronted with constant change. I initially hoped to reflect on my time at school, but while searching for the meaning of time, I discovered that it appears rational and orderly, yet can still be shaped to meet different people’s needs. Perhaps “time” is merely a container we fill with meaning — encountering people from different time zones, and adjusting our own “time” accordingly.’

Drawing on the filmmaker’s diasporic experience, this three-part video diary weaves Hong Kong’s geology, greenhouse cultivation, and migrant farming into a meditation on identity. Reframing agricultural processes and species migration, the film reflects on the implications of rooting and re-rooting, and on the evolving dynamics between land and humanity across foreign soils. Dorothy Cheung: ‘Filming As a Bird that Briefly Perches was a journey in reverse. It began with a curiosity about Asian seeds adapting to foreign soil: do they still resemble their original selves? After documenting a Hong Kong farmer in London, I added two formally distinct, asymmetrical chapters to complete this non-linear work. The title is drawn from a concept in an ancient Chinese text [The Zuo Tradition]: while a bird may choose where to land, the tree has little agency. At the time the text was written, little was known about the trees that can in fact lure or trap birds. While working on this project, I was reminded of a childhood friend who moved to the U.K. in recent years and later passed away. How much choice does a bird truly have? Perhaps we are all only perching briefly… before taking off again.’

Nothing can be heard anymore; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are heading straight to the world’s biggest display of soundproof fireworks, and soon we will drop our bombs.’ This film transforms Israeli military propaganda reels of the 1960s–70s into an absurd spectacle, exposing the violence projected onto an imagined Palestinian battlefield. Kamal Aljafari: ‘This area of Palestine has been very affected both by using a large part of it as army bases for exercises and by creating settlements and, by doing so, changing the nature of the place. Where there is desert, in many places in the world, it has been used to exercise, to test bombs and finally destroy the landscape itself. In the material we never see the people: the enemy is always supposedly hiding behind the hills, or between ruins, but we never see it. Nevertheless, the soldiers continue bombing and manoeuvring and attacking again and again with their power forces. This whole thing that the enemy is not to be seen is also quite symbolic: it’s the way the Palestinians are perceived in many aspects of their life, as non-existing and temporary. Yet the “state” is set to look for them; in a way, the material [testifies to] this ideology, they are there and not there. They are not being recognised as human beings, and the army attempts at the same time to fight them, which is in itself very contradictory and prone to failure.'– Excerpted from Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team, Clotilde Couturier, ‘Interview with Kamal Aljafari, Director of Paradiso, XXXI, 108’, myDylarama, 1 February 2023.

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut, raiding the Palestinian Research Centre and looting its entire archive. Containing historical documents and still and moving images of Palestine, the archive becomes the premise for A Fidai Film, which explores the visual memory of this looting through images now held in Israeli archives. Kamal Aljafari: ‘Often in newsreels and films the Hebrew word for “Saboteurs” is used to describe Palestinians, in particular the Palestinian freedom fighters, or fida’een, who led operations against the occupation in the 1960s and 1970s. And the longer I watched, the more I felt myself wanting to become a saboteur.My project chronicles my sabotage of the Cinematheque material. It is a sabotage that is also a reconstruction, reclaiming from the footage latent narratives, creating a counter-archive from repurposed images, and making Israeli fiction more fictional, so that another reality can be revealed.Repurposed images and films and names and texts and logos found in them are digitally defaced. Red scribbles blot out parts of the footage. Israeli colonists are cut out, or replaced with random material found in the backgrounds of their scenes. Their presence becomes ghostly and spectral. By such means, I reconstruct a Palestinian image that no longer has an archive. It is a fidai film.’– Excerpted from Kamal Aljafari, ‘A Fidai Film: A Project Idea’, Journal of Visual Culture 20.2, p. 347, August 2021.

A Night We Held Between unfolds from ‘Song for the Fighters’, drawn from the sonic archive of the Popular Art Centre. Shot in labyrinthine caves and underground passages in Palestine, the film weaves moving bodies, rituals and ancient sites through layers of the song, conjuring history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act. Noor Abed: ‘The occupation is always fragmenting land, so our bodies are learning all the time how to move and how to resist, how to try to re-enter, how to smuggle, and how to get used to the new road, to the new city. I always thought my body is the only thing I have, especially living in Palestine with the constant presence of aggression and dispossession. I figured that it’s lighter to just make art with the body.By documenting our daily lives, our rituals, we are reclaiming the narrative and showing our strength and resilience as a society, that we are more than just victims. Image-making is a powerful tool in promoting the truth of something. So using a medium that looks nostalgic and historical, I wanted to create another reality. I’m hoping that these images can intrude on the history that has been mainstreamed, because the only images we have are from Western and Orientalists.’– Excerpted from Hanis Maketab, ‘A Palestinian Artist’s Poetic Film Turns Resistance into an Art Form’, Asia News Network, 20 November 2024.

To dance is to remember and insist on existence. As Palestinian identity faces erasure, dabke becomes an homage to history and culture. The film documents choreography as collective memory, where assembling steps mirrors assembling identity. Film and dance together affirm a love of life, contributing to an archive that keeps Palestine present and alive. Lamees Almakkawy: ‘When we talk about Palestine, it tends to be post-Nakba (the “Catastrophe”, in which at least 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of Palestine in 1948, when the State of Israel was established) or in the context of its coloniser. Palestine and Palestinians have become a symbol, rather than a country and a people. We forget that Palestine has a rich culture and history. It is for these reasons that this film tells a story of Palestine through its folk dance, the dabke. Though the dabke is a key component of Palestinian political identity, it is also a reminder that Palestinians exist. Ultimately, this film is a love letter to Palestinians, their resilience, and their insistence on living life.’

On the threshold of adulthood, the director and his close friends gather to rekindle youthful playfulness and rebellion while confronting past trauma. What happens when an entire generation is forced to forget? Can friendship be a form of resistance? The film becomes a living record of solidarity, intimacy, and shared memory amid dark, muted times. Rico Wong: ‘We often do not give silence enough space. We avoid and fear it. Yet only within silence can ineffable thoughts and emotions slowly ferment, and fragments rooted deep in memory rise towards the surface. In those moments when language is no longer able to function properly, we fall into silence and accompany one another. From then on, silence becomes light, so very light.’

Unfolding as a tender letter, the film traces Hong Kong through its landscapes and lingering marks. Within memories of those who left, stayed or drifted, it searches for intimate moments that quietly connect lives, attuned to the city’s subtle rhythms of change and stillness. Chan Hau-chun: ‘In recent years, the landscape of Hong Kong has grown unfamiliar. Some have left, some have stayed, and some are stuck in between, unsure of where to go. The streets are still the same streets, yet every small trace is gradually fading away. They may seem insignificant, but they feel like secret codes, connecting us to one another. The film is about an unfinished conversation, an unoccupied seat, a mountain ridge whose outline is slowly blurring, and the memory of a city yet to be forgotten.’

In Osaka’s Nishinari Ward, Kamagasaki remains a historic enclave of day labourers, though its name no longer appears on official maps. As public spaces disappear, the director and his friend wander its streets, listening to residents’ voices. Their stories reveal lives shaped by hardship, solidarity, and a neighbourhood that continues to shelter society’s most marginalised. Itakura Yoshiyuki: ‘“The people of the town are disappearing. Soon, I won’t be able to film them any more.” Driven by this sense of anxiety, I began walking through Kamagasaki with Sato Leo, director of The Kamagasaki Cauldron War (2017). It took some courage to ask the people we met if we could film them. I thought they would hate being filmed, as they had long been subjected to discriminatory gazes. However, many accepted, and they spoke ceaselessly in front of the camera. They had so much they wanted to describe and express. Since then, we have been showered with the words of the people we encountered. Those people — despite being buffeted by economic and political forces in their daily lives — never gave up their honesty with themselves. Before I knew it, my anxiety and tension began to ease, and I often found myself laughing with them. As I watched the footage we filmed, the fundamental principle for editing became clear: to preserve the power of their words and presence, which were about to be forced to change due to redevelopment. Instead of cutting and pasting their words and images to fit a theme, it was about discovering and carving the film out of their voices and existence. The kind of people we met during filming existed in the past, exist in the present, and will likely continue to exist in the future. They have no choice but to.’

A Dutch-Afghan filmmaker confronts his authoritarian father, an imam with a violent past, in an attempt to heal their fractured relationship. Travelling across Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, they reflect on family, faith and displacement. Part personal reckoning, part universal search for freedom, the film explores liberation from inherited fear and emotional exile. Dawood Hilmandi: ‘This journey began with my father, Baba, a man who for years was like a statue of stone and silence to me. My curiosity as a child was always suppressed. Yet one unanswered question remained: how can I make sense of a world I am forbidden to question? Gradually, I realised that his silence was a frozen ocean […]. Beneath that frozen surface flowed a current of inherited suffering […]. There comes a pivotal moment when we must find the courage to become curious — to question, to challenge, and to examine critically the foundations of the oppressive systems imposed upon us, both within and around us. Paikar […] is about reclaiming the right to ask “why?”. It is for anyone who has inherited silence, who has carried pain across borders, and who still dares to believe that healing is possible through questioning and the insistence on telling our stories.’

Neang, an Indigenous woman in northeastern Cambodia, watches her village disappear beneath a hydroelectric dam. As industrial and state forces pressure families to leave ancestral lands, she struggles to hold her community together while her children’s futures drift away from traditional ways of life.  Polen Ly: ‘The experience of filming Until the Orchid Blooms over six years went beyond filmmaking; it became a journey that allowed me to form a deep emotional bond with Neang’s family and her Indigenous community. This story of struggle may seem small and unnoticed like a fallen leaf hidden in a vast forest, yet for me it reflects how our humanity confronts the crises of the modern world, where abuses of power produce both loud and silent forms of violence that harm human lives and nature itself. I dedicate Until the Orchid Blooms as a diary for the family and the Kbal Tomas community, especially for the children, so they may remember the resistance, strength and resilience of their parents and elders. I also hope the film creates a spiritual bond between the audiences and the people whose stories it carries.’

In June 2023, as civil war once again erupts in Myanmar, the filmmaker returns to the port where he once waited months for a passport. Years of absence do little to ease his anxiety or the suffering of the people. His homeland remains rooted in his heart, yet return is impossible. Midi Z: ‘I feel powerless whenever I learn about the cruelties that keep happening around the world, especially those happening in Myanmar, my home country. The military coup in 2021 spread existing problems, including racial inequality and poverty, from the countryside to the cities. Now, among the sixty million people in Myanmar, most are living in a nightmare of deep fear. What is barbaric is not ignorance or underdevelopment, but the fact that knowledge and civilisation cannot improve the situation. I can only document it, continuously, but to a certain degree, documenting it in this way is nothing more than mere observation.’

In a DIY cabin deep in the forest, Martin builds a solitary yet ordered life among his cats. When one disappears, routines falter and memories resurface. Through fragments of daily life and quiet confessions, the film reflects on mourning, freedom and the fragile edges of marginal existence. Steve Patry: ‘It all began with an extremely cinematic image: far from everything, in the middle of the forest, a man carving out a new life alongside his pack of cats. Wherever civilisation exists, there have always been people eager to break away from it. Are we meant to live alone? Can isolation be harmful, or can it allow us to experience the world more truthfully? These were the questions that guided me as I began filming. Working through an almost fully embedded approach, I shared my protagonist’s living space across 18 filming trips, becoming an observer-participant in an existence at once fabulous, tragic and marked by marginality.’

A decade ago, on the Morocco–Spain border, the filmmaker and his group attempted the ‘boza’ crossing to Europe. After repeated failures, they survive through solidarity, songs and a camera, as the self-named ‘Artist’ keeps hope alive. David Bingong: ‘We made The Travelers to capture our lives as sub-Saharan immigrants in Morocco from an everyday perspective. We wanted to show our reality as it is, without filters, using a handful of songs and videos we created that speak of our community, conflicts and dreams. We were driven by a common goal: crossing the border fence between Morocco and Spain, one of the most militarised borders in the world. Made during several attempts between 2014 and 2015, the film not only documents this reality but also gives us strength as a group and a sense of empowerment.’

A footbridge divides Argentina and Paraguay. Amid the dizzying flow of trafficking and trade, the filmmaker meets nine-year-old Ángel and begins filming with him. Over ten years, the images trace his passage from childhood to adolescence, shaped by resilience and the rhythms of the border. Clarisa Navas: ‘The Prince of Nanawa is a lifelong project that has connected me with Ángel since our first encounter, when he was a child at the border between our countries. Nearly a decade later, the promise of making this film together has remained our bond. As Ángel’s concerns evolved, so did our relationship. While daily life remains harsh, sometimes a film can be a promise. Sometimes I think The Prince of Nanawa is, at its core, a film about love in its many forms — how it transcends differences and how we accompany each other through life’s changes. I don’t know what cinema can do in a world that seems to be crumbling around us, but I do know imagination is not only a refuge: it is a force, our last reserve to defy, create and resist.’

For twenty-four years, a rare congenital condition prevented the filmmaker from pronouncing the letter R, effectively suppressing his voice. Returning to his parents’ home, he traces a personal journey where speech, identity and dissident sexuality intertwine, reflecting on visibility and the politics of difference. Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren:‘“This is an essay about the voice, and this is the voice of this essay.” I have always struggled to listen to my own voice because of how it sounded. As a child, I was diagnosed with Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare congenital condition affecting craniofacial development, hearing and vision. Limited auditory development often shapes language acquisition, particularly pronunciation. For me, pronouncing the letter R was impossible until a few months ago, when I worked on it through speech therapy. I believe the voice is [...] a bridge connecting the language of the soul to the body [... and] cinema the medium that made expression possible — a language of images and sounds, far more powerful. The denial of my disability, together with a “non-conventional” sexual orientation, shaped an unstable identity. This project became a form of speech therapy, asking what it means to have a voice — as a son, a cisgender man, a filmmaker, a human being — and how voice reflects our existence and our understanding of the world.’

A pioneer of amateur cinema in Asia, Yoshikawa Hayao (1890–1959) wrote over 160 books to share his passion for moving images in the 1930s. Years later, he revisits an unrealised youthful dream: a science-fiction film set on the Moon. Inspired by Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon, the search becomes a return to the spirit of amateur filmmaking. Huang Pang-chuan & Chunni Lin: ‘This film was shot entirely on 9.5mm film, a format that has vanished for nearly half a century. First introduced a century ago, 9.5mm film sparked a wave of amateur filmmaking, inspiring the creation of countless cine-clubs across Japan and Taiwan. Yoshikawa Hayao was among the most passionate advocates of this movement; through his wide network of friends and prolific writings, he helped advance a vision of ‘cinematic democratisation’. Yet the works of those early amateurs, created entirely on reversal film, left no duplicates and have since disappeared with time. This film revives that lost spirit, using the same tools, the same format, and the same handmade process, to summon back a forgotten golden age of small-gauge cinema, letting the faint light of film history shimmer once more today.’

A cinematic correspondence between two filmmakers in Taipei and Tokyo, begun during the COVID-19 pandemic and continuing until 2024. Exchanging images and sounds, the film unfolds through animation, collage, cyanotype and 8mm experiments, quoting one another’s materials. The result shimmers with the joy of deeply personal cinema. Johan Chang & Masa Kudo: ‘This film brings together eight video letters we exchanged between 2021 and the spring of 2024. Each letter forms a self-contained world. The images carry the accumulated weight and stains of life and work — traces that seep in and cannot be erased. Through the signals left behind, we imagine each other’s daily lives and respond in a pure language of images. Travelling alongside the pandemic, this film unfolds like a circle, quietly ongoing.’

In a Taiwanese mortuary, the bodies of deceased children are kept for years when families are absent. Funeral workers prepare rituals, paper houses and horses are burned, and quiet gestures of care unfold. Observing institutional routines and private mourning, the film reflects on how the living accompany the dead on their final journey. An Chu: ‘I visited this particular morgue in Northern Taiwan for a year before making this film. One of the funeral directors told me that many children’s bodies are kept in the freezer for several years due to the absence of their parents, who may be in jail, undergoing rehabilitation, or living in hiding as undocumented migrant workers. Social welfare units are often unable to intervene. As a result, funeral parlors sometimes hold a simple ceremony for these children and burn paper offerings for them. According to our beliefs, the deceased will receive whatever we burn for them in this world in the afterlife, including paper houses, horses, and other worldly objects. A large portion of the Taiwanese population practices Buddhism and Taoism, and believes in reincarnation and the afterlife. However, these children remain orphans even after death, becoming restless souls trapped in the morgue. If there are no ritual masters willing to perform a ceremony on their behalf, their fate after death remains unchanged. The gaze of the new recruit represents my own feelings when I first heard this story. Although the environment felt oppressive and formal, I felt I could use my imagination to do something for these children — to try to understand how they might feel, and to offer a different perspective and interpretation of their passing.’

As a long-term migrant caregiver, Fidati shapes Indonesian stories with Taiwanese paper clay. After years of separation during the pandemic, she returns to Central Java in 2024. Laughter and tears intertwine, yet family duty keeps her moving between two lands, where the taste of mangoes bridges emotions across the sea. Cheng Chih-ming & Lily Huang: ‘What does “home” look like for those who labour far from their roots? In 2023, we filmed Fidati’s Room, a cramped five-pyeong room in Taichung that served as her creative sanctuary. Here, she transcended her identity as a migrant worker, molding Indonesian stories from Taiwanese clay.In 2024, we followed her back to Central Java to witness the fruits of fifteen years of toil: a grand house and thriving livestock. Yet, a poignant irony emerged — Fidati has long been an absentee in the home she built. While her sacrifice bought land and bricks, the cost was time itself. Realities shift and dreams evolve, but the towering mango tree at her doorstep remains — bittersweet as ever.’

Fifteen chapters unfold across the Bunun villages of Litu and Wulu in Taitung, Taiwan, and the surrounding mountains and forests. Children dream of chasing — or being chased by — spirit animals; elders recall lives shaped by snake and bear myths; strange encounters emerge in the habitats of birds. Yannick Dauby: ‘A microphone is a non-neutral device, a transducer which can be taken outdoors. Entirely devoted to the observation of acoustic waves, it produces an electrical signal analogous to the sounds which stimulate it. If abandoned too long in the wild, victim of weather hazards, it might also produce some unwanted or unexpected noises.Much the same can be said of my own process in composing Bone Always Outlasts Feather. This audiovisual creation is a description, or maybe an interpretation, of the voices of animals and a garland of stories and dreams recollected by some Bunun people living nearby.Also, under the influence of the environment above the villages of Lidao and Wulu, a series of mental glitches happened, taking the form of imaginary myths. The film grain of sparse anachronistic images accompanies the spoken words, birdsongs, and whispers of the landscape in a narrative flow about the forest, the mountains, and their inhabitants.’

Known as ‘Pa Nana’, a celebrated Latin singer in 1950s–60s Taiwan, Kao Chu-hua supported her family through nightclub performances after her father’s execution during the White Terror. Drawing on family testimonies and newly declassified archives, the film reconstructs her life under state surveillance, revealing survival beneath authoritarian rule and enforced silence. Lu Yuan-chi: ‘Knowing Kao Chu-hua’s story, her survival feels almost miraculous. This film begins with a simple yet haunting question: how do the survivors live now?The tragic mist of oppression still lingers over her family today. We trace her life from an elite daughter, to the nightclub singer “Pa Nana,” and finally to a collapsing mother.Through surveillance records, we uncover the invisible weight that forced her to renounce her own identity. These families have endured in silence, not out of weakness, but to protect the next generation. They do not seek apologies, but the understanding necessary to live with dignity. May this film offer them a small measure of liberation.’

The film imagines a century after the Nakba, as a deceased grandmother navigates her hometown Haifa through Google Street View — the only remaining way to see Palestine. Her disembodied voice wanders digital streets, searching for a son born in 1948, and for a geography erased from history yet preserved through spectral imagination. Razan Alsalah: ‘This was my first film; I initially didn't know I was making a film. What mattered was finding a way to return my grandmother to Palestine. In retrospect, now I understand this film as establishing the ethic of my filmmaking practice in collective recollection—rather than in scripted narrative or documentary witnessing. It's something in-between. Similarly, my grandmother's voice was something that was both enacted and written. I immersed myself in our stories, our collective histories, archival research, the interview with Amine, critical historical research, and Google Streetview's inherent modes of production, and encountered the image as I knew teta would have: at the moment of her escape, as it coincides with her moment of return. Remembering and returning are inextricably linked. ’

Amine, a Palestinian elder, was exiled from land and labour, moving from Haifa to Beirut and finally to an offshore oil platform in the Gulf. Trespassing geographic and historical borders, the film reveals an emotional and material proximity between regional oil extraction, migrant labour and the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. Razan AlSalah: ‘During the pandemic, my brother and I wanted to have conversations with our dad to understand the material conditions of his labour on Zirku Island, an island in the Arab Gulf, off the shore of Abu Dhabi, a fenced-off work camp where around 1,100 male employees lived and worked 12[-hour-plus] shifts, often for extended and continuous periods of time. Growing up, “the island” was this obscure, mystical place that our dad disappeared to — and then came back from. So we were like: where is this place? What did you do there? What kind of work? What kind of conditions?We started recording these conversations, and at one point I told my dad, “It seems like this is going to be a film.” And he said, “No, you can’t make a film because you can’t bring a camera onto the island.” I was like, “You don’t know my work. If anything, I’m a certified expert for places where you can’t bring cameras.”And so the film very much became about trying to visualise the island — studying the images as another kind of border, another wall. How these images erase the bodies of the labourers, and how that erasure can be linked to the histories of Palestinian resistance to oil and gas as projects of colonisation.’— Excerpted from Nasrin Himada, ‘To Keep the Remembering Going: In Conversation with Filmmaker Razan AlSalah’, Public Parking, 20 May 2025.

The Diary of a Sky unfolds an atmospheric symphony of violence over Beirut, revealing the haunting fusion of incessant Israeli military flights and generator hums during blackouts. It plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponisation of air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes disturbingly banal. Lawrence Abu Hamdan: ‘We feel the air as a material; it’s materialised through the noise of aircraft. I wanted to close the conceptual gap between noise pollution and air pollution because I think something is lost when we separate these conditions out. What this work is trying to do is really take sound seriously as an activation of air. When we smell old diesel smoke emerging from some water supply truck, we are suddenly made aware of what’s going into our lungs, whereas we may not have been before. This is what’s happening with these F-35s and our ears. Through the sounding of the air, the vibration of its particles, the air becomes a volatile compound — of noise, dread, carbon dioxide, monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and all the other toxic emissions of international militarism.’

The films of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Media Unit disappeared during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut. Following elusive and contradictory clues, a filmmaker searches for the missing archive, encountering myths and lived stories. With humour, she engages a tragedy she identifies with, questioning its claims while tracing how absence and exile shape memory and who is seen in history. Azza El-Hassan:‘The narrative of dispossession, exile, war, and many other grand narratives of loss have long dominated individual Palestinian lives. The film archive through which Palestinians attempted to document their daily reality and reflect on these grand narratives went missing, and this disappearance became yet another grand narrative of loss to add to the list. Yet within grand narratives, many important details of life are forgotten. This is what Kings and Extras tries to capture: the price of trying not to lose things can be deeply personal and very high, so that you end up forgetting what you have lost while trying to preserve it at the same time.’

A collage of letters and intertwined journeys across time. As explorer and writer Alexandra David-Néel recounts her Himalayan passage a century ago, a filmmaker reflects on encounters in Eastern Tibet. Across different media, both examine their positions as outsiders, dwelling on historical wounds and a self reshaped by the high plateau. Cui Yi: ‘“Who was it written to? Who is it written to? Who will it be written to? If the consciousness behind the letters exists, can we have a dialogue?” These questions returned to me as I read the letters of Alexandra David-Néel, a writer and scholar whose Himalayan journeys were traces of her quest for truth. Like Alexandra, I find myself an outsider in the snow lands, grappling with my place within a colonial history. I stand between East and West, the spiritual and the secular, asking where the path forward lies amid plagues, wars, and human ferocity. I went to Eastern Tibet to teach filmmaking, yet received far more in return. Through the lenses of local filmmakers, I learned new ways of seeing the human and non-human worlds; their audiovisual landscape became integral to my own journey.’

Digitised in 2025, two 16mm films from Taiwan's Japanese colonial period are presented together. The first captures a national mobilisation rally in Taichung and the fervour surrounding a troops' send-off. The second observes a Shinto festival procession, student soldiers drilling with rifles, and female students forming rice balls for wartime logistics.

Digitised in 2025, two 16mm films from Taiwan's Japanese colonial period are presented together. The first captures a national mobilisation rally in Taichung and the fervour surrounding a troops' send-off. The second observes a Shinto festival procession, student soldiers drilling with rifles, and female students forming rice balls for wartime logistics.

Released circa 1942-1943, Kokumin Dojo (Civilian Training Centre) was a Japanese state-sponsored propaganda film documenting rituals used to convert Taiwanese people into 'imperial' Japanese subjects. This work offers a contemporary critical re-enactment of selfhood and emotional erasure as colonial policy, staging four young immigrants in Japan under off-camera command, synchronised with the original film. Fujii Hikaru: 'During the war, the ultimate goal of "Japaneseisation" was troop mobilisation. In the postwar "democratic" era, this is outwardly denied as militarism, yet assimilation policies from the imperial era continued to shape the lives of foreign residents in Japan. Under global capitalism, economic domination and exploitation now extend to Southeast Asian immigrants depicted in Mujō (The Heartless). Some are deprived of their freedom of employment under the Technical Intern Training Programme, criticised by the U.N. Human Rights Council and in the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report (2021). Excessive Japaneseisation is also internalised in everyday behaviour, gestures, and personal expression, closely monitored through social media and other forms of surveillance.' — Excerpted and adapted from 'Sign of the Times #5: Restoring Time' Kokumin Dojo (Civilian Training Centre). Courtesy of the National Museum of Taiwan History.

Suniuo (1919-1979), also known as Li Guang-hui, was an Indigenous Taiwanese soldier for Japan. Unaware of Japan's WWII surrender, he remained hidden in the jungle for thirty years. The film follows his life from 1975 to 1979, tracing his emergence from the Indonesian jungle, return to Taiwan and the Amis community, ensuing media frenzy, and death from lung cancer.

This hybrid documentary weaves stories from Isan, Thailand’s largest yet poorest region. Through Mor Lam, a popular folk music with Lao roots, it traces political uprisings before and after the Cold War. Questioning why Isan seems cursed by misfortune, the film reveals resilience, humour and joy persisting amid a landscape shaped by bloodshed and loss. Thunska Pansittivorakul: ‘Shortly before radical Thai art activist Thanom Chapakdee passed away in 2022, he proposed the idea that Mor Lam — a genre of music immensely popular today — was once used as a tool of rebellion. At the time, I already had a concept for a story involving a disturbing incident in the Mekong River basin. When Doc Club Originals approached me to produce their first theatrical documentary, we decided to merge these ideas into a single film. Although this film is being screened in Taiwan after its Thai release, the version shown in Taiwan is slightly different from the one in Thailand. Thailand is not a country where one can fully resist without consequence; certain acts of defiance carry risks severe enough to cost one’s freedom for at least fifteen years. As many are aware, a significant number of young people are currently imprisoned under lèse-majesté charges, many effectively forgotten behind bars. No matter how courageous I may appear, the truth is that I continue to live in a persistent state of fear.’

0.2 seconds after a sound reaches the cochlea, the brain assigns distance, direction and speed. With constant tinnitus, the director compares inner sounds with Somchai, a construction worker and fellow patient. Blending medical inquiry, soundscape and poetic reflection, she reveals how thin the line is between sound and noise — and whose voices are dismissed as such. Jung Hyejin: ‘One day, without warning, I lost hearing in one ear. While still reeling, I met Thai migrant workers afflicted with the same condition. Seeing their bodies and hearing their stories, I realised my crisis was not mine alone — it was ours. It was the story of my grandfather’s generation, who blamed themselves for workplace injuries. It was the story of those who demanded dignity, only to be cursed by a broken system. It is the story of a nation grown numb to the daily news of workers’ deaths. Words began to spill out of me; through the disorienting lens of my unbalanced senses, I wrote this story in equal parts anger and grief.’ — Excerpted from ‘Noise: Unwanted Sound, Director’s Note’, DMZ Docs Online Catalogue (2025)

Four years after cycling two thousand kilometres home during the first Covid lockdown, construction worker Mahesh becomes the subject of a film about his journey. Yet as shooting ends and he returns to the labyrinth of his job site, a quieter portrait emerges. Blending fact and fiction, this film-within-a-film reflects on migrant labour and the ethics of looking. Suhel Banerjee: ‘This has been a difficult film to make, because it tells a difficult story. At its centre is the ordinary Indian, within whom exists a multitude of stories, shaped by years of struggle against poverty and illuminated by the aura of mythology, music, and art. It is this inherited wisdom that I most want reflected in my work.’

After losing mental and physical balance at 34, the filmmaker trains at a Zen temple. Through Zen, she reconsiders eating, sleeping and breathing, seeing body and mind as a ‘bag of flesh’. Inspired by Noguchi Taiso, she imagines the body as fluid — organs and bones floating, expanding and contracting freely. Yoshigai Nao: ‘The title Masayume is a Japanese word meaning that what we see in a dream happens in real life. In Zen, there is no narrative promising salvation through belief; instead, true power arises from the tangible reality felt by the mind and body through practice. One vital lesson I learned was to value direct experience rather than depending on stories. Yet in filmmaking — even documentaries — we cannot fully avoid shaping a narrative from the creator’s perspective. By editing and reconstructing past footage as a story, I realised clearly that film is a kind of dream. At the same time, within that dream, I was able to observe what had happened to me exactly as it was, free from judgement. Living and making this film, together with that year’s weather, converged in an unexpected way — like “masayume”. I hope this film offers healing to someone beyond myself, and that in the end it might heal the earth, even just a little.’

In Osaka’s Nishinari Ward, Kamagasaki remains a historic enclave of day labourers, though its name no longer appears on official maps. As public spaces disappear, the director and his friend wander its streets, listening to residents’ voices. Their stories reveal lives shaped by hardship, solidarity, and a neighbourhood that continues to shelter society’s most marginalised. Itakura Yoshiyuki: ‘“The people of the town are disappearing. Soon, I won’t be able to film them any more.” Driven by this sense of anxiety, I began walking through Kamagasaki with Sato Leo, director of The Kamagasaki Cauldron War (2017). It took some courage to ask the people we met if we could film them. I thought they would hate being filmed, as they had long been subjected to discriminatory gazes. However, many accepted, and they spoke ceaselessly in front of the camera. They had so much they wanted to describe and express. Since then, we have been showered with the words of the people we encountered. Those people — despite being buffeted by economic and political forces in their daily lives — never gave up their honesty with themselves. Before I knew it, my anxiety and tension began to ease, and I often found myself laughing with them. As I watched the footage we filmed, the fundamental principle for editing became clear: to preserve the power of their words and presence, which were about to be forced to change due to redevelopment. Instead of cutting and pasting their words and images to fit a theme, it was about discovering and carving the film out of their voices and existence. The kind of people we met during filming existed in the past, exist in the present, and will likely continue to exist in the future. They have no choice but to.’

A Dutch-Afghan filmmaker confronts his authoritarian father, an imam with a violent past, in an attempt to heal their fractured relationship. Travelling across Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, they reflect on family, faith and displacement. Part personal reckoning, part universal search for freedom, the film explores liberation from inherited fear and emotional exile. Dawood Hilmandi: ‘This journey began with my father, Baba, a man who for years was like a statue of stone and silence to me. My curiosity as a child was always suppressed. Yet one unanswered question remained: how can I make sense of a world I am forbidden to question? Gradually, I realised that his silence was a frozen ocean […]. Beneath that frozen surface flowed a current of inherited suffering […]. There comes a pivotal moment when we must find the courage to become curious — to question, to challenge, and to examine critically the foundations of the oppressive systems imposed upon us, both within and around us. Paikar […] is about reclaiming the right to ask “why?”. It is for anyone who has inherited silence, who has carried pain across borders, and who still dares to believe that healing is possible through questioning and the insistence on telling our stories.’

Drawing on the myth of Mount Qaf, an imaginary mountain range at the world’s edge, the film follows Maryam, exiled from Iran at twenty, reconnecting with her family from afar through surveillance images. When Iran’s internet is cut off, memory and distance blur into a meditation on technology and belonging. Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani: ‘Past Future Continuous is inspired by the personal experiences of friends and family who left Iran in search of new lives abroad. Nearly every Iranian who remains has considered leaving at some point, while many who emigrated have longed to return. Past Future Continuous shifts the focus from the act of leaving to the homes and landscapes left behind — places that grow emptier over time. It reflects on the quiet loss of connection, the fading warmth of these spaces, and the enduring love that survives despite distance.’

Three MiniDV tapes filmed in 2001 resurface years later. A search for a former prison mate turns into a road trip across Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. Reflecting on memory, loss and time, the film evokes lives and places that may never be found again. Kamal Aljafari: ‘An homage to Gaza and its people, to all that was erased and returned to me in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence — or non-existence. It is a film about “the catastrophe”, and the poetry that resists. This is my first film, which I have never made. If I had discovered this material five years ago, it wouldn’t have made sense as a film.’ — Excerpted and adapted from the press kit and Mona Sheded, ‘“The life we see in this film no longer exists”: Kamal Aljafari talks Locarno competitor “With Hasan In Gaza”’, Screen Daily, 8 August 2025. Quotations combined.

Amid the U.S. housing crisis, twelve-year-old Mikal lives with his parents and their cat in a dilapidated flophouse room. Marked by precarity and alcohol abuse yet sustained by love, his coming of age unfolds over three years, revealing the wounds of childhood and the fragile hope of family life. Monica Strømdahl: ‘In 2005, as a photography student in need of cheap accommodation, I checked into a run-down hotel in New York. There, I met a community of people who relied on affordable housing but were shut out of the traditional housing market. In 2017, in a hotel lobby, I met Mikal, an 11-year-old boy raised in the hotel in the crossfire between poverty and addiction. Meeting Mikal and his family made me realise photography wasn’t enough to capture their story. I wanted to give them space to speak, to move, to show the complexities of their lives beyond still images. And so the 15-year photography project transitioned into film. Through making this film, my relationship with Mikal and his family evolved into something personal and meaningful. The trust between us allowed Mikal to set clear boundaries in the shoots. Some days, he was eager to be filmed and wear a mic; on others, he made it clear he wanted space. Between shoots, when I was in Norway, we would keep each other updated on everyday life. Flophouse America might be triggering to watch. At its core, [... it] is a film about fractured childhoods, inequality and social inheritance, but also hope and the dream of a better future.’

Recovering from surgery as war reaches Irpin near Kyiv, the filmmaker flees with her cat to her parents’ village, documenting fragile routines under threat. This cinematic diary observes a family suspended between staying and leaving, revealing how conflict reshapes home, intimacy and survival. Alina Maksimenko: ‘This documentary tells the story of my family, who find themselves thrust into the heart of the war in Ukraine, confronted with life-altering decisions. While deeply personal, the story reflects a universal human struggle against an extreme situation [...]. At the film’s core are my film notes from the initial days of the war, documented in a diary-like form, capturing the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions I experienced. I yearned to comprehend the unfolding reality, to grasp the essence of this war that, until now, had only existed in the abstract realm of books, films, and stories – a war that had abruptly transformed into our terrifying reality. Before 24 February 2022, I possessed no visual, literary, or figurative vocabulary capable of expressing the horrors of war. This language was created along with the unfolding narrative. In Limbo is not simply my story; through the lens of my camera, I explore human relationships: my bond with my parents, their enduring love for each other, their attachment to their home and their land.’

In the forests of the Eastern Himalayas, two curious observers explore a nocturnal world of moths, illuminating a fragile ecosystem on the India–Bhutan border. Immersive and contemplative, the film invites us to attend to hidden connections within the natural world. Anupama Srinivasan: ‘The film is in a way, at least in parts, of us observing them observing the moths. So it is about the precision and focus and attention we give to looking. That is also what we want — for the audience to look at the film with more attention than one would normally do. The other aspect was the repetition. The rigour of science, you know, where they have to put up the screen every night. So for us, we wanted to represent that rigour but in an interesting way so that it does not become boring for the audience. So, every moth-screen night has a little story around it, very gently told. One night, nothing happens, no moths come, and they just keep waiting and have to pack up and go.’ Anirban Dutta: ‘Our motivation was also to challenge the anthropocentric gaze, where human beings are seen as the most superior things. When we went to that place, we saw ourselves as very little. As you see in the film, the human knowledge and the great science we know of — when the scientists put up the moth-screen, many nights they fail. One of them says that we put up this screen thinking that the moths will come and that this place is humanised. It will take us decades to understand how the moths look. That contextualises how little we know. One also needs to understand that any science that happens is part of a process first. There is rigour, and our film is a love letter to this process of science.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Santanu Das, ‘Nocturnes Directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan Interview on the Only Indian Documentary at Sundance 2024’, Hindustan Times, 26 January 2024

Following the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan entered democratisation as grassroots movements flourished. Proposed by director Lee Daw-ming and funded by the Public Television Service, the film interviews key figures shaped by the Lukang Anti-DuPont Movement. Intended for broadcast, the film was suppressed by authorities and finally screened at the 2002 Taiwan International Documentary Festival. Lee Daw-ming: ‘Beyond the Anti-DuPont Movement: Portraits of Some Social Activists was filmed while the movement was still ongoing, but I chose not to film the protests themselves, as the Green Team was already covering them. Why repeat what others were already documenting? Besides, I was shooting on film, which made real-time circulation (as they were doing) impossible. I was clear that my aim was to leave a historical record, not to transmit images immediately like television. This is why this film is a “documentary”, not a form of social communication.’

Seminal and highly controversial, Dead Birds portrays the lives, beliefs and ritual warfare of the Dani people in the Baliem Valley of Western New Guinea, now part of Indonesia. Both immediate and allegorical, the film reflects on violence, death, cosmology, remaining a cornerstone of visual anthropology and ethnographic cinema. Robert Gardner: 'Dead Birds is a translation from the Dani term for weapons, ornaments, and other articles captured in warfare. They represent, magically, victims on the other side [... and are] sometimes referred to not as sué warek (dead birds) but ap warek (dead men). It is appropriate also to remember that Dani men take ardent advantage of the extraordinary variety of birds that dwell in or near their valley. A Dani is a plumed warrior in his most desirous state. What I have done is to acknowledge this indubitable fact and be glad for its wry, perhaps ironic, implications. [The Dani people] dressed their lives with plumage, but faced as certain death as the rest of us drabber souls. The film attempts to say something about how we all, as humans, meet our animal fate.’ — from Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film, p. 114

After the cancellation of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport, the filmmakers immersed themselves in the ZAD community (Zone à Défendre, or 'Zone to Defend') between 2022 and 2023. Observing daily life, collective labour and resistance, the film traces how a local struggle grows into a wider ecological movement, culminating in renewed confrontation with the French state at Sainte-Soline. Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell: 'This work springs from our own relationship to climate anxiety, cultural struggle, political uncertainty, and increasingly dark optimism. After the ZAD's victorious struggle against the state-run airport expansion project in 2018, we began this film hoping to bear witness to a viable path through the ecological crisis. Little did we know that a new ecological movement — Les Soulèvements de la Terre — would surface from the ZAD, exploding into the present and redefining what was to come. In visiting the ZAD, we both found a diverse collection of thinkers, dreamers, militant hardliners, organic dairy farmers and kids of all ages spread across forest and farmland in the approximate shape of an airport that was never built. The modesty of the land occupied by the ZAD offered an understated vision of an alternative timeline to neo-liberal development [...] In resistance, the minor is the major. To access this community, we made bimonthly visits of 10 days over the course of 14 months. We lived with and worked alongside the ZADists as they cut wood, weeded gardens, tore down walls, and planned "disarmament" actions. We worked to align form with content — finding direct inspiration in a community for whom action and ideology are inseparable. In time, we understood utopia to be a common cause and cinema the ideal place to realise it; the vehicle by which we can interrogate, present, and recreate utopia as a model for living in the environmental uncertainty of Right Now.’ — Excerpted from the 2025 Official Catalogue, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF), 2025.

A woman lives alone in a hotel room, filming herself, the city and her dreams over the course of a month. Suspended in time, she drifts through the city’s intricate geometries, where sharp architectural edges subtly reshape her sense of scale, intimacy and desire. As days and nights blur into dream-time, shifting rhythms and fleeting light trace a quiet passage from loneliness to aloneness. Rawane Nassif: ‘This film started years ago when I first left Lebanon and got attached to mundane objects that filled my ever-changing spaces ever since. This film started when I lived alone in a hotel room for a year and experienced loneliness for the first time. This film started when my friend passed by to drop me a darbuka, crossed the street, and passed away. This film started when I locked myself voluntarily in the house, for a month, to write my reflections, only to find out that loneliness has been there all along. This film started when I decided to leave, and began to film the space, lest I find bits of myself scattered in it. … This film got shattered into a million pieces in the Beirut explosion. This film started again when I found myself alone again, stranded in a small village, during the COVID lockdown, and only then could I finish the edit, and only then could I realise that I will leave, again.’

In a Canadian border city, set against the imposing backdrop of factory chimneys and a truss arch bridge, this autobiographical ode to freedom moves through reflection and experimentation. A dance film rich in poetry and symbolism, it is also a heartfelt tribute to an immigrant mother whose fate lies beyond her control. ‘In filmmaker Sonya Stefan’s hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a truss arch bridge straddles the St. Marys River, linking Canada to the United States. But underneath the bridge, a kind of liminal space exists where the notion of borders is blurred. With a wild yet carefully controlled energy, this deconstructed work transports us to the curious site where, it seems, anything is possible.’ — Excerpted from the 2021 Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) Catalogue

Like a Spiral unfolds as a dialogue between Beirut and five female migrant domestic workers living under the Kafala system. After the 2020 Beirut port explosion, many of the women were abandoned by fleeing employers, left without shelter or protection. Rising through grainy images, their voices carry memories shaped by oppression and resilience, reclaiming presence through testimony and movement. Lamia Chraibi: ‘My initial intention was to give a voice to the marginalised people impacted by the Beirut port explosion. During my fieldwork, I discovered that migrant domestic workers bore the brunt of the explosion, but [they] remained the most invisible. They have to cope with their lack of rights and the structural racism with which they are constantly confronted. For reasons of anonymity, a dialogue was established between them (sound) and Beirut (image). Through the materiality of film, I wanted to create an echo between their stories and this crumbling city. Because of my migratory background, I understood the complexity of their relationship with a country that sees them as foreigners, their sense of uprootedness, and their gradual loss of attachment. I was deeply moved by the testimonies of these women, admiring their courage and inspired by their solidarity.’

High above Nepal's mountainous landscape, a cable car carries pilgrims, villagers and tourists to the ancient Hindu temple of the goddess Manakamana. Once a multi-day pilgrimage, the journey now takes minutes. Filmed entirely inside the cars, Manakamana captures intimate conversations, revealing a society suspended between ritual tradition and technological change. Pacho Velez: 'When I was a student at CalArts, I directed quite a bit of theatre, and I was intrigued by the "doubleness" of acting — actors' studied non-attention to their audience. This interest carries over for me into Manakamana — I'm watching the subjects' awareness of their world, and how it shifts to acknowledge the passing landscape, other passengers, and private thoughts, before occasionally, obliquely returning to the camera, which is so clearly staring at them, yet is never explicitly addressed. These switches between different sorts of focus are crucial because they create the pace of the individual shots, which in turn creates the rhythm of the entire film. To make edits in the shots would have imposed another sort of rhythm on top of the material, obscuring these internal cadences. Our pace of editing was glacial. The final film has only eleven shots, but it took us eighteen months of editing to arrive at it, which works out to our deciding on one shot every forty days or so.’ Stephanie Spray: 'Contrary to what many assume, Pacho and I were both inside the 5'×5' cable car along with our riders; we didn't simply send them off alone; this would have been technically almost impossible and wouldn't have created the same tensions — between avowal or disavowal of the camera, and the different degrees of complicity, indifference, and discomfiture it engenders. […] The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is frequently murky, and the documentary engagement with the real is found across genres, but extremely hard to get on film, since most film subjects slip into becoming someone other than themselves, self-conscious representations, even if they are not purportedly acting. In Manakamana, the trip itself is surreal; passengers are propelled above a jungle in Nepal, en route to a temple inhabited by a goddess who demands blood sacrifice. Most passengers have never been in aeroplanes, and the time aloft can be frightening and exhilarating. This detachment it bestows upon the journey for the passengers heightens the sense that this world is fictional, for it is indeed a manufactured and unnatural experience for most of them.’

Opening with the Japanese national anthem, the film traces Taiwanese labourers in Okinawa, mass student labour in the Sakishima Islands, and Shōwa-era (1926–1989) coal mining on Iriomote. Travelling from Yonaguni to Taiwan, it reaches a Tayal village shaped by the Musha Incident (1930), where the noontime bell was replaced by the Imperial Japanese military song, 'Umi Yukaba'. 'This documentary, which has no official title or production credits — Asia Is One, as it has come to be called — is a record or document of what we, as members of the NDU [Nihon Documentarist Union] movement, encountered during our offensive south from the "main island" of Okinawa in 1972. At that time, the course of diplomatic relations was changing rapidly: the "Okinawa Reversion Agreement" had been reached through a joint proclamation by Japan and the United States in 1970 [signed in 1971; Okinawa reverted to Japan in 1972]; the People's Republic of China had rejoined the United Nations in 1971; Taiwan had left the United Nations in 1972 [1971]; "Kimigayo" greeted the Japanese Prime Minister during a state visit to China; and Japan normalised diplomatic relations with China but broke off relations with Taiwan. The maritime borders surrounding Japan were shifting, exposing the faces of different ethnic groups. Until the postwar period, the "East China Sea" had been a highly fluid space of human life; but as national borders became more sharply demarcated, the people who crossed these boundaries became "others", creating distinctions between zainichi Okinawans, fishermen, Japanese in Okinawa, Koreans, Taiwanese and Taiwanese aborigines. This film documents the various ethnic groups living amidst this sea of people and moving back and forth across East Asia — the same Asia Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzō) had in mind when he wrote, "For the down-trodden Orient, the glory of Europe is the humiliation of Asia" and "Asia is one." After the Pacific War, and once the rupture between the prewar and postwar periods had passed, the postwar nation-state of Japan was severed from this fertile Asia, with its spiritual climate of diversity and homogeneity, by American imperialism. According to Takeuchi Yoshimi (in an article on this film in the monthly journal Chūgoku [China]), "Without going through the experience of war and without knowing the lives of the people, one cannot mobilise the people, no matter what the approach…" although "one still cannot solve imperialism by recourse to imperialism." This film raises many questions, both about the grounds for anti-Japanese responses of solidarity across East Asia and about the history with which Japan has been burdened during its postwar isolation.’ – Excerpted and adapted from Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2005 Special Programme, ‘BORDERS WITHIN — What It Means to Live in Japan’

In the shadow of the New York Mets' stadium, Willets Point is an industrial enclave marked for demolition. Amid scrapyards and auto salvage shops, Foreign Parts reveals a tight-knit community sustained by wrecks, recycling and precarious lives, observing a neighbourhood facing erasure under New York's urban redevelopment. Véréna Paravel: 'As I started talking with people, I realised that many of their lives were as damaged as the rusting cars themselves, and I began to get a sense of the hardscrabble, resilient community that had grown up there over many years. From the outset I knew I wanted to make a film that would try to reflect the fragility and violence of the place, the beauty and squalor that reigned, its chaotic ordering. The tiny, bounded urban locality also encapsulated much larger narratives in the history of the country — such as post-industrialisation, immigration, political violence, environmental decay, and the breakdown of democracy.' J. P. Sniadecki: 'With the absence of commentary, textual explanation, or voiceover, the film allows the viewer more freedom to experience and explore the images and sounds on-screen and more license to interpret for themselves the social dynamics and cultural diversity of the junkyard. […] the viewer has the space and time to develop their own relationship to the place, the people, and the film itself.' — Excerpted from Patricia Alvarez Astacio, 'An Interview with Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki', 17 December 2012.

Nothing can be heard anymore; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are heading straight to the world’s biggest display of soundproof fireworks, and soon we will drop our bombs.’ This film transforms Israeli military propaganda reels of the 1960s–70s into an absurd spectacle, exposing the violence projected onto an imagined Palestinian battlefield. Kamal Aljafari: ‘This area of Palestine has been very affected both by using a large part of it as army bases for exercises and by creating settlements and, by doing so, changing the nature of the place. Where there is desert, in many places in the world, it has been used to exercise, to test bombs and finally destroy the landscape itself. In the material we never see the people: the enemy is always supposedly hiding behind the hills, or between ruins, but we never see it. Nevertheless, the soldiers continue bombing and manoeuvring and attacking again and again with their power forces. This whole thing that the enemy is not to be seen is also quite symbolic: it’s the way the Palestinians are perceived in many aspects of their life, as non-existing and temporary. Yet the “state” is set to look for them; in a way, the material [testifies to] this ideology, they are there and not there. They are not being recognised as human beings, and the army attempts at the same time to fight them, which is in itself very contradictory and prone to failure.'– Excerpted from Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team, Clotilde Couturier, ‘Interview with Kamal Aljafari, Director of Paradiso, XXXI, 108’, myDylarama, 1 February 2023.

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut, raiding the Palestinian Research Centre and looting its entire archive. Containing historical documents and still and moving images of Palestine, the archive becomes the premise for A Fidai Film, which explores the visual memory of this looting through images now held in Israeli archives. Kamal Aljafari: ‘Often in newsreels and films the Hebrew word for “Saboteurs” is used to describe Palestinians, in particular the Palestinian freedom fighters, or fida’een, who led operations against the occupation in the 1960s and 1970s. And the longer I watched, the more I felt myself wanting to become a saboteur.My project chronicles my sabotage of the Cinematheque material. It is a sabotage that is also a reconstruction, reclaiming from the footage latent narratives, creating a counter-archive from repurposed images, and making Israeli fiction more fictional, so that another reality can be revealed.Repurposed images and films and names and texts and logos found in them are digitally defaced. Red scribbles blot out parts of the footage. Israeli colonists are cut out, or replaced with random material found in the backgrounds of their scenes. Their presence becomes ghostly and spectral. By such means, I reconstruct a Palestinian image that no longer has an archive. It is a fidai film.’– Excerpted from Kamal Aljafari, ‘A Fidai Film: A Project Idea’, Journal of Visual Culture 20.2, p. 347, August 2021.

The filmmaker travels between Bethlehem, Haifa and Nazareth to explore the life of Karimeh Abbud, the first female photographer in pre-1948 Palestine. Born in Bethlehem in 1893, Karimeh rose to prominence in a male-dominated profession after receiving her first camera as a teenager. Her photographs remain vital records of life in Palestine in the early 1900s. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin: ‘Working on Restored Pictures opened up a space for me to engage with the writing of history through image and sound, against the “grain” of the archive and the condition of denial and erasure. In Restored Pictures I reclaim the denied legacy of Karimeh Abbud within her pre-Nakba Palestinian context. The Al-Karmel newspaper record advertising her Haifa studio, and her self-description as the “only national photographer in the country”, guide my speculation and imagination. In my search, I follow a period of renaissance and political struggle in pre-Nakba Palestine, engaging with present social and political contextualisation through archival practice and film.’

On 26 October 1929, around 300 women converged from across Palestine and organised a silent demonstration in Jerusalem, travelling in convoy to protest the British High Commissioner’s bias during the Buraq Uprising. Retracing their journey through archival photographs and present-day locations, the film attempts to recover a largely forgotten act of anti-colonial resistance. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin: ‘Being a creative practitioner in documentary film has deepened my understanding of how film can revive meanings of the past within colonised societies, where local narratives have been lost or abandoned by “dominant” histories. In this sense, film may capture representations of history that respond to local, on-the-ground needs for cultural expression that help locate the “missing” within lost knowledge. It also has the potential to foster reflection on how the past is constructed and represented through a lens relevant to the present. I hope this film encourages viewers to explore the interconnectedness of political and historical experience at both local and global levels. It is also a call to consider how we make sense of our shrinking worlds in times of genocide and authoritarianism.’

Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with oral histories recorded in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Through story, voice and song, the film reclaims Palestinian presence, unsettling colonial archives and reflecting on what bodies remember — and what empires forget. Diana Allan: ‘I use sound to reanimate and recontextualise these colonial images, interrogating archival authority, relocating these archives in the present, and restoring to song its political power. This move to sound-silent footage with the reverberations of Palestinian life as it is remembered, lived, and anticipated, is an attempt to reconnect people, places, and temporality through the senses. The film is about this experiential aspect of the archive, what it means to encounter one’s own past, and how the significance of that encounter might speak back to the present. You feel the weight of history in people’s voices in how they speak, the deep suffering that people have gone through.The living archive builds its forms in synchrony with existing forms in the life of the camp, which is fundamentally different from the salvage paradigm. It adopts the model of preservation, diffusion, and circulation through imaginative engagement rather than consolidation and conservation. These histories are carried in bodies and they are transmitted through bodies, and that will continue to happen.’– Excerpted from Incé Husain, ‘“Ongoing Return”: A Living Archive of Palestine’. Antler River Media Co-Op, 7 May 2025.

A Taiwanese Teikoku Kunjin revisits the wartime mobilisation of Taiwanese youth. Through the testimonies of five young men drafted in their twenties as volunteers, medics, or kamikaze trainees, and sent to the South Pacific, the film blends first-person narration with archival footage to trace survival, trauma, and the enduring human cost of imperial war. Hung Pei-ying: 'Before I made A Taiwanese Teikoku Kunjin, newspapers would from time to time have a story of old Taiwanese people demanding compensation for their military service for Imperial Japan, or a story about some Taiwanese soldier hiding in the jungles in Southeast Asia for the last four decades, totally ignorant of Taiwanese political power shift. I would only read them as legendary tales and anecdotes. One day, director Shaudi Wang asked me if I was interested in making a film on this. I was very excited, yet frankly more by the chance to make a 16mm film than by the subject per se. After one-and-a-half months of shooting, however, I got totally drawn into their memories of the Pacific War. The veterans' accounts of the war overwhelmed me so much that I could hardly put them in a half-hour film. My loss of control is therefore evident throughout the whole film. Yet their lives have become part of my life, fortunately without my having to pay the high price they did.' — Excerpted from Programme Catalogue, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, 1998.

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Taiwanese men were mobilised as guards in prisoner-of-war camps in northern Borneo. Tried and punished after the war, survivors carried stigma, imprisonment, and lasting trauma. Through conversations and images, the film traces fading lives shaped by displacement, identity loss, and the enduring violence of wartime systems. Chen Chih-ho: 'My intention was to record Taiwan's history, as so much continues to disappear, including the lives of these elders. By documenting them, we leave traces that may one day help others understand the past. Having lived through the transition from Japanese colonial rule to the Republic of China, and later labelled as war criminals for deeply complex reasons, they belong to a generation sandwiched between identities. Through their lives, we glimpse the historical condition in which Taiwanese people have been situated, and the roles these elders played at a crucial moment of change. These, I believe, must be recorded.In the face of an unresolved national identity, we must develop our own perspective on history and the land, and the strength to hold it.’ — Excerpted and translated from 'An Interview with Director Chen Chih-ho on Heat Sun', Taipei Documentary Filmmakers' Union Online Journal, Issue 10, July 2009.

Air Base’ refers to a pond in Wuhan, China, where anglers gather but never catch fish. Shot at the end of the pandemic, this hybrid film observes individuals’ strange public behaviours and inner struggles, capturing a time and place where people feel like the anglers at ‘air base’ — or the fish in that pond. Li Luo: ‘This film was inspired by the experiences of several friends in recent years. One of them became obsessed with angling during the pandemic. He often went fishing at a pond near East Lake in Wuhan. He said the pond was called “Air Base” because it was hard to catch fish there. (“Air” in Chinese means empty.) “Air Force” refers to anglers who catch nothing and return home empty-handed. It seems to me that many people in this city are like the anglers at “Air Base”, or the fish in that pond.’

A ghostly 'shadow' drifts across Okinawa, Sapporo and beyond, encountering fragmented war memories that transcend time and place. Guided by glimpses of images in a theatre, she moves through caves and underground passages, touches remnants left behind, listens to buried voices, and traces what once happened there. Oda Kaori: 'In my latest film Underground, I have deepened my exploration of memory [….]. Humans will inevitably go extinct one day, and, as long as we are human, you and I will surely die. Yet I want to affirm that each and every one of us has lived here. I now believe that this is why I seek to leave film as a living trace. In this film, we refer to something whose role is to journey through the living traces of the ancient past, the present and the distant future as the "shadow". I aimed to use the shadow to connect the underground and the aboveground, the lost and the remaining, the living and the dead, thereby creating an image of "us". Death, loss, and the things left behind... In the underground, where these signs can be felt, the device of film has, for a moment, made frozen time move again. Spaces that have been hidden, covered or concealed are brought to light by the eyes of the living. The living in this film are not only we, the filmmakers involved in the film, but also the audience gazing at the screen. The living traces, gazed at through film and exposed to light, become a collective memory. The strange phenomenon of "us" is renewed as this collective memory acquires a new layer. Hopefully, my film will renew "us".’

On the threshold of adulthood, the director and his close friends gather to rekindle youthful playfulness and rebellion while confronting past trauma. What happens when an entire generation is forced to forget? Can friendship be a form of resistance? The film becomes a living record of solidarity, intimacy, and shared memory amid dark, muted times. Rico Wong: ‘We often do not give silence enough space. We avoid and fear it. Yet only within silence can ineffable thoughts and emotions slowly ferment, and fragments rooted deep in memory rise towards the surface. In those moments when language is no longer able to function properly, we fall into silence and accompany one another. From then on, silence becomes light, so very light.’

Unfolding as a tender letter, the film traces Hong Kong through its landscapes and lingering marks. Within memories of those who left, stayed or drifted, it searches for intimate moments that quietly connect lives, attuned to the city’s subtle rhythms of change and stillness. Chan Hau-chun: ‘In recent years, the landscape of Hong Kong has grown unfamiliar. Some have left, some have stayed, and some are stuck in between, unsure of where to go. The streets are still the same streets, yet every small trace is gradually fading away. They may seem insignificant, but they feel like secret codes, connecting us to one another. The film is about an unfinished conversation, an unoccupied seat, a mountain ridge whose outline is slowly blurring, and the memory of a city yet to be forgotten.’

In Lac-Saint-Jean, Québec, summer brings the blueberry harvest, as workers from different walks of life bend side by side before the first frost. Through gentle observation, the film celebrates land, labour, storytelling and music, connecting generations and cultures, and reflecting on resilience and renewal — like blueberries rising from ashes of a forest fire. Andrés Livov: ‘Envision the story as a multifaceted diamond, where the film’s title encapsulates four fundamental pillars. The term “blues” embodies both a sense of melancholy and a musical style, while “blueberries” represents the small fruit and the nickname for the inhabitants of Lac-Saint-Jean. This layered perspective provides a fresh lens through which the documentary explores universal themes such as hope, resilience, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. As crates overflow with fruit, inhibitions fade, creating space for profound personal revelations. The Blueberry Blues delves into the challenges that everyday people face and the tough decisions they must make. It highlights the strength, wisdom, and empathy found in seemingly insignificant or challenging situations, encouraging us to reconsider our surroundings and reflect on what truly matters to us.’

After a devastating earthquake in Myanmar's Nyaung Shwe, lakeside communities confront loss and displacement. Through intimate observation, the film follows residents as they mourn, rebuild and remember. The lake becomes both witness and archive, reflecting resilience and grief after sudden rupture. Thaiddhi: 'After the military coup in 2021, life in Myanmar became unbearably difficult for all of us. I was one of many struggling simply to survive. I often wondered how my parents endured the hardships of their own era — the socialist period and the military rule of the 1980s and 1990s. After the earthquake, I began having strange dreams about my mother, and those dreams stayed with me. They became the reason I decided to make this film. During production, I encountered extraordinary loving-kindness, strength and resilience in the women I met at Inle Lake. Their spirit moved me deeply and became a source of inspiration. Perhaps the dream's true meaning was to guide me towards these stories and towards an understanding of resilience passed quietly from one generation to the next.’

Commissioned by e-flux for the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Narrative follows the filmmaker as she prepares a staged courtroom trial examining the Thai government's culpability in the 2010 Bangkok massacre of pro-democracy protesters. Blending witness testimony with research, the film meditates on truth, justice and the ongoing absence of official accountability. 

Emerging from the rubber boom’s shadows, the film recovers the stories of Omarino and Aredomi, two Indigenous boys enslaved by La Casa Arana and taken to Europe. Interweaving personal inquiry with early-twentieth-century Amazonian archives, it traces a sensory dialogue between memory, power and reparative imagination. Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski: ‘The Memory of Butterflies began with a single photograph: a portrait of Omarino and Aredomi holding hands in London [...], which led me to search for them in archives across Peru, Brazil, Ireland, England, Portugal, the United States and France. Most images were propaganda from extractive and colonial expeditions in the Amazon. The film demanded a montage that could deconstruct official historical narratives and reveal what these images conceal. Telling this story through a critical lens meant examining my own position and approach. Speculation allowed me to confront where we came from and what we inherited, and to imagine new futures in close alliance with the descendant communities where we filmed. The materiality of the analogue image became the materiality of memory — a speculative, ambiguous and undefined reality.’

A desktop documentary engaging the historical and digital traces of extremist propaganda, examining how images of violence circulate, mutate and persist. Moving between online investigations and real-world encounters with artists and researchers, it invokes Medusa to explore the dangers and transformative potential of looking, questioning whether seeing can ever be innocent. Kevin B. Lee: ‘These elements are connected by the idea of the afterlives of images: how past images of violence continue to live with us and how we engage with the legacies of violence. I hope the film prompts viewers to consider our responsibility as spectators — moving from passive unease to active, navigational engagement, considering and reconsidering an image across contexts. At the same time, that engagement is not without risk and may lead to recurring confrontations with the implications of one’s own curiosity. This is especially important when one’s gaze forms the basis for retransmitting one’s way of seeing. That’s one of the core tensions in Afterlives: is it possible to engage with violence without being complicit in its spread? And if there is an implicit violence in looking, how does one acknowledge and engage with that potential?’

On Barcelona’s edge, Vallbona lies enclosed by river, railway and highway. Antonio, son of Catalan workers, has tended flowers here for nearly ninety years alongside neighbours from many places. Through music, forbidden swims and budding romances, a quiet resistance emerges against urban change and social division. José Luis Guerin: ‘The project spawned out of a commission from Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which I made super fast. But I was left with the desire to develop that work because I began to discover that the echoes and resonances of the entire world could be contained in this very small and humble neighbourhood. Therein lies the vocation I aspire to as a filmmaker: to find the universal perspective in local realities. Neighbourhoods like Valbona feel somewhat universal, given that gentrification is a worldwide phenomenon. City centres are converted into tourist attractions, essentially becoming theme parks inaccessible to the local population. These are people who are then marginalised to the peripheries, where a more human, normal daily life remains. It’s a process we can recognise everywhere. It is the same case with cinema itself, where the spaces that offer most freedom and creativity aren’t so much at the centre of the industry but on these peripheries.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Rafa Sales Ross, ‘José Luis Guerin Returns to San Sebastián With “Good Valley Stories”, Stands Against “Impoverishing Cinema” by Looking at Docs Solely as “Denunciation”’, Variety, 25 September 2025

Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts — the U.S.'s largest fishing port and Melville's inspiration for Moby Dick — Leviathan plunges aboard a groundfish trawler on a weeks-long voyage. Dialogue-free yet mesmerising, it offers a visceral portrait of labour, machinery, sea life and the relentless force of the ocean. Ernst Karel (Sound Editor and Mixer): 'In a film which is about a specific engagement with a situation, it's important to me that the soundtrack, as well as the image track, be of that encounter. Just as Lucien and Véréna were amazed by the images that emerged from those early GoPro cameras, likewise were we astounded by what struck me as the electroacoustic music that emerged from their plastic-encased mono microphones and low-bit-rate encoders. The sounds were haunted, abrasive, and evocative in a way that more "high-fidelity" recordings may not have been, and so naturally formed the basis for the soundtrack. In composing [it], I integrated these with more conventional stereo recordings that Véréna and Lucien made on the boat — chains clanging, the repetitive sounds of labour — and re-recording mixer Jacob Ribicoff then added some foley (e.g. knives cutting through fish were inaudible over the ship's overwhelming engine noise).'

At a crossroads marking the edge of Buenos Aires, nightly routines unfold amid traffic, lights and passing crowds. The testimony of a mother whose son was killed by police ruptures this ordinary landscape, invoking shared visions of Jules Verne. This film is an excavation of memory and place where the state disappeared Luciano Arruga. Tatiana Mazú González: 'For me, it was impossible for this not to be a dark film — I am dark by nature. It revolves around the figure of the disappeared under democracy, police violence, racism and class violence. Density, sadness and anger were inevitable. Night, earth, engines and asphalt became its raw materials. Working with my comrades in the collective, we continued obsessions with noise, machines and geology: stones, sand, mines, caves. When I met Mónica, her voice felt crystalline — luminous yet mineral. I realised I had to search for light within this subterranean film. The struggle of the Family and Friends of Luciano Arruga is not only against state and police violence toward young people in working-class neighbourhoods, but for poetry, imagination, the future and freedom. That was when the idea of imagination as a political tool began to take shape in the film, in a country where a young person dies at the hands of the police less than every 24 hours.' — Excerpted, translated and adapted from 'Palabras de la realizadora (Words from the Director)', The Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires Online Programme