Professional Competition 7

1. Downstream 06:05 United Kingdom 2025
   

   Directed:	Silvana Roth
   Screenplay:	Silvana Roth
   Production:	Kat Haddow
   Dialogue Language:	English

   
   

   When a creative young woman becomes distracted by her smartphone, the digital world threatens to flood the physical one.

2. Thank You Dr. Farsi 08:09 2024
   

   Directed:	Samaneh Shojaei
   Screenplay:	Amin Kafashzadeh
   Production:	Samaneh Shojaei
   Dialogue Language:	English, Persian

   
   

   On the occasion of the 27th birthday of Minoo, we join her to observe the disorders and mental illnesses of her friends from her point of view. But this is not an ordinary birthday.

3. On Being 03:27 2025
   

   Directed:	Masanobu Hiraoka
   Screenplay:	Kozue Bessho
   Dialogue Language:	No Dialogue

   
   

   In response to Max Cooper’s interview-based album, this music video approaches memory not as a subject, but as a structure. Rather than illustrating the music, the film unfolds as a continuous flow of recollections, where fading memories and emerging life coexist within the same visual field. Through the combination of rotoscoped live-action and fluid hand-drawn animation, recorded reality is gradually transformed by imagination. The rotoscoped footage retains the weight of documentation, while the drawn lines destabilize and reshape it, creating a shifting space between remembering and recording. Within this space, time is not linear but layered, allowing past and present to appear simultaneously. Conceived with an awareness of future viewing, the film anticipates being revisited by the director and his child, each carrying different memories and experiences. The same images, seen again, will inevitably change. While remaining a commissioned music video, the work reflects on how time reshapes experience — how something dissolves even as something else begins.

4. The Stepladder / Стремянка 03:32 Czechia 2026
   

   Directed:	Pavel Alexashin
   Screenplay:	Pavel Alexashin
   Production:	Elena Flagina, Viktor Shadrin
   Dialogue Language:	No Dialogue

   
   

   A man walks down the street and carries a stepladder. And carries it... And carries it... And how else will it end?!

5. Roots 07:00 United States 2026
   

   Directed:	Sandra Suarez
   Screenplay:	Sandra Suarez
   Production:	Carlos Mendez, Sandra Suarez
   Dialogue Language:	English

   
   

   Isabel is a young woman who lives alone with her cat and her hair-pulling disorder manifested into a pesky creature called "Hair-Hand." She hides Hair-Hand and her bald spots from her one and only friend, afraid her friend would leave her forever if she knew.

6. No Trespassing 02:02 2025
   

   Directed:	Maria Chatzimourati
   Screenplay:	Maria Chatzimourati
   Production:	Maria Chatzimourati
   Dialogue Language:	No Dialogue

   
   

   An experimental animated film in which human presence exists only as energy and memory. Time disintegrates, and the conscious encounters the unconscious through images, rhythm, and silence.

7. Timosha 11:20 Germany 2025
   

   Directed:	Elena Malenkina
   Screenplay:	Ksenia Mchedlidze
   Production:	Elena Malenkina

   
   

   In the happy and peaceful world of the hedgehog Timosha, trouble suddenly comes. His life will never be the same again, and he will have to leave his cozy home. Will Timosha be able to understand and accept this? This story is about those who have been forced to leave their homes and start a new life.

8. Unbowed / 誓不低頭 04:47 Hong Kong 2026
   

   Directed:	Tony Siu Pang Kwok
   Screenplay:	Tony Siu Pang Kwok
   Production:	Tony Siu Pang KWOK
   Dialogue Language:	English, Yue Chinese (Cantonese)

   
   

   In the near future, the world is ruled by AI, and humans are raised like livestock. Unwilling to remain trapped in prison, a young man named Ren Dong enters a nearly fatal boxing match to fight for his brother and their freedom.

9. Bonefuzz 10:16 2026
   

   Directed:	Márk László
   Screenplay:	Márk László
   Production:	Zsuzsanna Vincze

   
   

   Vajk, a deaf teenager, controls his connection to the world through his hearing aid. His older brother drags him out of his comfort zone and takes him to a concert by a mysterious band. In the crowd, he loses control and gives himself over to the rhythm as he discovers his inner voice.

10. Nonna Lucia 07:00 2026
    

    Directed:	Marcel Barelli
    Screenplay:	Marcel Barelli
    Production:	Nicolas Burlet
    Dialogue Language:	Italian

    
    

    My grandmother Lucia died and left behind many objects. Many, many objects.

11. Yesterday afternoon, Mei went to do abortion 09:09 2026
    

    Directed:	Tie Yan
    Screenplay:	Tie Yan
    Production:	Tie Yan
    Dialogue Language:	Chinese

    
    

    Yesterday afternoon，Mei went to do abortion. The appearance of a sorceress planted a seed of terror in her heart.

12. In four stops 18:59 Russian Federation 2025
    

    Directed:	Elizaveta Khlomova
    Screenplay:	Elizaveta Khlomova
    Production:	Olga Granovskaya
    Dialogue Language:	Russian

    
    

    Little Max has a nightmare in which his hands are hoppled and in front of him Max sees a long ladder, leading to the beautiful space upstairs. But he cannot climb it without the help of his hands and he falls down into the dark cellar, where he sees a teacher and pupils with hoppled hands there. Max feels scared and wakes up. Luckily, it was just a dream… But is his life truly free and easy in the real world? And where do such dreams come from? Max is a deaf boy from a deaf family. And to develop his speech, his school insists on communication without the use of sign language. But when it is your native language – through it you think and feel, imagine and play – how can you make it stop talking?

13. Frankenstein's Dream 13:55 2025
    

    Directed:	Simon Pummell
    Screenplay:	Simon Pummell, Margot Knijn
    Production:	Marc Thelosen, Koert Davidse, Steven Dhoedt
    Dialogue Language:	No Dialogue

    
    

    Do we control technology and language,or are they parasites that use us as a host and breeding ground? In FRANKENSTEIN'S DREAM strange satellites release spores over foraging humanoids. The infected creatures struggle towards speech, but the technology demands a bloody price. To reflect this struggle between flesh and code, the creatures in the film are made by wrapping layers of watercolour drawings - made of blood, bone-black, ivory, and other physical pigments - onto 3D CGI skeletons and digital scans of real human and animal skulls - and given life borrowed (through MOCAP) from dancers.