10:59 min/sound/colour
Tess Martin, The Netherlands

A new father visits the hometown of his mother in 1976, accompanied by his wife and baby. At the same time, the NASA Viking lander is sending the first images back to Earth from the surface of another planet. Using the father’s travel journal as a guide, and re-contextualizing archival footage and photographs, this film explores our yearning to bridge the gap: the gap between parents and children, between points in space and between the present and the past.

Tess Martin is a film and visual artist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She brings her perspective as someone who was raised between cultures to exploring themes of belonging, identity and connection. Her short films, videos and installations address our vulnerability: in relation to nature, the onslaught of time and the precariousness of memory. Tess has both a classical fine art and an animation background and these come together in her work: she pushes the conceptual potential of hand-made animation and the narrative potential of site-specific pieces.

6:20 min/sound/colour
Adam Taufiq Suharto, Malaysia

In Kuala Lumpur, a man discovers he is now has been transported from 1998 to 2023. He grapples with memory, trauma, and nostalgia.

Adam Taufiq Suharto is a writer and amateur short-filmmaker turn photographer. After graduating from UiTM, he worked as a full-time content creator and scriptwriter at a Malaysian local private TV station untill the end of 2020. Currently, he is focusing on writing fiction, and essays while pursuing his studies (also doing street photography).

7:00 min/sound/colour
Max Hattler, Hong Kong/Germany

Shot entirely from an apartment on the 36th floor of a high-rise building, the images in this experimental animation survey large parts of Hong Kong’s cityscape, drawing attention to the individual lives hidden inside its buildings – together alone, collectively sequestered. Initially recorded in 2020 and completed in 2023 with the advantage of critical distance, TWENTYTИƎWT (二〇二〇) encapsulate the darkness, confinement, and uncertainty of 2020 – the year of the global pandemic.

Max Hattler’s experimental animation works explore relationships between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and politics, sound and image, and precision and improvisation. His work has been presented at museums, galleries and festivals around the world. Awards include London International Animation Festival, Annecy Animation Festival, and several Visual Music Awards. He has performed live globally including at KLEX, Sonar Hong Kong, Seoul Museum of Art, EXPO Milano and many others. He is a Professor at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

13:55 min/sound/black & white
Clarissa Zhang, Malaysia

On the evening of March 28, 2022, the Shanghai authority announced the lockdown starting the next day and promised to end on April 5. But it extended with no end in sight, leaving many residents of the Chinese megacity unprepared to be indefinitely housebound.
Born and raised in Shanghai. After graduating from Shanghai Film Academy of Shanghai University with BA in scriptwriting and directing 2008, Clarissa ZHANG started her career as a producer. The first feature-length film she produced “Dead Pigs” directed by Cathy YAN and executive produced by JIA Zhangke had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Award and has been screened in various film festivals including Pingyao, London, Göteborg. She also produced five seasons of National Geographic Channel’s documentary series Route Awakening that won Asian Television Award. She participated in the Berlinale Talents and Talents Tokyo.

10:20 min/sound/colour
Thanut Rujitanont, Thailand/Belgium/Finland/Portugal/Australia

The Announced Tragedy uses animation production as a process of memory consolidation. The work is a personal memory extension that preserves the irrational and incomplete specific memories of the director towards the house where he grew up. It recalls the space and time of these memories, ultimately overwriting, re-editing, and re-materializing them. Even though remembering is related to the past; memory is a form of action. We rewrite our memories in the present when we recall them. The work recreates the fragmented notions of time that characterize the director’s human being. In this sense, the work is suited as a means of memory preservation as it embraces the unreliability of memories in an honest way, excluding itself from issues of credibility of documentation, which other media such as photography and video are undergoing due to their nature of having a referent in real life.

Bangkok, Thailand, 1993, Thanut Rujitanont is a Thai animation artist. He holds a RE:ANIMA European Joint Master’s degree in Animation from Belgium, Finland, Australia. Invited as a visiting scholar in 2023, he is currently a PhD candidate at Griffith Film School, Australia. He does animation as a thinking process and a daily chore, in the forms of text and moving images, to contemplate his fields of interest. He founded his studio Graphy Animation in 2021, which has actively expanded animation culture in Thailand and abroad.

10:02 min/sound/black & white
Lena Srinivasan & Deena Dakshini, Malaysia

In an impulsive leap of faith, Deena abandons security in her quest for a fulfilling life in art. Struggling with familial estrangement and societal expectations, she dives into a world where creativity battles with doubt. Her journey oscillates as a neurodivergent struggling to navigate the intricate pace of life in unpredictable emotion. Amidst self-discovery, she finds solace, discomfort and fear in the unknowing. It’s a narrative of the mundane and acceptance — a relentless pursuit to be comfortable in identity amidst the chaos of artistic liberation.

Lena always wished he was good with words, but the fact that he isn’t has pushed him to find an alternative medium of expression. Initially drawn to documentaries, he shifted towards narrative cinema. Raised in Penang, he pursued his education in Perth and London before embarking in the Indian film industry. After years abroad, he returned to Kuala Lumpur, where he now creates short films and ads for local features. His current focus is on “Buku Conteng films,” a personal filmmaking style akin to a scrapbook, where diverse ideas coalesce in a fluid narrative, eschewing strict dramaturgical conventions.

6: 04 min/sound/colour
Raito Low, Taiwan/Malaysia

“Receiving Happiness” is a common handwritten greeting used at the beginning of letters, expressing longing, care, and blessings for the recipient. On Matsu Island, people record the lives, thoughts, and emotions of residents and servicemen through handwritten letters. This letter-writing culture holds not only historical significance but also adds to the island’s unique charm.

Raito Low Jing-Yi, an animation director from Malaysia based in Taiwan. Specializing in stop-motion animation. Currently studying at NTUA MAA master’s program, director of Raito’s Art Studio. Adhering to the spirit of experimental animation, using plants as medium to create visuals that combine humanities and nature. Personal work including <Fisso><Blüte><Blumentanz>, has been shortlisted in more than 100 film festivals. Published “Like Water, We Flow ” together with Ma Li.

11:22 min/sound/colour
Franki Wals, Spain

‘if only i had wings’ is a short film exploring the intersection of urban and rural landscapes in Córdoba, Spain. Drawing on key historical themes and personal connections, the film focuses on the fundamental elements of cinema—light, movement, color, and sound—to engage with the landscape’s dynamic nature. above all, it is an invitation to consider the deep, transformative relationships between humans and their environment, acknowledge their inexhaustible complexity and delve into the infinite density of the small events that compose them.

Franki Wals (b. 1989, Córdoba, Spain) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses sound, video, text and other means of expression. over the years, he has lived and worked in a variety of locations (France, China, Turkey, Taiwan, etc.), each of which has afforded him the chance to explore a number of unique milieus that have crucially shaped his perspective. some of the main concerns approached through his work include experience, perception, environment and the myriad lines that crisscross between them.

23:26 min/sound/colour
Zuza Banasińska, The Netherlands/Poland

Film created from the Polish Educational Archive materials, tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems.

Zuza Banasińska is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, currently based in Amsterdam. In their essay films and installations, they use archives to examine how the reproduction of images enables the reproduction of systems, subjects and bodies.